This may come as a surprise to you, but people like living in pleasant surroundings.
Just because I own the land does not mean I can open an abattoir next to an elementary school.
Using land in different ways results in externalities that affect those around it.
The people of a community should have some right to protect themselves from those externalities. How that happens in practice is a deeply flawed, messy, ugly process, but collectively deciding where to draw the line is part of living together as a community.
The next town over from where I live has basically no rules. No zoning, if you want to turn your property into a junkyard go right ahead! Even still, people are successfully fighting against a trash company putting in a landfill. I believe the levers they're pulling are a state wetlands permit and a state solid waste permit. The system is working.
Sure, and why not? And there's an even higher level of government above that one. And if we really start misbehaving, there's an international level above that one... I think computer nerds call that kind of thing "defense in depth".
This is false, they’re called “Land Use Zones” in Japan. It’s a national system, unlike in the west which is largely implemented piecemeal by municipality.
What does it matter if the zoning laws are local or national? You're OK with the feds telling you what you can and can't do with your land, but not local governments? Seems like a distinction without a difference.
This is the exact same sentiment I felt at the dawn of the Internet. I felt it was going to empower individuals, tear down borders and barriers, and bring humanity together.
Instead we ended up with an ad fueled dopamine/outrage slot machine.
We're seeing the same thing happen with AI on a condensed timeframe. Yes, its useful. Yes, it lowers barriers and amplifies what individuals can do, just like the early internet did.
However, the same pattern will repeat itself because the exact same forces that bent the arc of the internet towards its current state haven't gone anywhere; if anything they've just become stronger.
I don't completely disagree, but that's not the entire story, and the efforts of those who fought for good outcomes matter profoundly.
For instance, we do in fact have global, effectively ad-free, E2E encrypted messaging. A lot of people put in a lot of work on many fronts to design that, prioritize it, and deliver it at world-scale (mostly) legally.
The fact that the ad model became completely dominant is a real tragedy, but I think the deeper mistake with that idea was that "connecting people" is more complicated than it seems and has had many unforeseen consequences.
As a Western well-to-do person, to the extent I can tune out the slot machine, the dream actually has come true in many ways. I have friends and colleagues all over the world, travel is easier, coordination is easier, and politically my voice matters in ways it never would have in the past.
I was reading mailing lists from the early 2000s the other day and it was wild to remember a time when you literally had no idea what was happening in other parts of the world—when nearly all information was mediated through centralized authorities. People were sharing 'suppressed' reports on grass-roots political action other countries with a sense of self-importance that would be cringe today.
Feels like they’re hedging their bets. If Republicans stay in power they’re going to keep doing whatever they want; it’s not like they’re making data driven policy decisions today. If they are ousted then the incoming administration has bad data they can’t act on, and Republicans can go back to banging their old drum of “government is useless and dysfunctional”.
The way people keep describing Google, at least from the outside, sounds like a jobs program for developers funded by ad revenue.
So many of their products oscillate around the bar of profitability but so few reach the level of materially affecting Google’s bottom line that they can continually pop in and out of existence like subatomic particles.
Meanwhile the developers on these projects work towards their products brief moment in the sun so they can leverage it to move up and out, leaving it to die on the vine.
It’s a chaotic way to run a company, a decent way to make a living as a developer, and a shit way to build any kind of legacy, either as a company or as an individual.
From the POV of your employer your compute is powered by your decent salary, not bananas and coffee. If that goes away you’d be a fool to keep pointing your brain at your employer’s problems.
Thus, your compute is significantly more expensive than AI. Thankfully your taste is also part of your package deal, and is where you deliver real the value over an LLM.
The AI CEOs have been screaming for years now about how AI is scary, you should be afraid of it and it’s going to take your job.
“Mythos is too dangerous to release.”
“OpenAI offers a bounty if you can get ChatGPT to teach you how to do a bioterroism.”
“Agentic agents will replace entire categories of jobs. They’ll just be like, gone”
This is all signaling to their customers; no not you on their $20/month plan, the governments and corporations of the world who have deep pockets, fat to trim, and borders to defend and expand.
It’s no surprise that people don’t like AI. It’s not for people.
Just because I own the land does not mean I can open an abattoir next to an elementary school.
Using land in different ways results in externalities that affect those around it.
The people of a community should have some right to protect themselves from those externalities. How that happens in practice is a deeply flawed, messy, ugly process, but collectively deciding where to draw the line is part of living together as a community.