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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying (www.thenerve.news)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 7 points 2 months ago (11 children)

Yes, exactly.

Block chain would have been an amazing solution to most democratic vote validation processes.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    It can still be used that way. While most people talk about how corrupt politicians enrich themselves with fake currencies, more legal and legitimate uses can still use decentralized ledgers for useful things. Of course these won't make headlines.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    There are far better global ledger approaches than blockchain.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    I believe you, but can you name one so we can all learn more about the alternatives out there?

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    SWIFT is the easy one. Fun fact they looked into blockchain at one point and went "yeah, nah"

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Aren't votes meant to be anonymous to avoid retribution?

    Isn't the public ledger identifying information to be used by authoritarian violence on every single voter in that case?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Well no, because we don't have a problem that blockchain solves (better than open software, if it must be digital), and there are loads of problems that the blockchain doesn't solve. Like how am I supposed to vote with that thing under no coercion.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I'm not really sure what you're getting at. The blockchain is a good mechanism to maintain a source of truth that is inspectable and verifiable by anyone. It would only serve to certify that official counts can't be tampered with in certain ways.

    But it doesn't replace the whole democratic voting process. It doesn't protect against coercive voting, for instance.

    My point originally was that blockchain can be of use to us, but tech bros ruined its rep. Same with AI. I've been waiting for routers with ai-powered (really, just machine learning) firewalls that can adapt rules to environments. But instead of that, everyone is obsessed with generative stuff that isnt very good.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Yeah I hear you, but the 51% attack exists. Like if you use paper ballots, you're safer and it consumes less energy. There is just nothing better by using a blockchain, and paper ballots (for example) can be verified by anyone, the blockchain not so much.

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