I think he means "mass sterilisation of a population" Vs "mass murder of the same population", which is genocide either way, and then he would opt for the faster method.
Or something. Feels extra creepy discussing which genocide is better with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Some years ago I read the memoirs of a railroad union boss. Interesting book in many aspects, but what I thought of here was a time before he became a union boss. He was working at the railroad, was trusted in the union and got the mission to make store keeping of supplies and spare parts more efficient.
This wasn't the first time the railroad company had tried to make it more efficient. Due to earlier mergers there was lots of local supplies and a confusing system for which part of the company was supplied from where. In short, it was inefficient and everyone knew that. Enter our protagonist who travels around and talks to people. Finally he arrives back to HQ and reports that it can't be done. Unless HQ wants to enact a program where everyone who is made redundant gets a better job, with the company footing the bill for any extra training or education needed. Then it could be done, because then it would be in the interest of the people whose knowledge and skills they needed.
This being in the post war era with full employment policies, labour was a scare resource so the company did as they were told and the system got more efficient.
It's all about who benefits from the automation. The original Luddites targeted employers who automated, fired skilled workers and decreased wages. They were not opposed to automation, they were opposed to automation at their expense.
This is a civil case, right? Are there any criminal cases ongoing (as far as you know)?
I was thinking the other day about when some twenty years ago EU and EU countries created pretty drastic criminal laws for copyright violations. And also about how they included both jail time and punitive damages, so that in EU countries that doesn't otherwise use punitive damages, only copyright crimes can be punished such.
These laws were of course ghost written by lobbyists from large corporations, often from the US. But you can't say that when pushing it through, so they were officially created to protect authors, artists, musicians and composers.
So it would be funny - and potentially very profitable - if for example some (or a lot) of authors reported for example Meta for their crime of creating local copies of books from LibGen before using it as training materials.
Now, I think the law is there to protect big corporations and if push comes to show relevant ministers and prosecutors might get invited to a trip to the US to understand how to interpret the law. But funny, and potentially very profitable.
So one one hand the CEO's want their minions back into office and on the other they want to replace them with AI's?
Sounds like a conundrum. Or a business opportunity!
Presenting Srvile! The brand new Servility as a Service company, with AI powered robots that will laugh at all boss jokes at the water cooler and say things like "That is such a great idea boss! Since I am an AI I can't realise that you are just regurgitating what you read on Xshitter!" and "We certainly need more AI to solve any problem!"
Call now to order!
(AI may at times be enhanced by remote human control for "quality control". Actual level of servility may vary and is not guaranteed.)
Oh yes, very much so.
The British Empire had its colonial administrators curriculum consisting of Latin and history and such. A rich 19th century heir that went into physics or mathematics were considered to be wasting the chance of a political career.
It made their colonial administrators write about their crimes in a nice prose, but it didn't stop the genocides. If anything it made them aware of what paper trails to burn after the fact, in order to obfuscate the crimes when future historians came looking.
Georgia is 70-82% absolute certain that god exists.
Which one? Both of them.
Philanthropy can't change the power structures, philanthropy is a band aid that soothe the conscience of the philanthropist.
Aaron and assorted developers can't give the villagers power, because they only have power in relation to the villagers, not in relation to the world trade system. If they want to give the villagers power they need to change the system that gives the villagers a fraction of their earnings per hour.
But then you are back to the usual options. Thirty years of boredom, trying to change the system from within? Protest world leaders and get beaten by police for your troubles (or even sentenced for destruction of police equipment by smashing your face into it)? Join a communist party and play spot the fed?
I guess it's better to join a philanthropy cult, where billionaires can pay you to hang out in a castle and discuss the problems with the poor over some overpriced ethanol.
And did it appear he needed any help from dorky software engineers personally going to villages to “help out”?
I once saw what I think was a BBC show where an Englishman visited cool tribes and lived with them. Tough, outdoorsman.
The only episode I saw he was in Mongolia and it had what I think was unintentional humour. The local vet - who had been the local party representative during the Communist era and now held some other title - placed him in a family that could need a hand during migration, as their teenage daughter had a disability. So on he went on horseback and he made it there with just a bunch more pauses then the Mongolians would have preferred. But once there, the best his hosts could say about his efforts to help was "Well, he is strong. And he is trying."
By the looks of it, the Mongolians could not believe how a big, strong guy could be so utterly useless.
I am late to sneer culture. I read HPMOR back in the day and even visited LW and then forgot about it. EA (mosquito) was on my radar but since philanthropy is anyway a bandaid on societal problems I hadn't bothered. Until FTX crashed. I already knew crypto was a scam, but a scam that wraps itself in bad philosophy is more interesting.
After a lot of old Twitter threads and Tumblr posts it finally clicked: They made the Harry Potter fanfic guy their prophet!
Which is so stupid that it fits perfectly into our timeline.
Oxford educating the creme de la creme of the murderous British empire for centuries got to have given them expertise in rationalisations. Before the genocides and the pillage can really get going you need an officer class who can order murder for the greater good without stopping to ask "Hans, are we the baddies?"
I find it a bit interesting that it isn't more wrong. Has it ingested large tables and got a statistical relationship between certain large factors and certain answers? Or is there something else going on?