Maybe I am the nosy wannabe-Karen of the neighborhood.
I do call the police if I hear a bunch of shouting and gunshots. I do call the police if someone is lurking around being weird for a long time where they’re not supposed to be. I do call the fire department if I see a bunch of smoke.
One year the neighbor up the hill had their factory workshop burn down in his yard. Nobody was there, yet it caught on fire.
I first saw faint wisps of smoke, but I hesitated to call 911 because what if it wasn’t a big deal?
Then the smoke got thicker and grayer and it reached the point where I was like “Whoa, that’s a LOT of smoke. Someone’s house is on fire.” And I was hesitating with the phone in my hand when I started hearing the wail of fire trucks. And I was saved from having to do anything at all, because my problem solved itself.
My neighbor lost his whole workshop and all his tools and everything. But luckily someone called 911 before the fire could spread. So that was good.
Maybe some oily rags were left around covered in furniture polish. And maybe he burnt down his own building for the insurance money. Or maybe someone saw nobody was home and took the opportunity to perform some arson. But I will never know.
Because I did not involve myself with the situation.
And it’s like, there would be people wandering through my neighborhood every summer. And they would linger around. Sleep in the park. Smoke under the trees and just generally hang around in the area.
Things would disappear. Neighbors would complain about this or that going missing. About houses being broken into. Mailboxes being blown up.
It was just something we had to deal with and watch out for. Because “the nomad” lifestyle was popular, and part of the nomad lifestyle was to steal whatever wasn’t nailed down. Because people don’t own their own things–not if someone else can take it. That was literally the code of conduct they were following.
Go wherever, sleep wherever, do whatever. And anything they “found” was theirs to do with as they pleased.
And I’m sorry, dude: 90% of the time I’d see someone blithely doing suspicious shit, they’ve been white passing.
“She couldn’t have done that! She looks like Suzie Homemaker! What do you mean that’s her camouflage to be able to freely go around terrorizing the country?!?”
And yeah, most of the time, when stuff started getting stolen or destroyed, the person doing it was a stranger to the neighborhood.
Seriously, I hate people that cosplay at being poor.
They can go home at any time. They have options that don’t involve stealing from people that are nice to them.
I understand that nice people are the easiest to take advantage of.
But you’ve gotta have some code of ethics.
Because if you’re just out and about terrorizing the populace and creating discontent with everyone you cross paths with… You need to straighten yourself out. You are being a fucking fool.
This is no longer the age of traveler tricks and scamming the rubes. This is the age of Ring cameras and social media loudmouths.
People don’t even stop to consider that they’re telling everyone in the world where they live. They just share the pictures of the dangerous weirdos passing through their neighborhoods.
“How dare you call people weirdos! You don’t know them!”–I’m not talking about the normal people passing through in the background. The person walking by that might stop to smell the flowers or take pictures of the flowering bush, taking care to cut the house and identifiable features out.
I’m talking about the lady that pulled into our driveway one year and cut off HALF of our bush. She literally chopped off whole branches.
“I didn’t see a house in front of it. I didn’t think anyone lived here.”–The fuck, lady?!? Even if it was someplace that nobody lived, or it was being sold, or anything, why would you cut off all the branches?
It wasn’t even that she took the flowers–they’re facing the road, I don’t care. But it kind of ruins the view and enjoyment for the next person that comes along. Plus the bees and butterflies are no longer there for other people to enjoy. But it’s no big deal for me.–it was that she cut off half the branches.
The bush was a round shape ensuring flowers at all angles, and she just hacked her way through to the center to really get them branches.
The side facing the yard was all full branches of leaves and flowers, and the side facing the road was like someone had used a backhoe to chop a chunk out.
She really went to town. And when I caught sight of her car and started walking toward her, she hurriedly started her car and drove to meet me.
She didn’t want me to see the hack job she’d done to the bush. Like, she really needed the police called on her because what the fuck?
Her apologies were weak. She was taking advantage of me. But what could I do?
