No, this class of failure-mode has been present since the very beginning.

Being "surprised" is the opposite of an excuse, it is evidence of negligence, like a chemical-transport company claiming "surprise" that one that one of the chemicals in their tanks was very flammable.

> is not a failure of security or configuration: it's data being gathered.

Would that fly in another context?

"This isn't a failure of me to leash/fence my new dog, when it bit your child's face off it was an important step in data gathering! If anything, I need to unleash him more so that we get more data so that I can eventually train him not to bite faces when my back is turned."

> So go ahead, enumerate all of the ways in which you think that you can lock down these systems, but do realize that nobody has actually solved this problem adequately yet.

"Go ahead, tell me all the ways I can train my dog, but realize that nobody's figured him out yet... so it's totally it's not my fault if I let him loose and he bites off more childrens' faces."

I mean, merge one of these with a modern anti-consumer "Smart TV", and we're uncomfortably close to 1984's telescreen.

Part of woe is that once you've reviewed, validated, and comprehended a piece... Later gets casually mangled by some other LLM-generated urgent change.

Aside, I think you might find this comic rhetorically-useful for when someone says "but they owe their existence to us anyway."

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/existence

Are you implying that the bias is OK in both cases, or that is is bad in both cases?

(e.g. ride-share / "gig-work" networks, cryptocurrencies, off-leash stochastic AI.)

We've learned a lot of ways to predict, mitigate, and recover from human errors, and the equivalent ecosystem may not exist for nonhuman ones.

I feel that's like saying there's "nuance" when the police choose to pull someone over because--unlike the other car--they didn't have a "I Donated To Cops" license plate.

Yes, it's technically a difference, but if it matters then the police are abusing their power to play favorites.

* Asbestos: AI models making business-decisions which cause a ton of unrecognized damage, which cannot be healed, and replacing them with reliable processes involves expensive re-architecting.

* Radium Toothpaste: AI assistants that end up dealing psychological damage, especially if they are pitched as your friend or confidante.

* Chemical spills and plant accidents: Oops, our server-banks were manufacturing our latest desperate attempt to Create Digital God and in the process we accidentally destroyed/crippled/compromises some people's sites and databases because we weren't really paying attention to what was going on.

> The fact that a theory-free AI might demand far more cash to accomplish a task (even a "solved" one like playing chess) than an expert [helping with a symbolic AI] would charge is beside the point. Billionaires have money, they don't have expertise. Theory-free inference is a bid to substitute one for the other: the beauty and terror of being able to manipulate the world without studying or understanding it is that it can be done with money alone. No experts needed.

> In a world in thrall to financial power, expertise is the only substantial form of power that can reliably contest the power of wealth. [...] This is why AI bosses are so violently allergic to the idea of hybridizing [machine learning] AI with symbolic systems that operate on models of the world.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/06/nonfungible/

Just imagine the music-video with different politicians' faces.

Yeah, Jeff Bezos gives it some lip-service, but that's to promote Blue Origin as a company to launch rockets. Somebody will probably launch a symbolic little temporary thing to claim the prestige of "first datacenter in space".

But beyond that? Nobody's planning exaflops of compute in orbit, if they're sinking deep investment in satellites at all, it'll be for their classical role of relaying (or collecting) data.

1. "Don't put your Radioactive Asbestos Rocket facility in the middle of downtown."

2. "Don't create a vengeful god."

Currently it feels like one is being used to wave-away the other: "You have to allow us to put our Radioactive Asbestos Rocket in the middle of downtown, or else someone else might create the god first--and do it wrong!"

It was never a serious proposal, it's just some zillionaire's daydream about having their own Neuromancer-style space-station, a place where their word is law and their dynasty assured by a pet superintelligence.

The only "data-center in space" we're likely to see will be tiny low-power satellites, offering themselves as extraterritorial hosting (i.e. actual data, versus processing) for stuff like an oligarch's ill-gotten crypto-currency.

"Shopping isn't politics" [0], which I would summarize as "Consumption choices are vastly inferior to actual politics, never pursue the first at the expense of the second."

[0] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-05-21...

That seems a little unfair, given that we're seeing an essay to sell a much lengthier book. Some brevity is probably the author being strategic rather than un-self-aware.

Also, several of the claims do contain links for more information, such as simplification in music lyrics [0], melodies [1], and sentence-length in books [2].

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55742-x

[1] https://www.seresearch.qmul.ac.uk/chcc/news/4763/study-finds...

[2] https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/09/04/is-the-decline-...

So I went and checked, and it really is a ~90-minute thing, but I wonder if the excessive-exposition could partly be explained by habits (or cancelled plans) involving multi-part TV shows, where it's less-weird to remind viewers of details that might be--in their own timeline--a week in the past.

> According to actor Matt Damon, filmmakers are told: “It wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue, because people are on their phones while they’re watching.”

OK, well, that's just depressing... or at least, the idea that someone is being distracted playing on their phone while watching the movie on a larger screen is depressing.

In contrast, if it means people are watching on their phones while riding the bus or whatever, and distracted by external events... That's not so bad, because it's a story of where people watch rather than their (in)ability to focus.

For example, pump-and-dumping .si domain names or some other asset which connects to the phrase/acronym.