shads

I was trying to solidify a joke about beating up people who are pro-AI, but just can't get the timing right.

But I do have a question for someone who can apparently see things from both sides. Do you think that people's perceptions and engagement would be different if "AI" was marketed as natural language processing coding / programming expert system.

I feel like some of the visceral pushback against "AI" would be reduced if we didn't all have to pretend there was actual intelligence in operation. Plus it would seem more like the successor to context aware code completion, rather than the successor to the individual sat at the keyboard.

I started writing out a detailed reply going into all the nuance, but I feel that it's a waste of time. I'm not sure if you are trolling as such, but you are being deliberately obtuse. I actually feel like you understand the points that people are making to you quite clearly. This is terrible legislation, it's a knee jerk reaction to a complex problem, with very few exceptions this is almost always a bad way of enacting policy.

The jab at my parenting because I already do the things you claim parents are too feeble to do without the government holding their hand is admittedly irritating, but I am going to choose to move past it.

This is the brainfart of a conservative grifter, it's satanic panic, it's the war on drugs, it's another populist policy being pitched at the unintelligent to draw their attention while the business and political interests behind it are picking their pocket. You choose not to see it that way then fine, but we both know it's true.

I am going to stop engaging with you now, feel free to have as many last says and derisive put downs as you want. I will not be reading them.

The parental controls I had? That worked just fine? That no longer work as the kids are force logged out of YouTube until they have turned 16. Or do you mean I should engage with Microsoft's virtual spyware? Sorry but we are an opt out family and I do all I can to block telemetry and surveillance as I think my kids deserve better than to be reduced to a profile on a server. What do you use to monitor your kids activity online?

Do you not see the betrayal of our elected officials bowing to minority interests and pursuing policies that are, at very best, counterproductive, and at worst a distraction, that experts are telling them will not have the intended outcomes, to give them an excuse to avoid legislating the harder things? A deciding factor for my preferences at the last election was to minimise the creeping advance of the surveillance state that Dutton so obviously desperately wanted to push through... We are getting it anyway.

We keep moving further and further away from privacy and security in the face of the spooky spectres of "terrorism" and "protecting the children" but once we have handed those things over they are almost impossibly hard to regain. When we look back in 10 years and realise we voluntarily handed the government and big business all the info they need to monitor our every movement online at all times and got nothing in return how do we stuff that Genie back in the bottle?

No, what it does is removes agency from parents and tells us that we aren't capable of raising our kids, the government will have to do it. My kids have been asking, for several years, to get Facebook accounts so they can use marketplace. I used that desire to have a frank discussion with them about how predatory Facebook is and how sinister it is that they have subsumed so many things that used to be independent and didn't require an account with them specifically so they can lock users in and Hoover up more data. I have told the kids that if they want Facebook accounts after they turn 18 they are welcome to open them then, but until that day I am not allowing them to give up their privacy. Do I seem disengaged as a parent?

Not to mention it is counter productive in a number of ways. I have lost the ability to monitor my kids YouTube usage, the kids are just going to move to alternate platforms, and I am amongst the cohort of sensible Australians who will refuse to use social media before I provide some dodgy AI company my ID, it's going to be a lot harder to convince my kids to do the same once all their friends and peers start ratcheting up the conformity pressure after they turn 16. This whole thing isn't misguided, it's a betrayal of the majority of Australians who are too dumb to realise what they are giving away to access these services.

My father bought his house in the 80s for 1.5x his annual pretax wage. Last time he had his house valued it is worth somewhere north of 15x his annual pretax wage, same job. He is constantly asking when I will be buying my own house. I keep explaining to him, I am in my early 40s and got stuck in the rent trap fairly early, I am not in a position to take on a 30 year mortgage at this point, I will likely never own my own home. Median house price in my area is just under 9.5x my annual pre-tax income, and I don't see how I could support my kids and actually live my life while paying down a mortgage compared to the deal I got on my rental house through sheer dumb luck.

Perhaps if some thought and care had been put into this ridiculous land grab by our government this kind of outcome could have been avoided.

