I bought an oled phone for 200€ a few years back. What I’d really want is that every smartphone sold in the EU is open, with open drivers and OS with root access if you want to. And some investments by the EU to support open smartphone OS.
What a shithole civilization.
I couldn’t remember it either. I described it to deepseek in order to find it. Ironically it mistakenly thought
the short story you’re thinking of is almost certainly “Nanny” by Cory Doctorow. It’s part of his collection Radicalized (published in 2019)".
If you find it, let me know. I think I might have been conned by deepseek.
Both works critique technology-driven capitalism, but Doctorow’s focus is distinct:
Radicalized targets corporate control via IoT devices, insurance cruelty, and policing 612.
Manna explores algorithmic worker management leading to dystopian/utopian outcomes.
I incorrectly merged these narratives due to overlapping themes of technological oppression. My apologies for the oversight.
They would generate strategies that maximize their objective function based on the training data. Obviously garbage in garbage out, but my point is they would not be prone to certain irrationalities like humans.
It might be possible to regulate how AI CEOs are optimized and trained though. You can tell a human CEO a thousand times “we only have one earth, if you all externalize your cost we will all die and have zero profits” but an AI might actually get it. AI might also be connected to a kind of crowdsourced democratic economic global forum, where people can discuss, complain and make suggestions.
AI also has a much higher bandwidth and might catch institutional problems much easier because it doesn’t have to rely on summaries of subordinates to understand how things are going.
More broadly, it might be theoretically impossible for humans to act according to our shared values - no matter what rules, institutions, education or culture we create. Like “theoretically impossible, the system always degenerates” because individual humans will always follow their own greed and lust for power while pretending to comply, and then using that power to slowly pervert the system and it’s rules. I believe that is the root of our current malaise. But even non-sentient AI might be able to help us just enough to make it work. It’s much more likely that those in power will use it for the opposite, but that shouldn’t stop us from thinking about if it can be used for good.
People are a resource that keeps regenerating after all.
That’s what the AI would call “sustainable business practices”?
I’ve been wondering why they don’t blow up more regularly. I imagine a few long range sniper shots would make them explode easily. They should be relatively easy to hit, seeing how big they are.
I suspect an AI CEO would be more rational and science driven, instead of believing in some ideology that says workers have to feel desperate to be most productive or something. It’s possible they’d look at science and then raise the minimum vacation time so people are more productive and generate more profit.
Huh I read a dystopian short story about AI micro-managing workers, constantly telling them what to do next to optimize productivity. It ends with near “perfect” dystopian wealth concentration. While in another part of the world they used AI to create a utopia.
Oh it was called Manna by Marshall Brain
The gradual takeover of jobs by AI (starting with fast food), The warehousing of the unemployed in state-controlled facilities, A techno-utopian alternative (Australia) where AI liberates rather than enslaves.
Once we have proper self driving cars none of these recent “innovations” like that or the speed limiting would matter.
Ideally self driving cars would also be without a steering wheel and just be half width with a single seat or two seats facing each other to reduce energy requirements. You could just develop this with a manhattan style project and test it in a single city banning all other private cars except delivery vehicles.
That is just stupid. How about a slighly more complex markdown.
What I really want is a P2P archive of all the relevant news articles of the last decades in markdown like in firefox “reader view”. And some super advanced LLM powered text compression so you can easily store a copy of 20% of them on your PC to share P2P.
Much of the information on the internet could vanish within months if we face some global economic crisis.