All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:
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Tech bosses don't lie in wait for the perfect moment to claw away all the value from their employees, users, business customers, and suppliers - they're always trying to get that value. It's only when they become too big to care that they succeed. That's the definition of being too big to care.
Inside: "Humans in the loop" must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speedInside: "Humans in the loop" must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed; and more!; and more!
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If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely - not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:
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People who use AI to generate illustrations of their D&D characters engaged in epic adventures from their previous gaming session don't care about the odd extra finger. If the chatbot powering a tourist's automatic text-to-translation-to-speech phone tool gets a few words wrong, it's still much better than the alternative of speaking slowly and loudly in your own language while making emphatic hand-gestures.
There are lots of these applications, and many of the people who benefit from them would doubtless pay something for them. The problem - from an AI company's perspective - is that these aren't just low-stakes, they're also low-value. Their users would pay something for them, but not very much.
I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in THIS SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!
Anyone who says "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product" has been suckered in by Big Tech, whose cargo-cult version of markets and the discipline they impose on companies.
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It's not by giving them money. Paying for a service does not make a company fear you, and anyone who thinks they can buy a platform's loyalty by paying for a service is a simp. A corporation is an immortal, transhuman colony organism that uses us as inconvenient gut-flora: no matter how much you love it, it will never love you back. It can't experience love - only fear.
@pluralistic Lock-in also explains why employers treat employees like trash and underpay them. They are taking advantage of the fact that you need a job, not just to have nice things, but to survive. They don't need you as bad, because they can get someone else to replace you, and this power imbalance is where the rot comes from.
This is one of the biggest reasons to support a UBI. If your basic survival needs aren't dependent on employment, only your ability to have nice things, then the power balance is restored and employers can't get away with abusive practices.
@TonyJWells@pluralistic
Here's a slight variation of that theme: a bilingual sign for a hospital, left side has the Finnish descriptions, the right side has "the same in Swedish" in Swedish.
@pluralistic why do you call that phone โdecaingโ? It seems to be in good working condition to me - in contrast to the column to which it is mounted.
Which is surprising to me as telefoninos (=cell fones) are as common in Italy as they are in the US. I wonder how much those coin or card operated ones might be in use.
From his Mastodon, it looks like OP (Cory Doctorow if itโs not showing in whatever app youโre using) is doing talks in Serbia at the same event as Bruce Sterling, so itโs as likely that he wrote the ALT text for the image himself.
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Today in "Capitalists Hate Capitalism" news: The Appeal has published the first-ever survey of national prison commissary prices, revealing just how badly the prison profiteer system gouges American's all-time, world-record-beating prison population:
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Like every aspect of the prison contracting system, prison commissaries - the stores where prisoners are able to buy food, sundries, toiletries and other items - are dominated by private equity funds that have bought out all the smaller players. Private equity deals always involve gigantic amounts of debt (typically, the first thing PE companies do after acquiring a company is to borrow heavily against it and then pay themselves a hefty dividend).