A man with a small canoe catching a few fish with a fishing rod for his dinner is very different to a commercial fishing vessel trawling through the ocean with a massive net to catch thousands of fish at once. The two are treated differently under the law, and have different rules that apply to them due to the difference in scale.
Scale matters, and the scale that computers/these AIs operate under are absurd compared to a person doing it manually.
Why does scale matter in terms of AI? Just because a computer can do it at scale doesn't mean it should be treated similarly to your analogy. Rather than using an analogy, please tell me why it matters that computers can do something like AI at scale rather than individuals doing it.
The work of a person can be mitigated and a person can be held accountable for their actions.
Much of our society operates on the idea that we don’t need to codify and enforce every single good or bad thing due to these reasons; and having such an underpinning affords us greater personal freedom.
This does not actually answer the question of why it is bad (in your opinion) in the first place, it just states that bad things are mitigated. I am looking for a concrete answer to the former, not a justification of the latter. The former is what usually AI opponents can never answer, they assume prima facie that AI is bad, for whatever reason.
I answered your question plainly, but I'll try to go into detail. I have a suspicion that you don't see this as the philosophical issue that AI detractors do, and perhaps that hasn't been clearly communicated to you in the answers you've received, leading to your distaste for them or confusion at why they don't meet your criteria.
I believe that this kind of generative AI is bad because it approximates human behavior at an inhuman scale and cannot be held accountable in any way. This upends the entire social structure upon which humans have relied to keep each other in-check since the advent of the modern concept of "justice" beginning with the Code of Hammurabi.
In essence: Because you cannot punish, rehabilitate or extract recompense from a machine, it should not be allowed in any way to approximate a member of society.
This logic does not apply to machines that "automate" labor, because those machines do not approximate human communication - they do not pretend to be us.
Your argument can be applied to the printing press or the automatic loom, and before you say that AI is much more at scale, I do not think that it is any more at scale than producing billions of books and garments cheaply. If you instead say that AI is more autonomous than the prior which require human functionality, I will remind you that no AI today (and likely into the future) produces outputs autonomously with no human input (and indeed, many humans tweak those outputs further, making it more like photo editing than end-to-end solutions). Even if they could perfectly read your mind and output end-to-end, you must first think for them to do what you desire.
Should those machines then be subject to your same philosophies? I'd suspect you'd say "that's different" somehow but it is only because you are alive at this moment and these machines have been normalized to you that you do not care about them. Were you to be born in a few centuries, you would likely feel the same way most do about the prior machines, and indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who think that future generation's AI (probably simply called technology then) is problematic as you do today. Recency bias is one hell of a drug.
Unless the purpose and value of the video is solely distribution of the copyrighted music it should be protected fair use. If copyright holders don't like it they are free to not license their music to be played in public ever.
Their curation blows. The whole premise of having a canonical answer to a question is dumb. Most programming languages and libraries are always in flux. The whole nature of many questions changes over time.
StackOverflow is a tyranny of mediocrity. It is a bunch middling programmers shitting on newbies, and driving away experts because you get severely punished for not being mediocre.
I had a question closed as a duplicate for being too similar to another question that I directly cited in my question as being sublty different and not applicable. (Because I anticipated some idiot closing my question...and they went and did it anyway)
Starlink can see the packet traffic. They ought be able to analyze which dishes are on each side of the conflict. Even if it isn't perfectly accurate, a rough blacklist would help Ukraine tremendously (by hurting Russia). And if Ukraine complains about any that aren't working they can unblock those specifically.
Starlink relies on local downlinks (the laser link traffic is of course limited) so they probably just don't have the capacity in those regions. Or lack the permission to offer the service. Many countries forbid most satellite equipment, even big ones like India.
I am a Starlink customer. I don't love or hate Musk particularly, but when he makes bold claims that foreign leaders are helpless to stop LEO internet I hope he's ready to back that up. In light of recent developments[0] I don't think it's appropriate to assume all adversaries are helpless, and terrorism or not I'd assume Russia feels they have casus belli on Starlink after Musk's clashes with Russian governance and cooperation with NATO allies.
One satellite wouldn't "ruin LEO for everybody" and even if enough were shot down to cause a problem it would be a short-lived problem because most of the debris would decay within a few years. Furthermore, "ruin" is relative, "Kessler syndrome" doesn't mean instant satellite death, it results in an increased attrition rate which can be addressed by simply launching more of the highest value satellites and leaving the others on the ground until the situation clears up in a few years. SpaceX is in a good position to do this since they can replace satellites in LEO very cheaply.
Also, the countries most likely to do something this stupid are the ones the US government is giving him permission to defy, particularly Iran or Russia. If something happens, it will be more on the US government than SpaceX.
Why would it be one satellite? Many countries consider LEO sovereign airspace. And there would be international cover from countries like China and Russia.
If potting sats becomes normalised it ceases to be something that can be privately financed.
I responded to "Until one of them shoots down ONE OF his satellites and ruins LEO for everybody." And furthermore, the rest of my comment covers a scenario where many satellites are hit instead of just one.
The precedent is set once one is shot down. At that moment, SpaceX loses control over Starlink because it becomes clear its decisions carry military implications for America as a whole. (Nobody will expropriate it. But laws would need to be passed to ensure Bezos going on a bender won’t start WWIII.)
I didn't say "ruin forever". "Elon-exclusive for a couple of years" honestly sounds bad enough.
There's not only Starlink in LEO. Some of the existing constellations there are safety-of-life relevant (e.g. Iridium for polar flights or shipping routes), and Iridium doesn't have a stockpile of spares sitting on launchpads for an "Elon poked the bear one too many times" scenario.
