Comment by heaney-555
20 hours ago
DeepMind objectively is doing that. The world is not so black and white as "evil profit-hungry corporations will never do anything good".
20 hours ago
DeepMind objectively is doing that. The world is not so black and white as "evil profit-hungry corporations will never do anything good".
I preemptively acknowledged that in my comment…
If Google does anything good for the world it is entirely accidental, and I am certain they will correct this mistake later.
Market reward is the best proxy for good we have.
What's your alternative? Executive fiat? Mob rule?
Deepmind is objectively good. These endeavors would always cost money. Better private capital than state, no one has to give Google anything. The state is not so generous.
Mob rule, aka Democracy.
4 replies →
> Market reward is the best proxy for good we have.
Only if the goal is profit. All else be damned.
> What's your alternative? Executive fiat? Mob rule?
It is always bewildering to me that people see the world being raped by corporations and their negative externality, and they think that this is the pinnacle that humanity can achieve.
Nothing else can be better, if all your options are "mob rule" or "executive fiat".
I fancy myself a misanthrope, but damn, next to people in this forum I am probably the last humanist walking through the ruins of civilization.
> Deepmind is objectively good.
Google is objectively bad, and the world would be a much nicer place if they ceased to exist.
5 replies →
Executive fiat, given the right executive body, and undergirded by healthy autarkies or other cell-type self-direction, worked well in most locales for most of the years humans have been humans. Certain flashy civilizations, Sumer, Greece, have tended to draw the spotlight incommensurately with their population sizes. But even these functioned much more like what I describe above than anything modern.
3 replies →
I think they have done some quantifiable good.
Alphafold or Earthquake alerts for example spring to mind.
You could argue about comprehensive "free" services (search, Gmail, YouTube, docs, etc) and "free" browsers and "free" operating systems (yeah plural) being net positives in the world but I know that many people view these as negatives as they (rightly or wrongly) view them as vehicles to sell ads or collect data, but I bet you 100 bucks the typical person on the street using their android phone to search Google, watch YouTube, check their Gmail, write a doc, view photos etc doesn't give a shit about that and values these things - google has ended up as a monopoly as these things are actually pretty useful to people and thus valued, even if we in the tech world disagree with the adtech and data aspects. This monopoly was not a fait acompli or pure market abuse - Nokia, MS, flikr, Hotmail, yahoo etc were all incumbent and market dominant but are now irrelevant because the Google products were viewed as better by end users.