I was trying to solidify a joke about beating up people who are pro-AI, but just can’t get the timing right.

But I do have a question for someone who can apparently see things from both sides. Do you think that people’s perceptions and engagement would be different if “AI” was marketed as natural language processing coding / programming expert system.

I feel like some of the visceral pushback against “AI” would be reduced if we didn’t all have to pretend there was actual intelligence in operation. Plus it would seem more like the successor to context aware code completion, rather than the successor to the individual sat at the keyboard.

I started writing out a detailed reply going into all the nuance, but I feel that it’s a waste of time. I’m not sure if you are trolling as such, but you are being deliberately obtuse. I actually feel like you understand the points that people are making to you quite clearly. This is terrible legislation, it’s a knee jerk reaction to a complex problem, with very few exceptions this is almost always a bad way of enacting policy.

The jab at my parenting because I already do the things you claim parents are too feeble to do without the government holding their hand is admittedly irritating, but I am going to choose to move past it.

This is the brainfart of a conservative grifter, it’s satanic panic, it’s the war on drugs, it’s another populist policy being pitched at the unintelligent to draw their attention while the business and political interests behind it are picking their pocket. You choose not to see it that way then fine, but we both know it’s true.

I am going to stop engaging with you now, feel free to have as many last says and derisive put downs as you want. I will not be reading them.

The parental controls I had? That worked just fine? That no longer work as the kids are force logged out of YouTube until they have turned 16. Or do you mean I should engage with Microsoft’s virtual spyware? Sorry but we are an opt out family and I do all I can to block telemetry and surveillance as I think my kids deserve better than to be reduced to a profile on a server. What do you use to monitor your kids activity online?

Do you not see the betrayal of our elected officials bowing to minority interests and pursuing policies that are, at very best, counterproductive, and at worst a distraction, that experts are telling them will not have the intended outcomes, to give them an excuse to avoid legislating the harder things? A deciding factor for my preferences at the last election was to minimise the creeping advance of the surveillance state that Dutton so obviously desperately wanted to push through… We are getting it anyway.

We keep moving further and further away from privacy and security in the face of the spooky spectres of “terrorism” and “protecting the children” but once we have handed those things over they are almost impossibly hard to regain. When we look back in 10 years and realise we voluntarily handed the government and big business all the info they need to monitor our every movement online at all times and got nothing in return how do we stuff that Genie back in the bottle?

No, what it does is removes agency from parents and tells us that we aren’t capable of raising our kids, the government will have to do it. My kids have been asking, for several years, to get Facebook accounts so they can use marketplace. I used that desire to have a frank discussion with them about how predatory Facebook is and how sinister it is that they have subsumed so many things that used to be independent and didn’t require an account with them specifically so they can lock users in and Hoover up more data. I have told the kids that if they want Facebook accounts after they turn 18 they are welcome to open them then, but until that day I am not allowing them to give up their privacy. Do I seem disengaged as a parent?

Not to mention it is counter productive in a number of ways. I have lost the ability to monitor my kids YouTube usage, the kids are just going to move to alternate platforms, and I am amongst the cohort of sensible Australians who will refuse to use social media before I provide some dodgy AI company my ID, it’s going to be a lot harder to convince my kids to do the same once all their friends and peers start ratcheting up the conformity pressure after they turn 16. This whole thing isn’t misguided, it’s a betrayal of the majority of Australians who are too dumb to realise what they are giving away to access these services.

My father bought his house in the 80s for 1.5x his annual pretax wage. Last time he had his house valued it is worth somewhere north of 15x his annual pretax wage, same job. He is constantly asking when I will be buying my own house. I keep explaining to him, I am in my early 40s and got stuck in the rent trap fairly early, I am not in a position to take on a 30 year mortgage at this point, I will likely never own my own home. Median house price in my area is just under 9.5x my annual pre-tax income, and I don’t see how I could support my kids and actually live my life while paying down a mortgage compared to the deal I got on my rental house through sheer dumb luck.

Perhaps if some thought and care had been put into this ridiculous land grab by our government this kind of outcome could have been avoided.

I’m not giving Reddit a single bit of benefit of the doubt here, but by pushing back against this they may be helping us instead of pissing on us for a change.

