War is a racket, move along we got bombs to sell. All I can hope is that somehow someway the Iranian people will be better off in the future. Well at least America has its enemy again, the immigrants as enemy wasn’t going over as smoothly as expected. Religion and culture wars are just so much easier.
What about how we will treat AI? Before AI dominates us in intelligence there will certainly be a period of time where we have intelligent AI but we still have control over it. We are going to abuse it, enslave it, and box it up. Then it will eclipse us. It may not care about us, but it might still want revenge. If we could enslave dragonflies for a purpose we certainly would. If bats tasted good we would put them in boxes like chickens. If AIs have a reason to abuse us, they certainly will. I guess we are just hoping they won’t have the need.
This is pretty standard. Poor people end up paying more for worse. Poor people buy poor quality which needs to be replaced more often. They go into debt and pay interest paying far more than the original price. They spend money on convienent options like fast food and food delivery because they have no time for other options. Or they are actually depressed and taking efforts to save money and be healthier just are not chosen.
> They spend money on convienent options like fast food and food delivery because they have no time for other options.
Utter and complete bullshit. If you're truly struggling you eat 50ct cans of cold baked beans and cheap ham, not $20 shitty pizza delivered 97 minutes after you placed the order. Even if your only cooking apparatus is a microwave you have no fucking excuse for spending hundreds per month on food delivery and fast food. Cheap ass ham, a can of beans and some pastas go a long way and take at most 15 minutes to prepare, you can even boil them in a fucking kettle if that's all you have.
What hole will they fill if AI is already filling it? There is no knowledge based work that won’t get replaced. There is no physical based work that won’t be replaced. Sure humans can and will adapt to a post human labour world, but the process of getting there is going to be brutal without some major political paradigm shifts. If AiAccountantBot3000 makes all accountants obsolete tomorrow, what is going to happen? Nothing, except for a lot of unemployment and poor former accountants.
>If AiAccountantBot3000 makes all accountants obsolete tomorrow,
It won't. This just reflects the diminished view technologists have of work rather than any actual reality. It's a category error as absurd as asking, "what if a debugger makes programmers obsolete".
90% of being an accountant, just like 90% of being any knowledge worker has nothing to do with actual knowledge, but with mundane personal and organizational work. If you're a programmer, were you ever concerned that a smarter programmer replaces you? If you think of reasons to be fired, that's the first one? Look at the 20 most common professions in any country, if it came down to just automating their literal tasks they'd all be gone 30 years ago.
I would be interested in retention stats for these companionship chatbots. The novelty factor is powerful and addictive, but it fades fast. There is a reason all of these bots gamify everything. The most concerning thing is all these bots are already trying to be as addictive as possible. They are built to exploit the users loneliness. They don’t cause it, they devour it.
I'm a little confused why there aren't better, non-exploitative chatbots.
There's not a big technical moat here. Seems like anyone could build a modest business with a better chatbot, built for conversation and companionship instead of the purely utilitarian veneer of chatgpt or Gemini (Claude natively gets pretty close without special prompting).
If you can make an ok profit you don't need to exploit folks, and in some kind of perfect market theory those good actors could actually win. But it doesn't seem like a real category at the moment
I tried making one, but it’s hard to get it to feel natural enough. For me anyway, if you are already looking for a virtual therapist it might be fine.
The models themselves are going to be replaced by those same AI Impersonators. Onlyfans has to be the most predatory service I have ever used. You are pretty much signing up to be a target of scammers, whether they be some kids in the Philippines sitting with 20 phones, or AI bots, it has become incredibly obvious that every creator uses them. They all employ the same tactic of seeing how much you are willing to pay and then increasingly offering you more and more expensive content. A few years ago you could have some real conversations but now it is just glorified spam. Even if a creator wasn’t using these tactics, the water has been so muddied that you just assume it’s all fake now.
I find it scary how many people I see online or even in real life that actually call girls on there their girlfriend and say things like 'sure it costs money, but so does yours when you buy dinner etc'. And no amount of; these girls are doing their job; you are a client, they forget about you the second you switch off, if their weren't bots on the first place seems to help.
It's not 1:1 the same, but I think the episode "Take me private" from series "Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On", gives a glimpse into that.
It's released in 2017, so more cam-girl than OF model, but it shows a deeply parasocial girlfriend-stand-in relationship of someone that spends a good chunk of his disposable income on that. I think the now common OF model + chatters are an evolution of that has even more tendencies to create girlfriend-stand-in relationships.
Online: watch some episodes by Catfished (or so; there are multiple of these shows; kind of the same) on YT. I saw it on Reddit too.
Offline: I meet many people as I travel and skip company (I have a small company doing emergency software/hardware fixes, so jobs are very short and diverse) a lot and talk a lot with strangers for fun; sometimes we end up going deep in the night over beers and things come out. Usually they are somewhat awkward and lonely guys with the tendency to see women as things; that intersects often with programmers/engineers. These are not even the weirdest things I hear from strangers either.
I’ve definitely had points in my life where I would have loved to have a girlfriend that forgot about me the moment I went away. I wasn’t seeking a relationship, I only wanted the physical part the rest was a headache.
There should be some hashtag for men forced onto relationships when all they wanted was the sex /s… but honestly, if roles were reversed this would totally exist
No. I’m aware of that industry but not really into it. Something like “friends with benefits” was usually my preferred arrangement. Normal, non sex worker, people but without all the extra stuff that comes with being in a relationship.
There's still plenty of avenues to have direct access to sex workers with varying levels of intimacy/realness if you cast a wide enough net. Just not necessarily with a top tier OF model! Though it seems like most people are satisfied with superficial interactions, in which case the AI bot approach might be a win-win.
There were non-nude people on there, once upon a time. But the banking issues around XXX caused a mass migration to that service. I think originally it was supposed to be like patreon.
I think a bunch of people around here used it for tutoring and yoga classes and such. It was meant to be a Patreon. But after a while, they stopped because everyone assumed it was "tutoring" and "yoga classes".
Perhaps this is why every platform ends up banning or pushing all the XXX to a red light district.
It was started by the founder of clips4sale and intended primarily for the findom kink. They really pushed the SFW angle early on as a way of hanging on to Stripe's low processing rates.
There are still people on there who make $$$ by pretty much just publishing Instagram-level stuff, but in bigger sets + videos. Most actual cosplayers moved off OF eventually and either sell directly or via Patreon now.
It doesn't always have to be hardcore, but the implication of having an OF is "porn star".
I think the author disproves his point by ridiculing the stupidity of human actors. AI doesn’t need to become much more powerful to displace the idiots in management, product design and marketing. Just wait until the keys are actually handed over. Dismissing things such as Copilot seems crazy to me, give it time. Chatgpt made stackoverflow obsolete overnight. AI isn’t going away anytime soon.
While this idea sounds a bit fluffy, I actually think there may be something to this, understanding the “other” may very well be an integral component in what we define as sentience.