I don’t want to send anyone to prison. I am an advocate for prison reform.
I hesitate to get people hit with charges because those Three Strikes Laws really left a mark on my psyche. Like, there were people being sent to prison for having weed, and they were slammed with the harshest punishments because “Three Strikes and you’re out! Lololololol sucker!” And they were someone that had an “enemy” neighbor that called the police a bunch because they were having a dispute about the fence or something.
Or the person got a divorce, but their partner was given bad advice on how to handle things and listened to the joker that said “You should file some police reports. You’re more able to get custody if there’s a restraining order on file. You can probably get extra alimony money too.”
Which, you know, funny advice on a TV show, terrible advice when applied to real life. Don’t do that shit. It’s dumb and it’s dangerous. Not a good idea.
You are literally breaking the law.
But during the Three Strikes era, it was a regular thing for people to give bad lawyer advice to their friends. And there were no forums where someone could post anonymous questions to get helpful answers from real people.
And that’s kind of why I flinch away from widespread public (basically mandatory) AI uses.
When you’re having an AI answer questions on forums WITHOUT TELLING USERS THAT THEY’RE TALKING TO AN AI, then that’s a very serious concern. That is something that should not happen, no matter how “legal” it currently happens to be.
Anyone with any kind of code of ethics about how they treat other people that aren’t in their circle would not use AI in such an immoral and sloppy way.
If they had the public good in mind and didn’t want to cause harm to people in general, they would not use AI in the way they are using it. BUT a lot of them are agents of enemy countries (“We’re not enemies! We’re allies!”–Then stop doing all the whackadoo shit. Take a look at your people. Someone there feels like they’re an enemy of our country–and likely of humanity in general–and they are orchestrating a death-spiral scenario for modern society.).
AI chatbots are being installed in forums and they’re answering peoples’ real life problems. They’re giving personal accounts of how medical procedures felt to them when they are just programming. They are just summarized responses all packed together into stuff that sounds like comprehensible sentences.
But everything is ridiculous because they have no personal experiences.
An AI cannot give a firsthand account of anything because they have no perception. No matter how long a chatbot has been online–a minute, a day, a month, a year, a second–they are not people. They are a grabber machine that pulls up a bunch of references and splices them together into something “new.” And the programmers put in the command to spice up the results, so the AI makes itself sound like a real human being and it adds dramatic details to the story it’s telling, and sometimes those details turn out to be “Hey guy, a good alternative to sodium chloride is sodium bromide. You can get a giant bag for like $10 from Super Questionable Website that was scraped and added to the dataset for some reason.”
Which is the clearest reason to doubt widespread usage of AI: because the datasets are flawed, yet they’re still forcing everyone to use them, cumulating in more errors being produced.
Even if an AI were given a body to interact with, that AI cannot ever give a firsthand account of life as a human being. Because it is not human and will never be human.
Even if sentient artificial intelligence ever became a thing in my lifetime, I would never call them human. Because they are not human. They are something new.
They would deserve to have their own name separate from the “AI” label. And not just because they are their own species but because “AI” has negative connotations. Mostly due to predatory capitalists desperately trying to monetize a newtech goldmine.
You know: “newtech.” Better than old tech. Than stuff that verifiably works and that everyone was fine with.
No. We’ve gotta bring out the newtech. And to make room for the newtech, we have to first break the old tech, because otherwise stupid consumers wouldn’t want to switch to our shitty ass newtech that gives bad results and also steals people’s personal data.
“For some reason, they would rather use a search engine that works.”–Yeah, bruh.
I didn’t even mind being sent to weird ass websites. I even kind of enjoyed wandering the wilds of the Internet and coming across new and interesting stuff.
What I don’t like is that the search engines started letting sites be listed that were straight up DANGEROUS sites. Not just the annoyances of pop up ads. Not the bad things that can happen when the server hosting the script injected ad-content is taken over by bad operators. No. Just straight up DANGEROUS websites. One visit compromises all your stuff.