Instead of using political capital to shove age verification down our throats, imagine if they used that same capital to restrict gambling advertising? Or implement strong data protection and privacy legislation? Or strong laws against IP theft by AI companies? The government could have pursued all sorts of positive policies to materially improve life for us, what we got instead was the conjunction of the masturbatory fantasies of the intelligence community (who have never enjoyed us having any privacy) and knee jerk reactionary conservatives who know best how to raise kids because of “muh feels”.

This half baked, vague, wishy washy law has made my kids materially less safe online, all so the government can soft sell the idea that you should have to provide ID for every interaction online.

Wow I wish the media would remember that a strong independent media that is willing to hold the government to account actually makes for a stronger democracy.

Somehow Jonathon Haidt is being discussed as the ultimate authority on this topic because he wrote a book that some pollies read. Not seeing Candice Odgers being brought up, just to grab a name at random. Her take seems a bit more nuanced but we can’t do nuance these days.

And meanwhile the truly catastrophic damage is already being done, how many young people handed over their biometric data today? Yes there is a lot of noise in that data, but the politicians are categorically stating that the systems will improve over time, if the scope of data collection is solely for the purpose of performing verification and no data is being retained… How exactly are these systems expecting to improve over time… And the mask is off, “Won’t somebody think of the kids!!!” Is actually, “Won’t somebody provide categorised biometric data to the scumbag AI companies?”.

Citizens need to start demanding that the eSafety Commissioner investigate these AI companies for misappropriation of data starting today, if the demands are concerted and consistent enough maybe we can keep the government tied up investigating these companies and help them avoid shooting any more toes off in the process.

I genuinely don’t think I have anything to add to that. It’s all just so petty and tawdry.

On a related note I think it’s worth mentioning that this is all accelerated by a 24 hour news cycle and the amount of right-wingers who insist on dragging American culture wars and politics over to Australia, I’m guessing because our own politics aren’t dramatic enough for them, which then platforms the worst sort of people.

Maybe that’s reaping what we sewed considering we exported Rupert. Now we are importing hate & radicalism on-top of our own domestic stock.

I want to preface this by saying that I don’t believe anything could serve as recompense for what those women and girls went through.

But it’s a bit telling that they had been caught, tried, found guilty and were actively serving their sentences, yet the mob (or at least elements of it) still clung to that pretence as a way of being able to attack and traumatize an entire community.

I sincerely doubt that this was the first flirtation with racism for many of these people. Violent race based attacks maybe, but not racism on the extreme end of the spectrum.

Slightly off topic anecdote:

I talked with a refugee from sub Saharan Africa once, he was pretty cooked and not super lucid. Talking to a friend later she revealed that she had dealt with him before doing community outreach.

She explained that his parents had got him out of Africa ahead of a little ethnic cleansing and brought him to Australia as a young child. He had then spent the next decade plus dealing with racism, ranging from casual to overt and targeted. Started on drugs at 13 and looked like he was in his late 30s before he turned 20.

I’m certain he was no angel, but I feel like he was forced down a pathway in life by the environment he lived in through no choice of his own. How different could his life have turned out if he had landed in the right community?

I despair that we are really terrible at just living with people from different places and cultures, especially when they make up a minority in our communities.

My MP started off giving this topic a simple once over and agreed with it. Then listened to a bunch of constituents, experts and just the rhetoric from other politicians. He has since changed his stance on it. Also he happens to be an Independent.

Strange how much of the inequity in our current system is related to people who are motivated to vote along party lines instead of listening to the people who put them in their position isn’t it?

Not a Sydney-sider or from NSW, was the racial tension that was stoked up to the riots really caused or significantly contributed to by that horrible series of rapes?

For the outside I get the feeling it’s a brick in the wall kind of thing. Along with lots of racism, culture clash, opportunistic politicians and grifter shock jocks.

But I understand it’s hard to gauge the vibe of a culture from a half a continent away. Even more so doing it 20 years later.

It’s so frustrating seeing the government fiddling in the margins to grab headlines rather than, doing something constructive. This is going to devolve into a game of whack-a-mole trying to make it look like it is achieving something other than what it is (normalising the idea of having to dox yourself to access the internet). Meanwhile I have just lost all the passive ability to monitor what my teens watch on YouTube, and the easy ability to check in on their conversations on Snapchat. They have thrown my kids out into the wild west of barely moderated YouTube and dubious chat apps.

