16,000 karma · joined July 17, 2007
Seems pretty conclusive. Very similar story when they bought skype.
1. Put AI in charge of health policy 2. Give it a naive misguided charter/goal eg eliminate suffering 3. Euthanasia for everyone
This is simply AI optimizing for the goal - the goal is the evil/naive/misguided part, not the AI.
Those who aim to "eliminate suffering" are the issue here to be clear, but unfortunately they are a growing group.
If people start giving enough power to AI, with ill thought out goals, and no human in charge, don't be surprised...
Why would it need "free will" or "consciousness" whatever that means?
A concrete example might be putting an AI in charge of health policy, and telling it to "eliminate suffering" without any human to check and push back. Well, the best way to eliminate suffering is...
The UK population grew from about 58.9 million in 2000 to 69 million in 2025 - an increase of roughly 10 million people. The large majority of that came from immigration.
And you don't think having to house an extra 10 million people is a reason for the housing crisis?
I would suggest you do your own research, and use your own logic and reason rather than blindly accepting government reports into why what they're doing is brilliant.
Nothing to do with millions of new people arriving wanting to live somewhere?
"I'm tired of all this internet talk" in 1990s?
They certainly do in my experience. Maybe you've been lucky and haven't worked with really messy programmers.
Concentrate on code quality, and whether it does what it needs to do. Not whether it was written by AI or not.
It'll be interesting to see the next language that comes along rejecting bloat in favor of simplicity, and then we can all start again.
Perhaps time for me to move on.
They're evil irritating virmin IMHO.
However, I'd much rather have a million customers paying me $1 each, than have 10 customers paying me $100k each.
But I agree with your last point. Depends what gets you excited. For me personally, B2B is as soul destroying as it gets.
With B2C, your revenue grows over time as you grow your userbase. It's pretty predictable, and not too risky.
With B2B, it's more binary. You might go months with 0 revenue, then get some deal and suddenly be profitable. But then there's added risk, as losing a single client can have a massive impact on your bottom line.
Donating 10% of revenue away, wouldn't go down too well with average Joes pension scheme.
Also I'm not sure any big company 'completely depends' on FOSS. Yes it's an awesome thing, but big companies would survive just fine without it.
Still awesome to see duckduckgo do it of course.