I'm not giving Reddit a single bit of benefit of the doubt here, but by pushing back against this they may be helping us instead of pissing on us for a change.

Instead of using political capital to shove age verification down our throats, imagine if they used that same capital to restrict gambling advertising? Or implement strong data protection and privacy legislation? Or strong laws against IP theft by AI companies? The government could have pursued all sorts of positive policies to materially improve life for us, what we got instead was the conjunction of the masturbatory fantasies of the intelligence community (who have never enjoyed us having any privacy) and knee jerk reactionary conservatives who know best how to raise kids because of "muh feels".

This half baked, vague, wishy washy law has made my kids materially less safe online, all so the government can soft sell the idea that you should have to provide ID for every interaction online.

Wow I wish the media would remember that a strong independent media that is willing to hold the government to account actually makes for a stronger democracy.

Somehow Jonathon Haidt is being discussed as the ultimate authority on this topic because he wrote a book that some pollies read. Not seeing Candice Odgers being brought up, just to grab a name at random. Her take seems a bit more nuanced but we can't do nuance these days.

And meanwhile the truly catastrophic damage is already being done, how many young people handed over their biometric data today? Yes there is a lot of noise in that data, but the politicians are categorically stating that the systems will improve over time, if the scope of data collection is solely for the purpose of performing verification and no data is being retained... How exactly are these systems expecting to improve over time... And the mask is off, "Won't somebody think of the kids?!?!" Is actually, "Won't somebody provide categorised biometric data to the scumbag AI companies?".

Citizens need to start demanding that the eSafety Commissioner investigate these AI companies for misappropriation of data starting today, if the demands are concerted and consistent enough maybe we can keep the government tied up investigating these companies and help them avoid shooting any more toes off in the process.

I genuinely don't think I have anything to add to that. It's all just so petty and tawdry.

On a related note I think it's worth mentioning that this is all accelerated by a 24 hour news cycle and the amount of right-wingers who insist on dragging American culture wars and politics over to Australia, I'm guessing because our own politics aren't dramatic enough for them, which then platforms the worst sort of people.

Maybe that's reaping what we sewed considering we exported Rupert. Now we are importing hate & radicalism on-top of our own domestic stock.

I want to preface this by saying that I don't believe anything could serve as recompense for what those women and girls went through.

But it's a bit telling that they had been caught, tried, found guilty and were actively serving their sentences, yet the mob (or at least elements of it) still clung to that pretence as a way of being able to attack and traumatize an entire community.

I sincerely doubt that this was the first flirtation with racism for many of these people. Violent race based attacks maybe, but not racism on the extreme end of the spectrum.

Slightly off topic anecdote:

I talked with a refugee from sub Saharan Africa once, he was pretty cooked and not super lucid. Talking to a friend later she revealed that she had dealt with him before doing community outreach.

She explained that his parents had got him out of Africa ahead of a little ethnic cleansing and brought him to Australia as a young child. He had then spent the next decade plus dealing with racism, ranging from casual to overt and targeted. Started on drugs at 13 and looked like he was in his late 30s before he turned 20.

I'm certain he was no angel, but I feel like he was forced down a pathway in life by the environment he lived in through no choice of his own. How different could his life have turned out if he had landed in the right community?

I despair that we are really terrible at just living with people from different places and cultures, especially when they make up a minority in our communities.

My MP started off giving this topic a simple once over and agreed with it. Then listened to a bunch of constituents, experts and just the rhetoric from other politicians. He has since changed his stance on it. Also he happens to be an Independent.

Strange how much of the inequity in our current system is related to people who are motivated to vote along party lines instead of listening to the people who put them in their position isn't it?

Not a Sydney-sider or from NSW, was the racial tension that was stoked up to the riots really caused or significantly contributed to by that horrible series of rapes?

For the outside I get the feeling it's a brick in the wall kind of thing. Along with lots of racism, culture clash, opportunistic politicians and grifter shock jocks.

But I understand it's hard to gauge the vibe of a culture from a half a continent away. Even more so doing it 20 years later.