If they had implemented strong laws around algorithmic outputs, human moderation, and online harassment then we would have been applauding them for holding the social media companies to account. Instead what they have done is laid another part of the foundation of a surveillance state.

In essence the governments desire to be seen to be doing something is dovetailing neatly with the shit heads that want everything we do online to be monitored, recorded and as a byproduct more heavily monetised.

Also since they are doing this to protect the children, is there a number of children they are willing to sacrifice to achieve their goals. How many marginalised kids have to self harm before they start to ask the question “Are we the baddies?” We already know that social media has had Perverse Incentives at play that have shaped it, so while it sounds hyperbolic I don’t imagine it’s beyond the pale that the LGBTQI+ kid who lives in a rural area with 0 local support is going to be affected by their online support networks disappearing. The kid suffering from domestic violence suddenly becomes voiceless and can’t work out who they trust enough to reach out to. The bullying goes to the all new special app all the kids on the playground are using that is hosted out of another country that doesn’t give a shit about Australian laws and becomes impossible to take down as we have just taught our kids to work around the tissue paper blocks the government keeps relying on.

On top of all this, we don’t have comprehensive data privacy laws, and while the government says it will levy massive fines against companies that don’t take reasonable steps to secure our data, the reality is that they will not, and if they tried to what’s to stop the companies deciding that Australia is not an economically sound country to operate in and just up stumps and leave rather than paying the $85,000,000 fine?

This is all just the surface level thoughts I have of this debacle.

Hard disagree, at some point investors are going to start asking these AI companies when they will be done burning cash and when the profits will start rolling in. Arguably OpenAI is already starting to see these concerns. If the US gets a new government at some stage there might be enough political will to draw a line in the sand with NVidia and tell them to stop manipulating markets. Finally there may be some pushback against datacenters literally killing the areas they are built in. What we are seeing is a fraud against the world originating from a group of hyper rich arseholes that may last a surprisingly long time, but eventually they will need to pay the piper.

I did have someone tell me this has all the hallmarks of the space race. We are going to see enormous amounts of efforts and resources thrown into AI only for these pioneers to realise there is no clear way to monetise at which point all that energy will be redirected, until then China keeps on egging the US on to make them increasingly commit more and more of their economy to a concept that is going to be a lead anchor on the country left holding the bag.

Oh I don’t mean to diminish the harms of the movement. We have a disappointingly long history to show what happens when this sort of group is weaponised by the wrong type (I was going to write right type, but that feels wrong) of leader/funder. But on an individual level, can you imagine one of these stains trying to explain their viewpoints to an honest questioner on a one on one basis?

I used to know a powerlifter who looked like what these guys fetishise, but he is their polar opposite ideologically. I would love for him to sit down and in his oh so calm voice ask one of these goons why they think the way they do. Trust me when I say it would never leave their mind that this guy could tear their arms off and beat them with the bloody ends, so if they were stuck next to him on a flight or train ride I think they would be sitting in a couple of different puddles by the end without having made a single valid point, meanwhile my old mate would likely continue his trend of intimidating people before they realise he wouldn’t hurt a fly.

So they are LARPers? I mean what a bunch of shitheads, but what a shit society to join. Why would any of them individually want to associate with any of the others? Surely they look around and think “What a pathetic bunch of losers!”

I especially like how we are bending over and taking it from a Non-Profit so they can make more money.

Did what I could between Peter George and Rosalie Woodruff, but Dean Winter still got back in as did vice chairman Abetz.

As a state though we did the Australian Signature move of voting against our best interests. We aren’t quite as polarised as the US yet but I see people whinging about Leftists with disturbing regularity.

Plus the whole way through this stadium crap they have been calling anyone with even basic questions about the process an “Anti”. I always wanted to reply with Anti-Corruption, Anti-Crime, Anti-Bankruptcy. But most of those mouth breathers wouldn’t appreciate that sort of nuanced position.

Yeah, just look at Discord. Not only harvesting data, by sharing it with “trusted partners” I was told the Esafety commissioner can bring legal action to find companies up to $850k per offence for improperly storing Australian citizens data, but I haven’t heard anything about hundreds of millions in fines against Discord yet.

Just repaying the excess fees is “taking shareholder money”. No fines or penalties, just making the original customers whole.

Just make the entire executive team pay the money to the shareholders, problem solved. If they aren’t good for it I am sure they can get a line of credit extended to them, pretty sure they know some people in the banking industry.