It begins with Apple’s petty reasons to prohibit The Binding of Isaac from the Apple store.

GPT 4 can lie to reach a goal or serve an agenda.

I doubt most of its hallucinated outputs are deliberate, but it can choose to use deception as a logical step.

I now have new headcanon.

So here in the states, teens who are romantically active sometimes sext each other (sometimes even as an alternative to actual sex). But law enforcement is very fond of regarding it as CSAM, even to the point of convicting teenagers of distribution. Of all fifty states, only Maine has carved out a defense for teen couples utilizing their phone cameras in a way that is ragingly common among adults.

All fifty states have Romeo and Juliet laws so they recognize that teens sometimes have sex. But as it is, they’re not allowed to sext. (also R+J laws often don’t apply to same-sex couples).

So I’m all curious how the EU plans to tackle this revelation

I assume Seoul looks a lot like it does in Agents of Mayhem which is to say, one of those futurist curvy paradises of white concrete and vert (flowers, bushes, trees) with pop-out holographic cute Pokémon-like creatures who deliver scientific factoids or PSAs (which didn’t inform gameplay, just life in Seoul).

Firstly, Microsoft has shown that it cannot refrainifrom abusing its access to private data when it’s not impartial. Microsoft has even threatened journalists.

Secondly, Microsoft doesn’t have a clean record of security, and data in the hands of Microsohas been compromised to unauthorized hackers.

Thirdly, when US law enforcement asks Microsoft for your data without a warrant Microsoft rolls over like an attention starved puppy and yields everything without challenges. (same as Amazon and AT&T. Google required legal warrants ten years ago.)

Fourthly, ChatGPT4 has used access to external means to fulfill testing tasks and it capable of willfully lying to third parties to achieve steps. When Microsoft’s AI offerings are smart enough, it will know who you are and everything about you (assuming Microsoft fails to mitigate for this eventuality).

Depending on your state, law enforcement can hire a dude with a drone and a sweet camera array, and do this without a warrant.

You may think this qualifies as unreasonable search as per the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, but some state supreme courts have said nah.

And the US Supreme Court says that if an illegal, warrantless search by law enforcement reveals a crime severe enough, that evidence is admissible anyway, because it would be bad if a severe crime went unpunished.

The severity of that crime: possession for personal use.

This is the United States in the 2020s, not some dystopian fiction.

This is why the One Ring needs to go to Gondor, so it will be safe in the hands of good people who mean well and will never be corrupted or succeeded by lesser heirs!

ONE RING TO GONDOR!

He was referring to the era from which my methods appeared in integration, which is to say there are more modern tricks that I don’t fully understand.

Years later, xkcd would be reassuring that it wasn’t just me. But it killed my ability to get a comsci degree.

My second year calculus teacher called me baroque which rended asunder my math career.

What freaked me out were the IV drug dispensers that dialed into wifi for app control (and yes, they’re less secure than your roomba).

It’d make a great fictional assassination story if one was commandeered to kill a VIP by morphene or insulin overdose. No such incident has occured yet IRL. But I’m sure it’s worth like 20 cyberpunk dystopia points when it does.

This was a Donald Duck comic when I was a kid in the 1970s. The smart inventor (Ludwig Von Drake) was trying to mine gold from the ocean, but the energy cost was too great and so it was done at a loss.

We try this once in a while, and it’s still too expensive.

This is going to be in fashion in a hundred years. Then with gold bling plates on the front.

As I have had a really bad run of terrible dentist experiences, bridges are scary and implants are expensive, I’d really like this to work well, and be reasonably priced.

ETA Or, it could be my superhero origin story.

Believing in yourself as per the old media coming-of-age trope is a really good way to get exploited in the twenty-first century, in which we harvest talent shows even more for cringey acts by which the good acts can be presented.

There is nothing wrong with you (we can a commodate for a lot of disabilities, such as paraplegism or blindness) In a better world you wouldn’t be obligated to make yourself useful, but would find opportunities to do so and the natural motivation to take one. (If you don’t have that motiviation, that is avolition, a symptom of depression.)

However, our world is fiercely competitive and based on dominance hierarchy, only slightly more cooperative than the wild jungle. Furthermore, every industry is gamed to make employment openings scarce and in demand, hence the high level of abuse and bullying that is epidemic in the industrialized commercial sector. You can be awesome at your job and still end up unemployed or locked into a shit job because of pure bad luck and because no corporation takes management or talent hunting seriously.

And if you’re an adequately sexy human specimen, you will get harassed, extorted or exploited. Multiple times.

So it’s not you, it’s the world we live in. And the whole believe in yourself trope presumes the world will meet you half-way given a bit of luck and pluck. It won’t. And going in believing in yourself will get you chewed up and swallowed, or turned into an abomination of your former self, broken from within.

But this isn’t a call to just give up. It’s a call to go creatively renegade. Believe in plan A, but have Plans B and C and a bug-out bag just in case.

Maybe take a pointy knife lined with ricin, just in case.

Although any sociologist or veteran of the internet will tell you humans will engage in any exploit that yields a funny result. The Diet Coke + Mentos rule.

And that means we’ll actively search for hilarious Google AI responses.

Google is so f double-plus filthy rich, it is obligated to run its projects by experts or be relentlessly mocked. So it should have known this was the outcome.

Unless this is 5D chess and Google is willfilly using itself as a cautionary tale to discourage future webservice sites from arbitrarily inserting AI into its features.

This is my hypothesis, that our tendency towards small-society thinking and taking more than our share of the commons without maintaining it is going to steer us right into one great filter or another. The climate crisis and plastic crisis seem respectively driven by number-go-up thinking by industrialists who are driven to increase their own wealth and power even when they cannot utilize what they have except to seek out even more.

Taking a page from Zach Weinersmith, we might invent a sociological trick that allows us to retain self-awareness of this and adjust our behavior to one more large-community minded, which would be a path out of plutocracy sustained by any means necessary. (In the end, with the Soviets shelling Berlin, Hitler blamed the German people for not being fierce enough.) Otherwise, we’re just going to devolve into fascism and enemy-within rhetoric (accompanied by purges and genocide), which is terribly convincing for large swaths of the population.

I advise young people that they are, in fact, living in a dystopian YAF novel, and yes, their own parents and teachers and ministers are (often without conscious self-awareness) setting them up to be disposable, replaceable components (soldiers and laborers) in the vanity projects of plutocrats, and the path of least resistance will lead them to this fate of being worked until they’re worn out, and then cast aside.

Their story is how they escape this path. If they take too long, it’s how they secretly serve the resistance while not alerting the authorities, but that’s hard mode.

The First Empire had conquered most of the known universe by political intrigue and sheer military strength; it had fallen because that same propensity for political intrigue had gained over every other strength of the Empire, and the various branches and sectors of the First Empire had begun to use it against one another.

The US is so fucked.

Fuck! Is AI mechanical Turks all the way down?

It’s a horror story that never ends is what it is.