etuomaala

consumerism != capitalism

Capitalism is the allowing of control over companies to be bought and sold without the consent of their workers.

Consumerism is using cheap marketing tactics to sell cheap garbage to people who don't know any better, and is mostly the result of not requiring companies to pay for the waste they create.

Either of these could easily exist without the other.

Stop defining everything you don't like about the economy as capitalism.

I agree. And defending against bots will be difficult. But not impossible. Trust exists in real life. It can exist online. The solution to establishing trust in real life changes with scale, but the highest level, there is democracy. It works on millions of people. The fediverse can try to find a new solution, but it may be easier and faster just to replicate democracy online. This includes many of the tasks a real democracy has to undergo, like:

• photo IDs
• municipal, provincial, and federal elections
• supreme courts, regular courts, judges, laws, and punishments
• public news service

At this point, paid full-time civil servants are required. They can't just be volunteers! How are they paid? Uhoh, now we need taxes.

After all that, it is probably easier to just piggyback on the trust established by existing democracies, requiring a valid photo ID from a functioning democracy in order to sign up. I think that is a pretty good solution. However, no democracy in the world has an official online service in place that web servers could use to reliably validate such government photo IDs. So unfortunately, this solution is impossible for now.

IDK, what solutions do you have?

Well, there are a lot of threats from AI that are popularised today. Some of them are fake, crazy, or stupid, but others are real. Here are some threats that are real, in my opinion.

In trying to use AI for good, we may give too much power to an AI that we do not understand well enough, and whose motivations are not clear. Worse still, this AI might have motivations that we humans could not understand, even if we wanted to. Such an AI may not value humans at all.

Another threat is that a country like China creates an AI and puts it in charge of their soft power program. It may be possible for an AI to be so intelligent that it could manipulate the world in ways that humans physically could not understand. This could allow China to not only literally take over the world, but also ensure that everybody with any kind of power is absolutely thrilled about it. (Anybody without the power to stop this AI would be disregarded in its calculations, no matter how much they hate the AI. This could easily include most humans.)

One thing AI has already been doing for a decade to our great detriment is optimising the ad revenue of search engines and social networks, with a total disregard for all other consequences.

All of these threats are not new. People have been talking about them for years, now. You should pay more attention.

If you think about it, tonne is actually a better base unit than grams, because it aligns better with the cubic metre (1m^3 = (approx.) 1 tonne of water.)

So really, I would ask why kilograms and milligrams, and not millitonnes and microtonnes?

I can picture it now. I weigh 70 millitonnes.

I'm saying that the world is facing many threats, and all of them need to be addressed. Including some AI.

Would you say then that our efforts to hinder access to dangerous information aren't working?

Hm. Yeah, banning bots would be better, but it would be more expensive than fighting troll farms with AI. That is valid. Still, I consider AI counter arguments a temporary solution.

Never mind the fake news for a second. Which side has the most reliable real news?

Does it? Doesn’t that threat exist even without AI

Yes. Your point?

In that case, would you object to the posting of detailed schematics on the internet for the creation of nuclear weapons?

This was why I was so furious about Elon Mask's blue checkmark debacle. He had a chance to prove that a gigantic part of the internet was a) human and b) non-duplicate. I was really shocked by how badly an apparently smart person fucked it up. Not so smart, it turns out.

What makes you say that this new disinformation machine is pro-America?