You can’t build a moral society without laws eliminating unethical parasitical business models either.
That is a very false and misleading dilemma.
Coordination matters. And coordination is too hard to do as a call for everyone to just be good.
If you live in a jungle of “free” actors (unconstrained by a need to compete constructively), the good path becomes unrealistic for everyone. And everyone but a few, have to work increasingly harder to pay off the damage of those few.
Or suffer the unrelenting undertow on their lives as highly rewarded parasitic behavior finances its own continued growth.
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What would a single chart of computing power devoted to commercial surveillance and feed manipulation, on hire to actors both good and bad, look like?
I can tell you, that the scrapbook and organic sharing aspects of the major social networks, even with non-surveillance personalized ads, would be profitable with a small fraction of the servers being used to optimize users for advertisers. If that wasn’t the enabled bar.
In the meantime, the leverage compounds as how do good actors who need to advertise compete without themselves feeding these highly centralized surveillance/manipulation machines? Even while they increasingly siphon off the margins of their revenue as real producers?
And how can direct competitors avoid becoming monsters? Whatever OpenAI’s natural good intentions, high or low: to compete with Google and Facebook in the consumer market they will also have no choice but to also start and innovate new ways of extracting surveillance/manipulation value from users.
Not just ads to cover natural costs, but s/m driven ads to keep up with the s/m margins and therefore investment by competitors they have to compete with.
—
Without guardrails for everyone, everyone (at a practical level) is forced to be actively or passively complicit in increasing damage as a major growth industry.
Margins for profits in legally externalized negative outcomes are, by definition, better than for productive on-their-merits businesses.
I’m not arguing for a lack of regulation or a jungle. Far from it. But I’m pointing out that many people behave within the law but not in the spirit of it, for example.
Google exists, Facebook exists, both require intrusive advertising technology that has undermined democracy, led to large scale violence, etc. and it’s legal, and thousands of nerds make it happen.
That is a very false and misleading dilemma.
Coordination matters. And coordination is too hard to do as a call for everyone to just be good.
If you live in a jungle of “free” actors (unconstrained by a need to compete constructively), the good path becomes unrealistic for everyone. And everyone but a few, have to work increasingly harder to pay off the damage of those few.
Or suffer the unrelenting undertow on their lives as highly rewarded parasitic behavior finances its own continued growth.
—
What would a single chart of computing power devoted to commercial surveillance and feed manipulation, on hire to actors both good and bad, look like?
I can tell you, that the scrapbook and organic sharing aspects of the major social networks, even with non-surveillance personalized ads, would be profitable with a small fraction of the servers being used to optimize users for advertisers. If that wasn’t the enabled bar.
In the meantime, the leverage compounds as how do good actors who need to advertise compete without themselves feeding these highly centralized surveillance/manipulation machines? Even while they increasingly siphon off the margins of their revenue as real producers?
And how can direct competitors avoid becoming monsters? Whatever OpenAI’s natural good intentions, high or low: to compete with Google and Facebook in the consumer market they will also have no choice but to also start and innovate new ways of extracting surveillance/manipulation value from users.
Not just ads to cover natural costs, but s/m driven ads to keep up with the s/m margins and therefore investment by competitors they have to compete with.
—
Without guardrails for everyone, everyone (at a practical level) is forced to be actively or passively complicit in increasing damage as a major growth industry.
Margins for profits in legally externalized negative outcomes are, by definition, better than for productive on-their-merits businesses.