DavesWorld's recent activity
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Comment on AI, automation, and inequality — how do we reach utopia? in ~talk
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Comment on An equitable solution to a problem at work regarding sick leave and staffing? in ~life
DavesWorld LinkIt's not right, and everyone knows it. Even the owners, except they're allowing their greed to carry the decision. What happens if you're sick, and interact with others? You get them sick. Working...It's not right, and everyone knows it. Even the owners, except they're allowing their greed to carry the decision.
What happens if you're sick, and interact with others? You get them sick. Working while sick saps energy, hurts you, causes pain and discomfort, and very likely increases the time you'll suffer while sick since you heal slower.
Everyone knows all this. It's just capitalism encourages people to ignore it in favor of money. For owners and companies, it's "not shutting down" in some form. They want the money to keep rolling, the work to keep happening so it brings that money into their coffers. For self-employed people, same.
For workers, they fear the consequences of a greedy owner/boss/etc who will punish them for daring to prioritize not just their own health (recovering from the illness), but the health of others (who risk getting sick when someone who is interacts with them.)
Owners just don't care. That's the bottom line. They're not the one getting sick. And usually, an owner or boss has control over their own schedule and position so they don't have to actually interact all that much with a sick employee. So they don't personally risk very much when they demand "no, come in; keep working."
Most people are very bad at consequences, at forecasting, at examining ramifications that aren't instantly direct. So when an owner/boss demands a sick employee come into work, some people genuinely are incapable of understanding that "sick person interacting with other people risks the sickness spreading."
Now, an owner/boss might not care that people on the bus or at the grocery store you interact with will catch your sickness. But they should care if their other employees get sick. Except, again, they don't because they just require/force everyone to continue working regardless.
Even though the owner damn well will often stay home and recover when they get sick. They're in charge, and at that point they're considering their own pain and discomfort, their own health. Of course, when they feel horrible and have trouble functioning, they tend to their health. But you, as a worker, you should just snap to and obey as far as they're concerned.
It's the same reason the parents send sick kids in. Not parents who don't realize their child has gotten sick, or parents of children who are sick but who aren't showing yet. But parents who know their kid woke up this morning obviously sick, and send them into the school/daycare anyway. Why? Same reasons as above; they fear punishments and loss of money for doing what used to be considered the right thing and taking care of their sick kid. And further, doing so at home so the child doesn't spread the illness amongst other kids.
So a kid wakes up with flu or fever or whatever, and is bundled off to school because that's what happens these days. Soon enough, as you noted, all the kids have it. Which is utterly unnecessary except everyone involved except the damned owner, and some bosses, is under pressure to just ignore basic biology and "gut it out."
Flu can kill. Fever can kill. Some illness may look "benign" or "normal", but could be something serious like pneumonia and such. But the expectation is to ignore biology and come in anyway, spreading the disease.
So no, it's not right. Yes, your owners are assholes. What can you do? Only the same as everyone else; decide how much risk you want.
Honestly, as a teacher, and having heard in increasing amounts in recent years how hard it is to find and keep teachers, there's an argument to be made for you telling the owners (politely) you're staying home because you're too sick to work. You don't even have to get into how you'd be passing that sickness on to your students and coworkers, even though that is what happens and everyone knows it; just that "look, I'm just sick, so I'm not coming in."
Yes your owners will be upset. Because they're prioritizing their income over the wellfare of everyone else involved. Including you. After all, you're "just a worker." What do they care about you?
Until you leave. Then they care. Because abusing you is fun and games until they realize they don't have a replacement, or can't hire one at your wage level. Then, suddenly, they're upset they didn't treat you a little better. At least just enough so you didn't leave their employ. At that point, they do care.
But, again, no one can decide for anyone else what that person's tolerence for risk is. Here, the risk of getting and staying sick, the risk of working through the pain and discomfort of being sick, and the risk of your owner actually being a big enough asshole (with other options to replace you) to decide to fire you.
Why would an owner/boss fire a sick employee who calls out? As a warning to other employees. So they all whisper to one another. "Sara was sick, and they shitcanned her. I need my job, I'm barely scraping by. Fuck it, I'll come in even if my husband has to drag me in on a cart."
That's what they want when they do stuff like demand you work sick, demand you come in. All so their income doesn't suffer even a slight interruption. It's evil, except so many people do it a lot of folks consider it almost normal.
Something can be normal, and wrong, all at the same time.
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Comment on Is TV advertising still relevant? Does anybody under 60 even watch traditional TV anymore? in ~tv
DavesWorld Link ParentUp front, I'm not a sports person so I have no horse in the race. I'm not so sure how sports on streaming will look. What does the NFL charge for their rights, just as an example? Google ......Up front, I'm not a sports person so I have no horse in the race.