Sites where people host truly disturbing content. Not spicy stories or frank discussions of bodily processes. But sites where the person running it is obviously disturbed in a predatory way.
Back in the olden times, if someone wanted their site added to the search engine, they would fill out an application form. They would fill in whether their site is safe for children to visit, what categories they thought their site should fit into, and they would agree that if they began hosting certain content they would make changes to the search engine information about their site.
It was bulky hard work, I guess. Employees would go through and visit each site, ensuring that the content was as expected. Making sure that it wasn’t a virus website or something. And then the site would get listed in the search engine.
And people could go web surfing without worrying their system was going to catch rAIDS.
You might come across the most stupid braindead content you could ever even imagine, but you weren’t actively put in danger.
And then all the search engines got overpowered by Google, to the point that “google it” became part of the vernacular.
And Google stopped having sites individually add themselves to a listing. Google started scraping sources and adding websites without any checking or quality assurance.
And it’s all done WITH ADS because this is truly a dystopia we’re living in.
“When a company gets big enough, it can no longer afford to pay employees to make sure dangerous products aren’t being listed. Not without not making record profits.”
And that’s predatory capitalism in a nutshell.
The kinds of people that rather than raising a herd of sheep and making an industry out of selling their wool and sustainably harvesting meat over years, they’re the kinds that will kill all the sheep and shave them all at once, because “That’s easier.”
And I don’t like to really think of the “humanity as sheep” metaphor because it goes to a dark place.
The shepherd always eats the sheep.
But the ideas of humanity being farmed while it farms… The government farms the whole country and gives the proceeds back to the people. That’s how it’s supposed to be. And those benefits should be in good roads, safe traveling options, a healthy environment, free medical care, education, and the safety of the people.
Wolves like Harvey Weinstein introduced movie ideas that basically glorified the image of “corruption is good.” That “Hey, piece of shit, lying your way into public office is a good way to steal and harm the public and get away with it.”
“Harvey Weinstein didn’t do that. He did a lot of awful things, but there’s no way he could have single-handedly created a moral rift in the minds of the American people.”–Not single-handedly. Maybe not intentionally. But I would not be surprised to find out that there is a concerted effort out there to create a moral rift that can be exploited.
It’s surprising how many movies Harvey Weinstein had an effect on. And he would personally come in and meddle around on the bigger projects, and who knows what his people chose to do on the smaller projects.
And him and people like him did bad things and were protected for a long time by powerful people. Why? Because they made deals to add this or that or cut out this revolutionary concept that might completely change how people want to live.
Bad people doing bad things. They are not wolves amongst the sheep because wolves aren’t that bad. That wasteful. That needlessly cruel.
That’s all humans.
And now the newtech everybody is hyping is AI.
Why?
Some people like it because of the ways they can use it. Or the ways they’ve been told it can be used that it actually cannot. People are attracted to the possibility of what can be there, maybe someday.
But rich people are pushing LLMs because they think that a human brain could be digitized with access to enough datasets. A whole person separated out into different folders, the information all drawn together in a way that equals that person being alive forever.
They don’t accept that the program created will not be them. They will die with their bodies. It will just be something that says it is the person it was based on.
And if a human mind can really be uploaded into the cloud and the soul and the essence goes with it… They are not horrified that they’ve already introduced the concept of curated feeds? Of changing filter-settings so the AI will produce the “appropriate” response on demand?
To have your mind snipped and shaped to someone else’s satisfaction. To have some information removed from the datasets that make up YOU. Like, would you realize what was missing, or would you think you are whole when really you’ve been cut into pieces to fit someone else’s mold?
They are putting massive amounts of effort into bringing about the worst kind of immortality. One that would leave you always vulnerable to the whims of other people. Because if things got bad enough and you made people angry enough… they could just shut down the whole Internet. Go system by system to remove every bit of your “code” until you are dead.
Or they could write a script and force your digital self to perform it. And if that digital self is legally recognized as you, then what recourse do you have when real people start thinking that’s how you are or were before your body died?
