Comment by siliconc0w
1 day ago
The problem with "Any Lawful Use" is that the DoD can essentially make that up. They can have an attorney draft a memo and put it in a drawer. The memo can say pretty much anything is legal - there is no judicial or external review outside the executive. If they are caught doing $illegal_thing, they then just need to point the memo. And we've seen this happen numerous times.
Did you guys really think that the jurisprudential issues that became endemic after 9/11 suddenly disappeared because we discovered LLMs?
Let’s put pressure on our government to fix the FISA issues. Let’s reign in the executive branch. But let’s do it through voting. Let’s not give up on our system of government because we have new shiny technology.
You were naive if you thought developing new technologies was the solution to our government problems. You’re wrong to support anyone leveraging their control over new technology as a potential solution or weapon of the weak against those governmental issues.
That is not how you effect change in a democracy.
And, to be clear, the way you affect change in democracy is coalition building, listening to others, supporting your allies in their aims, and in turn having them support you, even when you don’t fully agree or understand. There’s no magic wand, none of us are right, there’s no big picture, just a bunch of people working together.
While I agree that we should be voting in people who will respect the power and authority they're given, I can't imagine we will vote away all these problems.
We would need to vote in a president and 60%+ into congress that is willing to throw away their own power and authority. I just don't see that happening, especially not in a political system so corrupted already.
The US needs a organization doing the equivalent of the Nation Popular Vote Interstate Compact but for candidates and for fixing the US voting system. Get running politicians to sign up for if 60% of you are in office you'll table and vote for a specific already spelled out constitutional reform for more representative voting.
The goal being more than two parties in government so that democrats and republicans can fracture into more functional bodies (MAGA, RINOs, neo-liberal, progressive etc) and people can vote closer to their issues/beliefs and that multiple parties mean 1 party isn't running rushod over the other.
> But let’s do it through voting.
You don't get a successful vote without a tremendous amount of coordination and activism preceding it.
Laws that constrain government from bad things are very difficult things to get the government to pass.
In the meantime, using completely legal civil power to push back on legally allowed harms seems beyond sensible.
But if you just vote and it works without all that, please let us know how you did it!
Take a step back: Americans voted for this. They want unaccountable police and courts for the Dirty Harry legal system: maximum indiscriminate violence against those designated as criminals.
I've never seen this on a ballot and, maybe with the exclusion of Trump, never heard a candidate campaign on anything similar.
You probably could make the case that Trump did campaign on it so I'll grant that, but this problem started well before he was even firing people on TV.
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You are right that this happens in practice (e.g. John Yoo torture memo). However, it is not how the system was intended to function, nor how it ought to function. I don’t want to lose sight of that.
We shouldn't be stacking up so many incentives for it to happen though.
This is all happening in secret. That don't need any memo.
In the unlikely case anyone finds out, those acting in the interests of the administration will have "absolute immunity", as they are "great American Patriots".
That's what "all lawful use" means.
It's lawful use with specific laws called out though? New laws won't supercede what is agreed in the contract at the time of signing.
not to mention that the government is already bound against using things it buys for unlawful uses. Its a totally redundant clause in a contract that OpenAI is touting to confuse people.
It's the DoW now, not DoD
Or best case by the time it’s found out it’s years later, theres a “committee” who releases a big report everyone shrugs their shoulders and moves on. It’s a playbook.
Exactly, and its easy to hide behind things like the Patriot Act if challenged legally.
Its interesting to see the parties flip in real time. The Democrats seem to be realizing why a small federal government is so important, a fact that for quite a few years their were on the other side of.
I think the problem is exactly the opposite. The federal government has the total combined power and scale that it does because we are a massive and complex modern nation. That's inevitable. The problem that we are seeing is that the reigns to that power can be held by too few people it turns out. The checks and balances have ceased to exist. No one is held accountable and people are allowed to be above the law.
The power and scale of governments doesn't have to be correlated with the scale of the society. The concept of nations themselves aren't even a necessity.
I get that this is what we have today and all we've had in recent history, but we are ignoring a huge number of possibilities to assume that being human means always inventing new things, using more resources, creating more weapons, and needing larger and larger governments because someone had to be in charge.
> The federal government has the total combined power and scale that it does because we are a massive and complex modern nation. That's inevitable.
Perhaps massive and complex (I'd say complicated) nation-states inevitably create industrial complexes, but it's certainly not inevitable that nation-states grow so large (or even exist) in 2026.
The idea that we still need soverign-esque entites across entire continents, when we can now communicate and coordinate instantly across them, and use cameras to documents truth all around us at all times, is just downright silly.
We can reduce states to the size that you can walk across in a day or two, and everybody will be much happier and healthier.
I don’t see the connection to a small federal government here. Mind connecting the dots?
The government is forcing a company to change their terms of service, and "threatening" to have them effectively shut down. I say threat, because the SecWar issued an illegal command that no employees, or contractors of the federal could use any Anthropic product at all. He does not have that power.
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