I'm not so sure how sports on streaming will look. What does the NFL charge for their rights, just as an example? Google ... something like eight billion a year? Maybe I'm looking that up wrong. Anyway, it's a lot. Even "small" sports like baseball or hockey are not cheap.
Is a streaming service going to pay that much? And the real question, are they going to pay that much and not recoup from advertisers? Better question; what streaming service can afford to pay that and not get the money back in some way? Because, and just as an example, even Netflix can't afford to pay billions a year without basically rearranging themselves into SportsFlix due to cost.
And how are the non-sports fans gonna feel if they know their subscription could be funding series and movies ... or sports they don't watch. I'd be irked. A billion dollars funds a lot of content. I don't necessarily mind they fund movies and shows I won't watch, but those are things I might. Sports ... not interested. Sure sports are popular, but it's not like the non-sports fans are this vanishingly small segment.
Some of the streamers might buy in as a loss-leader, to build subs, sure. They've already been trying that though. Part of the industry's issue right now is they've been spending borrowed money and aren't getting it back from consumers. Hoping to build up to a critical mass like Netflix has so they can cash in, but only Netflix really has that critical mass. The loan payments are coming due, and interest rates are up; who could afford to keep loss-leading even on content, much less start doing it in a major way with sports?
I can see the services adding a special subscription option, similar to what the sports leagues have been running a while now (NFL Sunday Ticket, etc...), but how many subscriptions do they need to recoup shelling out billions annually on sports?
The whole thing seems like a big "hmmm ... we'll see" situation to me. Because there's just a lot of money involved, and a lot of ways it could go since one way or another they're gonna want their money back if they keep shelling out the leagues' asking prices.
To be clear, I'm not saying sports doesn't turn up on streaming. I am saying I don't really think we're going to see a future where Netflix or one of the presumably three to five services that survive after all the failures and merges we're going to see over the next handful of years just add sports without modifying their pricing somehow.
Maybe it'll be ads, maybe it'll be a rider subscription, maybe it'll be a spin-off subscription, but I doubt it'll just be "new to your monthly subscription: every game, included for free along with everything else you've come to expect and love from us!"
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Comment on "No CGI" is really just invisible CGI in ~movies
DavesWorld Link ParentSpielberg famously had to work around not having a shark to show in Jaws. And for decades now, film students and critics and directors have praised the genius of that decision. How it added...Spielberg famously had to work around not having a shark to show in Jaws. And for decades now, film students and critics and directors have praised the genius of that decision. How it added tension and stakes, how it took advantage of the unknown to let the audience play with so much that was going on in their heads. In the theater of their minds. Which worked brilliantly.
Today's directors, sometimes not even on the student level with the way technology has advanced, don't often have to "settle" for working around something. CG and effects houses/programs can put just about anything on the screen for the audience. No messing around with a mechanical shark that keeps breaking, no stunt guy who can't see in the monster suit and refuses to do certain things you want because of it, none of that.
Restraint is a powerful creative tool. Needing to work a problem, to have to sit down and think of options, is incredibly useful. But so many in this era of movies, even TV these days with prestige budgets, they don't have any such limits. They just say stuff that used to be insane, that would make the producers laugh nervously before demanding the real plan. Now they say crazy stuff, and the producers are like "okay, so we'll have VFX do that."
Parker and Stone with South Park have a story they told about the "In the Closet" episode. They were like "we want to have an episode where we riff on Tom Cruise being gay." And the lawyers were like "fuck no, you can't say that, instant lawsuit." Even after Parker and Stone pleaded, and pointed out how funny it would be, no. The answer was no.
So they thought some, and were like "okay, so can we say Tom Cruise is in the closet?" Lawyers were like "no, just no." Then they thought some more, and were like, "okay what about this. We'll have Tom Cruise physically be in a closet. Like, we'll put our Tom Cruise in a closet on screen. Then can we say Tom Cruise is in the closet?"
And the lawyers were like "okay, that you can say." And the episode works brilliantly. It's amazing how funny it is when they build up to it. Way funnier than if they'd just had the characters wander around ripping on Tom Cruise for being gay or whatever.
Limitations enhance creativity. Anything that makes an actual creator (not those lame Youtubers who call themselves 'creators' just for vlogging to their smartphone) sit and think is a good thing.
CG is an amazing tool for storytelling. But when you just lean on it because you know you can have a digital artist listen to you describe something, and have it appear, it turns into the kind of thing this thread is lamenting. Where you wonder where the magic that used to be an essential part of cinematic storytelling has gone.
The audience's imagination is a powerful tool. But you'd never know that if you never have to use it. It's a forgotten paintbrush in the bucket that today's productions don't know how to use.