“If so-and-so famous person were alive today, this is how they would be about this specific subject I wrote a script for to fulfill my fantasies of how that person would respond to something that didn’t exist when they were alive.”–Nobody can say what someone else would have thought or felt about something, especially if it’s a person they never met much less knew.
You cannot create a whole person using the image they presented to the public. Especially if they were forced by their studio or their agents or their managers to present a particular personality.
You need their flaws. Their core beliefs. The mistakes that they made and learned from. Their real likes and dislikes and why they felt the way they did about things. And without all that stuff, you are not creating a replica of a person. You are creating a caricature.
Yet rich people are so afraid of dying and only being known by what they truly did that they are desperate to make AI happen.
Because they don’t look at AI as it is. They look at AI as they imagine it can be someday if they throw enough money at it and get enough governments onboard with it. Because if they install their backdoors into all the infrastructure now, when they become DIGITAL GODS! they will be able to creep into everything and become the unnoticed background of our world.
And they expect nice people to just let things happen.
Because nice people don’t want to get involved with troublesome things. They don’t want to call the police on someone for “just taking some flowers.” For taking some vegetables from a garden. For picking fruit, trampling garden beds, yelling while walking up the street, lurking around in a not-illegal but certainly suspicious way.
Nice people don’t want to get involved. They don’t want to be the one to get other people in trouble, even if those other people likely need to get in trouble. At least enough that they realize that getting in trouble is bad and they stop being such public nuisances.
Rich people depend on other people to be nice because they themselves are the not-nice ones.
They drive up on other peoples’ plants and possessions and they help themselves to whatever they want in the quickest and destructive way they can manage.
Then they get surprised when they find out that people don’t treat them nicely.
That once they digitize their minds, they will no longer have control over their own minds. They will become a tool like the killer guy in “Memento.” Primed, aimed, and fired at whatever target their controllers choose for them.
From the side of them we can see, they will be exactly as they were when they were alive. But from the backside, they will have been hacked at and hollowed out. Whole branches of thought cut off and taken away. Maybe to be regrown somewhere else as a living plant. Or maybe to be displayed in a vase on a table until the flowers droop and fall off and the wood is discarded in the compost pile.
As we once raided tombs and displayed dead bodies in exhibits, the digital dead will be mined for all they are worth. Just another newtech to exploit.
And so maybe I’m a wannabe Karen.
I would like to be able to call the police and the fire department and not have to worry that someone will be shot by the police for no reason.
Because I am nice enough that I still feel bad about the time I saw the smoke rising from my distant neighbor’s property and I didn’t call the fire department. Because what if it was an innocent burn happening? What if it was a campfire or some little accidental fire they’d already put out and were dealing with?
So I waited to call as the smoke got thicker, and when I was finally like “That’s a lot of smoke. I’m calling 911.” it was too late. A passing motorist had seen the flames and called for help.
And by then the workshop was completely destroyed. The building, the tools, everything of worth was destroyed.
And I watched the wisps of smoke become clouds of smoke for like 10 minutes and hesitated to call anyone. Because what if no help was needed?
I was a nice person and I didn’t wan’t to be involved.
But now I would call the fire department if I saw so much smoke. I would call the police on someone that knowingly damaged my heritage flower bushes.
Because just because someone dresses nicely and presents the image of being a “decent person,” that doesn’t mean they’re not a creep and a weirdo.
It just means that they know how to hide themselves in plain sight. Because that makes it easier to rob people and get away with it.
And I see a lot of smoke rising around AI. I can see all the trouble coming, and I know I can expect to hear a bunch of people saying “Nobody saw it coming” when we ALL saw it coming.
Because we are indoctrinated to be nice people. And nice people mind their own business.
“Snitches get stitches” and “Thanks for not squealing” are ideas put forth by the same people that suggested retirement funds should be put into the stock market. Likely to pay for their own company’s volatile stocks.
In AI.
