Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a ‘Terms of Use’ policy — a first for the iconic open source web browser.
This official Terms of Use will, Mozilla argues, offer users ‘more transparency’ over their ‘rights and permissions’ as they use Firefox to browse the information superhighway — as well well as Mozilla’s “rights” to help them do it, as this excerpt makes clear:
You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice (aka privacy policy). This adds a crop of cushy caveats to cover the company’s planned AI chatbot integrations, cloud-based service features, and more ads and sponsored content on Firefox New Tab page.
But nuclear weapons have only been used twice in 80 years for military purposes. They have arguably prevented more deaths than they have caused.
And you’re drastically underselling the potential impact of AI. If anything, your reaction is a defense mechanism because you can’t bear to stomach the potential consequences of AI.
One could have easily reacted the same way to the invention of the printing press, or the automobile, or the analog computer. They all wasted a lot of energy for limited benefit, at first. But if the technology develops enough, it can destroy everything that we hold dear.
Human beings engineering their own obsolescence while cavalierly disregarding the potential consequences. A tale as old as time
Nukes only “prevent” deaths by saying they’ll cause drastically large numbers of deaths otherwise. If the nukes didn’t exist, there wouldn’t then be the threat of death from the nukes, which is being prevented by more people having the nukes.
“AI” is just more modern machine learning techniques that we’ve had for decades. Most implementations of it today are things that nobody actually wants, producing worse quality outputs than that of a human. Maybe it will automate some jobs, sure, that can happen. Just like how tons of automation historically has just pushed people from direct labor to management of machine labor.
Heck, if “AI” automated most of the work people did and put us out of a job, that would just accelerate our progress towards pushing for UBI/or an era of superabundance, which I’d welcome with open arms. It’s a lot easier to convince people that centralized ownership of wealth and resources makes no sense if goods can be produced automatically by machines for free.
But sure, seeing matrix multiplication causing statistically probable sentences to be formed really has me unable to stomach the potential consequences. /s
And what did the printing press, automobile, and analog computer bring?
A rapid advancement in the spread of information and local news, faster individualized transport that later contributed to additional developments to rail and bus transit solutions, and software solutions that can massively reduce workloads while accelerating human progress.
And all of those things either raised the standard of living without causing equivalent harm from job loss, or actively created substantially more jobs.
Make human work obsolete so we can do what we care about and hang out with people we like instead of spending our days doing labor to produce goods we rely on? Sign me up.
Okay? But war existed long before nuclear weapons, and it also causes a large number of deaths. If nukes didn’t exist, there would potentially be more wars, and thus more death.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. We have already automated essentially everything else, and yet people work more than ever. If goods can be produced automatically by machines for free, what’s to stop the owners of the machines from simply eliminating what used to be the working class?
Your defensiveness speaks volumes.
An ever more powerful nucleus of mechanization that has resulted in the most devastating wars and the most widespread suffering in all of human history. Genocides, chattel slavery, famine, biochemical and nuclear weapons; mass extinction and the imminent destruction of the very planet on which we live.
Sweet summer child. Making human work obsolete makes human beings obsolete. I envy your naivety.
Nukes enable larger amounts of death. They increase the possible death, while also increasing the incentive to do a war, to prevent that death. In a world with no nukes, the threat and preventative force of less deadly weapons would simply match each other, just as they currently do with nukes, and have the same effect on disincentivizing war.
Oh no we have not. See:
Not to mention that when we automate something, and a job goes away because of that, that doesn’t mean there’s no new work that gets created as a result. Sure, when a machine replaces a human worker in a factory, that job goes away, but then who repairs and maintains the machine, checks that it’s doing what’s required of it, etc? Thus, more jobs shift to management style roles.
You’re defensive over believing AI will actually make humans obsolete, that must mean you’re actually unable to stomach the reality that you’ll have to keep working the rest of your life. Your defensiveness speaks volumes. /s
Seriously, I welcome automation and the reduction in the amount of labor human beings have to engage in so that people are free to engage in their own interests outside of producing material goods for society. A future where work is entirely optional because we’ve simply eliminated the need to work to survive is great to me.
Ah yes, the printing press, car, and computer, the cause of all genocides. /s
Seriously man, do you not understand that people will just do bad things regardless of if a given job/task is automated?
By the way, your logic literally has no end here. The printing press, car, etc, is just an arbitrary starting point. There’s nothing about these inventions that’s inherently the starting point for any other consequences. This argument quite literally goes all the way back to the development of fire.
Fire brought the ability to burn people to death. Guess we should never have used fire for anything because it could possibly lead to something bad on a broader societal scale, maybe, in some minute way, that in no way outweighs the benefits!
Were you ever a kid? Y’know, the people across nearly every society on this planet that don’t get jobs for years, and have little to no responsibilities, yet are provided for entirely outside of their own will and work ethic? Yet I have a sneaking suspicion you don’t believe that children are obsolete because they don’t do work.
The assumption that work is what gives humans their value is a complete and utter myth that only serves capitalists who want to convince you that it’s good to spend most of your time doing labor, actually.
Hmm, you seem like a relatively intelligent person, so perhaps you’re not accustomed to being corrected.
Your arguments contradict themselves and lack logical consistency. They are flimsy at best, and I lack the energy to explicitly demonstrate their triviality at the current moment. It seems that you start with the assumption that humanity is destined for a post scarcity utopia, and haphazardly arrange your arguments to help justify that conclusion.
Or perhaps it’s because you refuse to admit to yourself that your original comment was ill-considered, and thus you are forced to spout this nonsense in order to protect yourself from the emotional ramifications of admitting you may have misjudged the relative harm of nuclear weapons as compared to AI.
Regardless, it’s frustrating to watch you spin this web of sophistry instead of simply acknowledging that you were mistaken. I sincerely hope that you did not utilize AI to assist in writing that wall of text.
I would recommend that you reflect on my words when you’ve given yourself some time to calm down. It’s not so bad to be wrong sometimes, just think of it as an opportunity to learn and become smarter.