New take.

It's not marketing.

The private american companies are scaremongering to get ai regulated. Why? Because their Chinese competition is open source.

They are scaremongering that ai is dangerous and existential and needs shut down switches and the like. They want this despite it being a pain in the ass for themselves because it will force all open source ai into legal problems that closed source ai in private companies will not have because of "kill switches" and the like.

They are losing to Chinese open source ai and want to weaponise fear into regulation against open source.

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[–] 5 points 1 day ago

This has been happening to a lesser degree for a while: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Computation

So today we have marketing departments who say things like "we don't need computers, we need... appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits."

But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We're not making a computer that runs only the "appliance" app; we're making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer -- it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.

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