This suggests that Google aggregates derived information based on how a user uses Google (i.e. VPN info). The fact that derived info was also potentially passed along is particularly upsetting to me.

Aside from the fact that I don't think companies should be able to collect user data at all (if you disagree, I think there's a good chance you're at least a little bit fascist), this amounts to Google providing free surveillance services to the government.

If you squint, it's minority-report-esque: eventually Google will tell the govt who it thinks is likely to commit crimes based on how they interact with its AIs. Almost certainly coming to a society near you soon.

Rich people want their own methods of highly convenient transportation; they don't want to share with everyone else. They don't pay taxes. Public infra gets worse and the average person taking public infra is poorer. Over time your city has people who don't have houses or jobs, or who do drugs. Inevitably they are relegated to public spaces since they own nothing. The rich people avoid interactions with the poorer members by building gated communities and private infrastructure--rich techies now have concierge physicians and monopolize high quality teaching at their absurdly expensive private schools. Each decision is rational. This is the social rot that is wrought by an oligarchic, and generally value-extracting rentier class.

Many problems today stem from wealth inequality.

> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.

Scam Altman: "ads lead to positive human impact"

Non-fascist: "Sir, ads have destroyed google's commitment to index and make useful the world's knowledge"

Scam Altman:

The fact that it’s hard to turn this into a formula is exactly why robot drivers are bad.

Oh also, that video says "kid ran out from a double parked suv". Can you imagine being dumb enough to drive over the speed limit around a double parked SUV in a school zone?

If you drive a car, you have a responsibility to do it safely. The fact that I am usually better than the bottom 50% of drivers, or that I am better than a drunk driver does not mean that when I hit someone it's less bad. A car is a giant weapon. If you drive the weapon, you need to do it safely. Most people these days are incredibly inconsiderate - probably because there's little economic value in being considerate. The fact that lots of drivers suck doesn't mean that waymo gets a pass.

Waymos have definitely become more aggressive as they've been successful. They drive the speed limit down my local street. I see them and I think wtf that's too fast. It's one thing when there are no cars around. But if you've got cars or people around, the appropriate speed changes. Let's audit waymo. They certainly have an aggressiveness setting. Let's see the data on how it's changing. Let's see how safety buffers have decreased as they've changed the aggressiveness setting.

The real solution? Get rid of cars. Self-driving individually owned vehicles were always the wrong solution. Public transit and shared infra is always the right choice.

(re the decline of scientific integrity / signal-to-noise ratio in science)

Estimate 4k for one-way biz ticket and 500 for economy, then that's about 240k from the front and 145k from the back. Actually, I'd expect them to optimize based on space, so if 40% of the plane is biz, then 40% of revenue should come from biz. Perhaps the most profitable routes with this config are 60% revenue from biz; other routes might be more like 2.5k-3k one-way biz.

It is furthermore hard to believe that the engineers are working for the users, given that google’s primary activities today are broad enshittification of their products.

Because of these two things I did not make it past point 4.

But let me entertain it for a moment: prior to knowing, e.g., that plastics or CO2 are bad for the environment, how should one know that they are bad for the environment. Fred, the first person to realize this would run around saying "hey guys, this is bad".

And here is where I think it gets interesting: the folks making all the $ producing the CO2 and plastics are highly motivated to say "sorry Fred, your science is wrong". So when it finally turns out that Fred was right, were the plastics/CO2 companies morally wrong in hindsight?

You are arguing that morality is entirely socially determined. This may be partially true, but IMO, only economically. If I must choose between hurting someone else and dying, I do not think there is a categorically moral choice there. (Though Mengzi/ Mencius would say that you should prefer death -- see fish and the bear's paw in 告子上). So, to the extent that your life or life-preserving business (i.e. source of food/housing) demands hurting others (producing plastics, CO2), then perhaps it is moral to do so. But to the extent that your desire for fancy cars and first class plane tickets demands producing CO2...well (ibid.).

The issue is that the people who benefit economically are highly incentivized to object to any new moral reckoning (i.e. tracking people is bad; privacy is good; selling drugs is bad; building casinos is bad). To the extent that we care about morality (and we seem to), those folks benefitting from these actions can effectively lobby against moral change with propaganda. And this is, in fact, exactly what happens politically. Politics is, after all, an attempt to produce a kind of morality. It may depend on whom you follow, but my view would be that politics should be an approach to utilitarian management of resources, in service of the people. But others might say we need to be concerned for the well-being of animals. And still others, would say that we must be concerned with the well-being of capital, or even AIs! In any case, large corporations effectively lobby against any moral reckoning against their activities and thus avoid regulation.

The problem with your "socially determined morality" (though admittedly, I increasingly struggle to see a practical way around this) is that, though in some ways true (since society is economics and therefore impacts one's capacity to live) is that you end up in a world in which everyone can exploit everyone else maximally. There is no inherent truth in what the crowd believes (though again, crowd beliefs do affect short-term and even intermediate-term economics, especially in a hyper-connected world). The fact that most white people in the 1700s believed that it was not wrong to enslave black people does not make that right. The fact that many people believed tulips were worth millions of dollars does not make it true in the long run.

Are we running up against truth vs practicality? I think so. It may be impractical to enforce morality, but that doesn't make Google moral.

Overall, your arguments are compatible with a kind of nihilism: there is no universal morality; I can adopt whatever morality is most suitable to my ends.

I make one final point: how should slavery and plastics be handled? It takes a truly unfeeling sort of human to enslave another human being. It is hard to imagine that none of these people felt that something was wrong. Though google is not enslaving people nor are its actions tantamount to Nazism, there is plenty of recent writing about the rise of technofascism. The EAs would certainly sacrifice the "few" of today's people for the nebulous "many" of the future over which they will rule. But they have constructed a narrative in which the future's many need protection. There are moral philosophies (e.g. utilitarianism) that would justify this. And this is partially because we have insufficient knowledge of the future, and also because the technologies of today make highly variable the possible futures of tomorrow.

I propose instead that---especially in this era of extreme individual power (i.e. the capacity to be "loud" -- see below)---a different kind of morality is useful: the wielding of power is bad. As your power grows, so to does the responsibility to consider its impact on others and to more aggressively judge every action one takes under the Veil of Ignorance. Any time we affect the lives of others around us, we are at greater risk of violating this morality. See eg., Tools for Conviviality or Silence is a Commons (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44609969). Google and the tech companies are being extremely loud, and you'd have to be an idiot to see that it's not harmful. If your mental contortions allow you to say "harm is moral because the majority don't object," well, that looks like nihilism and certainly doesn't get us anywhere "good". But my "good" cannot be measured, and your good is GDP, so I suppose I will lose.

You can store my data for me, but only encrypted, and it can be decrypted only in a sandbox. And the output of the sandbox can be sent only back to me, the user. Decrypting the personal data for any other use is illegal. If an audit shows a failure here, the company loses 1% of revenue the first time, then 2%, then 4, etc.

And companies must offer to let you store all of your own data on your own cloud machine. You just have to open a port to them with some minimum guarantees of uptime, etc. They can read/write a subset of data. The schema must be open to the user.

Any systems that have been developed from personal user data (i.e. recommendation engines, trained models) must be destroyed. Same applies: if you're caught using a system that was trained in the past on aggregated data across multiple users, you face the same percentage fines.

The only folks who maybe get a pass are public healthcare companies for medical studies.

Fixed.

(But yeah it'll never happen because most of the techies are eager to screw over everyone else for their own gain. And they'll of course tell you it's to make the services better for you.)