Did it really predict these things? We’ve had data surveillance and algorithmic targeting for a while before Watchdogs. A lot of “prescient” sci-fi is just writing about stuff that’s already happening but which people don’t pay much attention to.
I was thinking about this recently when I had to look at a website without an ad blocker. (Btw, does anyone know an Adblock option that works for iOS Lemmy? Memmy’s browser doesn’t block anything.)
The website was absolutely packed to the brim with ads. Animated, expanding, moving, etc. All competing for your attention. How can ANY of those ads be getting enough attention for it to be worth it?
And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,
I don’t know why you’d assume that. I’m pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn’t start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn’t hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.
As far as alternatives. I’m always up front with people in saying that I don’t have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That’s a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we’d want to live in for very long. It’s a cruel system and it’s going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don’t do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn’t going to fix the issue.
The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it’s a proposed solution. It’d be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it’s important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.
Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.
People are great. We’ve done great things. We’re a species who’s defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.
People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We’ve created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It’s bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don’t need to add to it by making it seem like everyone’s at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.
I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.
But they’re not trying to do that. Profit isn’t enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.
So they put in ads. But that’s not enough and oh look there are more places we haven’t put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don’t we sell that too? Hey guys, we’ve heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small protection payment subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don’t like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we’re adding ads back into the service. But don’t worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don’t think that last one’s happened with YT premium yet, but it’s happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn’t put it past them.)
There’s no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.
Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.
Reddit API fiasco. Practical issue since I didn’t want to use Reddit’s shitty app for my phone browsing and it was just the writing on the walls.
Wars are plenty profitable if you’re a lot bigger than your opponents and can force them to be subservient to your business interests. It’s not a fluke that the richest country on earth is also the one with the most frequent wars.
It’s crazy that this is real. It looks like a comic someone would make to make fun of the idea. Like the fact that they’re watching some guy shoot someone, then the burger commercial comes on and the guy stands up and cheers “McDonalds!” Before sitting back down to watch more of guy shooting other guy.
This is peak “dumb Americans” humor, and they’re using this unironically to describe their business idea.
Yeah. It’s more like:
Researchers: “Look at our child crawl! This is a big milestone. We can’t wait to see what he’ll do in the future.
CEOs: Give that baby a job!
AI stuff was so cool to learn about in school, but it was also really clear how much further we had to go. I’m kind of worried. We already had one period of AI overhype lead to a crash in research funding for decades. I really hope this bubble doesn’t do the same thing.
No. But not because AI isn’t gonna get better, but because hype is an ever moving goal post. Nobody gets excited about what’s already possible. Hype lives on vague promises of some amazing future that is right around the corner we promise. Then by the time it becomes apparent that a lot of the claims were nonsense and the actual developments were steadier and less dramatic, they’ve already moved onto new wild claims.
…Except you knew it was sarcasm. Hence why you made your comment in the first place. Unless you thought I was earnestly praising Google for making new ads?
Idk, because it’s a joke and I’m not really that invested in the specifics of the latest ad garbage a tech company is pushing? Ads expand to fill all available space. If it can eventually become a video ad, it will. Just give it time. These things never go in the other direction.
I already adblock. For a good reason. The ads only get worse. I’d be surprised if it didn’t turn into that after some time. It’s not an unreasonable assumption.
Oh yeah that too. It’s bad enough when YT does the thing where it pulls up suggested videos when you pause.
Ah yes, because what I want when I tell my computer to stop playing audio and video is for YouTube to play some audio and video of some random thing I didn’t ask for at like 3x the volume of the video I just paused. Thanks google. Such an innovative company!
I’ve tried looking into that but I couldn’t get it working. It didn’t add any subscriptions to my feed. Going to the site now I don’t even seem to be able to click on anything. I just tried disabling my ad blocker and now I can click on stuff, but none of it won’t load any videos. Any idea what’s up with it? I’d love to be able to switch off YT if I can.
Anyone got a recommendation for an open source alternative to discord? Basically just need voice, text, and screen sharing for a group of friends of like, 5-6 at most on at any time.
Even if I gotta pay to host a server, I’d rather do that than pay discord extortion money to avoid ads while still getting my data stolen.
For me, I just recognize that AI, or any technology isn’t the problem. It’s context it exists in, who gets to use it, and how.
We shouldn’t have to choose between automating boring or dangerous jobs and letting people live dignified lives free from the fear of poverty. We shouldn’t have to choose between having AIs that can generate all sorts of interesting media quickly (even if a lot of it isn’t that good yet, it can still serve its purposes, like say, quickly mocking up an idea to see if it’s worth going forward with it.) and ruining the livelihoods of the real artists that made it possible. We also shouldn’t have to deal wit the mountain of garbage that will be created and shoved in our faces by corporations that don’t understand what the limitations of the technology are.
These are all capitalism problems. We should probably do something about that instead of asking dumb questions like if AI can really make “art” or if it’s copyright infringement.
Mine is that in Star Trek, at least all the computers advanced enough to be used on a starship are actually sentient. At some point you have enough self aware hologram programs and rogue AIs that you should start to wonder if they’re actually anomalous.