Discussion

@mekkaokereke
I can understand the urge to blame capitalism, given that so many of the problems facing the masses right now can be traced to the wealth concentration made inevitable by unregulated capitalism.

And unfortunately, even when you regulate capitalism enough to prevent things like this, they will use their vast wealth to tirelessly corrupt the government until they can have unregulated capitalism again.

AI and social media are in a special category, I think.

AI greatly amplifies the problems of wealth concentration by giving the wealthy access to expertise while denying experts access to wealth (to borrow a meme for my argument). While there are useful applications of this tech, right now, it is doing enormous harm on many fronts.

As for social media, decentralized social media solves some of it, but most of the power and influence is still in the hands of a few billionaires. I am sure I don't have to remind you that the controversy with the Cambridge Analytica incident was that CA used data they did not pay to have access to. What they did with the data was exactly what most social media platforms are designed to do; they just shocked everyone because they did it to influence an election instead of purchasing decisions about dish detergent or graphics cards.

Sorry to interject. I otherwise agree with everything. My apologies if I misread or misinterpreted anything. I'm super tired right now.

@mekkaokereke 100% agree w you.

@mekkaokereke

How genAI was built, how it was trained, how it is being powered, how it is being forced into every single niche whether it makes sense, how it is being championed by the worst humans alive and being embraced by the most oppressive governments in the world are all symptoms.

Social media was cool and good until it became about literally addicting its users so the Epstein Class could extract wealth through ads, data harvesting, surveillance, and algorithmically driven radicalization.

@mekkaokereke
There is some nuance in this reply, as in are you disagreeing with the post or the video.
If it is the post, then:
"Tech companies are destroying social structures" does not equal Technology.
I would argue by calling out the tech companies, the poster is agreeing with your point that the #EpsteinClass is hell bent on #Genocide and #Slavery for the proles.

@mekkaokereke A bit too Messias like but basically right. In the end, isn't he explaining what everybody already knows?

Some people think that venture capital is a fundamentally evil business structure. I disagree.

Thought experiment:
If you could press a button tomorrow, that would cause 50% of the entire population of the continent of Africa to die within 5 years😮, but would 50X your profits and create dozens of trillion dollar companies, and help humanity become interplanetary 10 years earlier, would you press it?

If you're on this weird little Mastodon thing reading this, then you are most likely:
1) A technologist of some sort
2) Not a genocidal maniac

So you would of course say no.

Some of you suspect that I'm going to *imply* that many VCs would say yes. But I'm not going to imply anything. I don't have to. Because many of these VCs have written papers and blog posts under their real names, celebrating the fact that they believe that it's wrong *not* to press that button.🤦🏿‍♂️

The problem with VC is neither the profit motive, nor the business structure.

The problem is that the vast majority of the funds that our entire society uses to solve hard problems, are controlled and allocated by people that believe that it is their duty to create new buttons like the one above, and then mash it repeatedly.