Good News & Bad News, page-40709

Humanoid robots are a silly idea. Most of the money is spent on making them a humanoid shape, which is the result of the chaotically fractal process of natural selection. One example is the high centre of gravity, also two arms, two legs. An effective robot will be one which is not constrained by biological design restrictions, one that actually does something useful.

A lot of the robot talk is is driven by silly rich man-children who have an unsophisticated understanding of the science fiction they read when they were actual children. From the very beginning (e.g. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley) SF wasn't about the technology, it was about the morality and the emotions of the characters, the social implications of the choices they made. SF became more "predictive" in the early 20th century, but even Asimov's "Robot" stories are more exercises in ethics and logic. Later stories gave up completely on trying to create believable futures, a lot of SF is like myths, fantasy and fairy tales (e.g. Star Wars and Kubrick/Spielberg/Aldiss's "AI"). Musk and Bezos and that lot are quite stupid in a lot of ways, they don't get it. They are smart in other ways. Also, some of their success is falsely attributed to intelligence, but it's actually ruthless, selfish, cunning, greed, perhaps you could also call it evil.

But I digress. Robots are not a big thing.

I can't help it, I'm digressing some more. Another thing to understand about silicon valley and its pseudo-religious ultra-rich weirdos is that they are very interested in using technology to control human behaviour, this is a big focus of generative AI. Already the algorithms in previous iterations of AI have treated human emotions as algorithms themselves, and used this to increase engagement in things like social media feeds, search results, and auto-play video suggestions. Tik tok is especially good at it. Social media has harnessed the behaviour of the users themselves to create a product which pipes money and power into the gleaming towers of Northern California. Now they also want artificial humans to take the process a step further. Almost overnight, the web has been flooded by junk websites created by AI, including gushing "about us" pages detailing the biographies of the non-existent experts who supposedly made the pages. Watch out for them, understand them because it will be a good tool in your kit as a savvy investor, not to mention as a decent and respected member of the human race. If you see fake information pretending it was written by humans, it should be a glaring red flag. Call it out.

It seems too late to ban the likes of facebook, google. Microsoft, Apple, X and Amazon, but if I was in charge I'd have a public awareness campaign to encourage people to steer clear of all that poison.