Originally published at: Tech media ready for the dark enlightenment - Boing Boing
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Now we’re just shilling for the gadgets.
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I suspect that this would be almost equally acceptable to the rich VC guy. After all, if you don’t want to interact with human beings, then a human who’s forced to pretend to be a robot and follow the robot script is almost as good as an actual robot. And a tele-operated fake-bot is a big improvement on the old seen-but-not-heard speak-only-when-spoken-to domestics, because if the human gets sick or has some complicated emotional crisis, RobotCo will seamlessly replace it with another one.
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Even better if the human pretending to be a robot is in a foreign country with cheap labour.
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They spent a couple of years doing exactly that with Sam Bankman-Fried, and learned nothing after that rotten edifice collapsed. They just moved on to the next Sam.
The people Zitron is talking about are no longer journalists. They’re courtiers to the rich and famous, and often delusional ones at that. And if that isn’t bad enough, the “genius” techbros whose boots they lick have also convinced some of them to burnish the reputation of JD Vance.
I’ll post this sequence from the 1994 movie The Paper (co-incidentally directed by the same person who did the film version of Hillybilly Elegy) once again.
The other day, when Tesla’s bartender robot was shown off, some rich VC fellow on Twitter gloated specifically about it putting humans out of work and ending the need to even interact with them.
That attitude, by the way, is what might keep “AI” a viable industry. If this industry can make a credible promise that their products can cut 1% or more of the headcount off the balance sheet of any company, no matter what its size, that’s all it will take for corporate America and Wall Street to keep them in business. All the other applications of LLMs are sideshows and details.
Of course, most of these anti-social greedpigs aren’t thinking about what happens to society in general and their lifestyles if that number goes to 10%, mostly because they agree with Thatcher that there’s no such thing as society. The ones who are thinking about it see a neoliberal UBI or DS9-style sanctuary districts as “solutions”.
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Great article. I got a sense of peace and calm reading that because there are those out there who see these people for who they really are - grifters who are, and have always been, mediocrities with inherited wealth. I can try and explain to someone why i’ve never trusted these platforms or tech bros but in the future i’ll point them to the article and say “wait until you get a load of this…”
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That Shutterstock photo of the woman holding the red pill. . . I keep thinking it’s from an ad for a suppository.
Which maybe is perfect for what “red pill” means to the weirdos of the far right. “Take this pill and shit will just pour out of you!”
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There. Fixed it.
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So you’re saying that Gen-X sarcasm can’t solve every problem?
Whatever. 
/s
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The galaxy-brain, tech-bro play here is to create a “Task Rabbit” for foreign intelligence agents masquerading as cheap teleoperator labor, then brag about “vision” and “democratization of intelligence opportunities”
Also, tag: Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age/Snow Crash.
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Already happening:
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I read about a Japanese company that had developed a robot to teach children English, controlled by an operator in the Philippines.
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