> Some of the existing constellations there are safety-of-life relevant (e.g. Iridium for polar flights or shipping routes), and Iridium doesn't have a stockpile of spares sitting on launchpads for an "Elon poked the bear one too many times" scenario.
Iridium is only useful in safety-of-life because it's too expensive for anything else. If SpaceX were that bad at creating a market for satellites no one would be trying to shoot their satellites down.
Not to nitpick, but polar flights can (and do, as a back-up, sometimes not only) use HF comms (which do not rely on a line-of-sight, as the waves are long enough to "bounce" off the ionosphere). It's slow (~300bps if transmitting data?), sometimes (but rarely) can have latency up to 15 minutes (interference from the Sun and others stars breaking/jamming comms for some short time, along other phenomenons), but it works. Even 15 years ago not every commercial airplane had satcom link installed, and even now, HF is the only thing which is required when flying away from VHF range. But anyway satcom is just more convenient usually (as long as it is available and it works).
On the other hand, I also think that some *ground* safety systems will rely on satellite data links as a back-up, as well.
Yes, but does that make it any less useful for safety-of-life, especially given that Starlink is not even a viable alternative for that application yet?
I could imagine that in a head-on intercept of an Iridium satellite, some of the debris might make it into higher or lower orbital shell, but to be fair I don't know how realistic that actually is.
Until he decides he wants to offer the service above-board to residents of those countries and their regulators decide that, because he's been shirking their laws for years, they won't allow him to import/sell his devices legally.
His other businesses will most likely get sanctioned, employees associated with them will conveniently get searched and detained on trumped up charges whenever they visit said countries. It's very difficult because Musk's businesses are hardware businesses, and with hardware there is a supply chain involved.
It's not difficult for a state level entity to create problems for his businesses.
That was in the context of hostile nations, like Russia or Iran or Cuba, where Starlink has no chance of being allowed.
Everywhere else it makes much more sense to get permission to operate (vs. trying some pirate operation where Starlink is treated like a contraband that needs to be illegally imported into the country, the payments must happen stealthily, you get no support etc.).
A single Starlink could service bandwidth to a whole lot of people through local wired connections - which is a serious disruption to the existing industrial complex-government power structure; is what comes to my mind first.
Until there's consolidation and it's no longer local but national or multi-national, or global companies like Blackrock et al who own controlling shares and board member positions to steer the companies how they choose.
But there is a good point and pattern to notice here, that further consolidation into a global companies providing internet access put resources and power into even fewer hands, but now that power is no longer being held by potentially authoritarian politicians and their Gestapo.
The solution for that means requiring multiple satellite internet providers, and people paying attention always to prevent a critical mass or majority of them from capture by bad actors - which we know happened with MSM consolidation, as well as more recently with social media platforms all illegally colluding with the US government - exposed due to Elon buying Twitter-X and releasing the Twitter Files.
But what point were you trying to make? That Starlink is bad for local economies because people are paying a non-local company?
> Why do they give a damn if people are subscribing in the US and using their product in Africa?
A government gets to decide what their citizens can have.
Think about it the other way around.
Let's say there is a brand new vehicle for sale in China with no airbags, no abs, no emissions controls of any kind, etc.
People in the US are absolutely NOT allowed to purchase that because the government of the US have decided it goes against the public interest (safety, pollution, etc.).
Just because one country thinks people should be able to conceal carry handguns, that doesn't mean other countries have to allow it.
Then it is up to the local government to confiscate their starlink hardware. There is no reason for starlink to respect every single legal jurisdiction's rules. They only need to deal with wherever they connect to ISPs.
What is an African country going to do about enforcing anything to do with starlink other than confiscate hardware within their borders? Whine to the UN that someone is competing with their local telecom?
Do Africans deserve less enforcement of things their government has not approved than people in other parts of the world?
Would you be OK if some country started making high-current electrical devices that were not approved and then just forcefully sold them in your country, even though regulations prohibited it?
I am not belittling them. Just recognizing the fact they have no power to enforce anything on starlink.
It's not about what they "deserve". It is about what is physically possible.
I would love it if pirate internet via satellite that cannot be controlled by any government became a common thing in the US (and everywhere in the world). Unfortunately the US does have the enforcement capability to tell starlink what to do.
> Just recognizing the fact they have no power to enforce anything on starlink.
What are you talking about?
They can make the possession of satellite equipment a crime (already is in quite a few countries), They can fine Starlink for allowing service when it has not been approved, they can ban starlink in the future.
They can't fine starlink if they have no presence in their country. They already did those other things and people are still using starlink systems in their countries. There is no other recourse for them.
Other people have mentioned the legal/sanctions reasons.
But also, from a business point of view, maximum profit might mean offering a $100 a month service for residential users, a $1000 a month service for billionaires' yachts, a $5000 a month service for private jets, and a $100,000 a month service for defence industry applications.
Charging more for use away from home, based on GPS data, could be very profitable. Especially as you need GPS tracking to beam the signals to the right place anyway.
You must have read a different article, because "starlink doesn't like it" is the only justification or explanation the article offers for their stance. And that is neither a valid justification nor an explanation.
I would say that is unfair because their actual platform is deliberately sabotaging any kind of functional governance and refusing to change any government policy that is clearly broken and in desperate need of change. Obviously they won't admit that. But that is what they have been doing for decades. They wouldn't want to accidentally make things better for people because then they can't campaign on fixing the problems.
I recall reading or hearing that a bunch of senior GOP leadership got together immediately after Barack Obama’s election and agreed explicitly that their approach was going to be obstruction.
And that worked, but then the next generation of elected party members seemed to be obstructionist only. So much so that in 2017 when they held the executive branch and both houses of congress, they couldn’t get anything done.