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Comment on "No CGI" is really just invisible CGI in ~movies
DavesWorld Link ParentI'm a huge fan of writers and scripts, but on Endgame, as good as the movie is, as good as the movies those writers had given us were up to then, they still hadn't nailed what we got in the final...I'm a huge fan of writers and scripts, but on Endgame, as good as the movie is, as good as the movies those writers had given us were up to then, they still hadn't nailed what we got in the final form.
One of the behind the scenes bits concerns the climatic moment of the entire epic. Where Tony steals the gems off Thanos, and holds his hand up. They knew they needed him to say something. To have something. The moment needed it.
And they didn't know what the fuck to have him say. They tried all kinds of stuff apparently. And then one of the editors, I think, was like "just have him say 'I am Iron Man.'"
Which is a genius line for that moment. It's perfect. It brings the arc back to Tony's origin, it plays off Thanos' having been wandering around grimly stating "I am inevitable", and all that. But that line, that moment that brought the infinity saga finally to rest, that put the last bits of ink on the page of Tony Stark's arc in the MCU ... the writers didn't have it. Neither did the directors.
They worked it, played with it, massaged and trialed and failed it, until they found it.
That moment is both amazing, and super annoying. Because I love writers, but they didn't have that moment figured out. And you really think that'd be a moment you write towards, throughout most of the story. But they just kind of wrote, and got there, and were like "hmmm, I dunno." And the directors even were just like "ehh, whatever, come back to it."
Sure they did get there, eventually. But what if they hadn't? Further, that moment, the final version of that shot we got in the finished film, that was a pickup. They had to bring Downy back in and put him in the dot suit and act out a bunch of stuff they'd come up with to see and hear.
You write a script so when you put a cast and crew together, you know what everyone's there to do. I feel like it's an important part of the process, and it's one of the things that CG and various other "techniques" have encouraged this era of filmmakers to let go. Used to be, you had to have your shit figured out before you called action. Now, they're all just like "ehh, whatever, come back to it later."
Little less "eh" would be nice these days is what I'm saying. Little more "we know" would be a welcome return to good filmmaking. Gosh, even a plan maybe. You could call it a script, use it to generate storyboards, which were this thing productions would use to map out who was where doing what while the camera did X and Y and Z to see it.
Eh, whatever.
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Comment on ‘Red One’ down: How Dwayne Johnson’s tardiness led to a $250 million runaway production in ~movies
DavesWorld Link ParentI don't know what's going on with Johnson. He might genuinely be incredibly bad at time management, or at listening to staffers hired to help him manage it. He might also just be a pompous prick...I don't know what's going on with Johnson. He might genuinely be incredibly bad at time management, or at listening to staffers hired to help him manage it. He might also just be a pompous prick who feels he's the most important thing and everyone else will wait for him. There's no way to know from that article.
But on the late thing, I used to be late. I was late to work, late to appointments, it just happened all the time. Because things would happen. I wouldn't sit down and figure out travel times, or prep times, or "get ready to leave" times. I'd leave things until the last moment, then scramble, then have unexpected stuff come up (traffic, calls, interruptions, forgot something, etc) and after adding it all up it equaled late.
I just got tired of it one day. And decided to no longer be late guy. And honestly, I think some version of that is the only real solution. Anything else is just penny-ante tiptoeing around the real issues; that you're not making leaving on time important. That you're not being mindful of schedule or commitments.
When I commit to something, I commit to it. Which means I sit down and think through travel time, prep time, get ready time, all of it. And apply it to the schedule, then add some fudge and delay factors. If anyone's gonna wait, it'll be me at the destination because I'm early; not everyone else.
But I'm not a multi-millionaire for whom a temporary corporation worth tens of millions of dollars will wait on. Then I guess it's okay. What does Johnson care? He's getting paid, and they pay it because he brings in the bucks. Which is something I see so many people not understanding about Hollywood.
A-list isn't an award, or a recognition of acting talent or "due" or anything. It's an acknowledgement that the actor will bring in an audience. When Johnson wants to be magnetically charismatic, he can be. He does it a lot in interviews, on talk shows, in movies, on tv, lots of places. That's why he's A-list. You hear he's in it, you're interested because it's him.
I was thinking about A-list the other day when I was trying out another Brit tv series that didn't pan out.
They never seem to factor charm or charisma or the ability of an actor to pull an audience. They seem to just audition people, and almost pick at random most of the time. Like it's taking turns or something. So when I stumble across some BBC/UK series, even a lot of their movies, if I put it on I'm often left perplexed why I'm watching.
Because few of their concepts are that compelling, that I'll watch just for the concept. Something like "ooh, I like bank robbery stories" or whatever. Few concepts are that compelling, for anyone. What you're usually watching for is the performances, because a compelling actor makes any material come alive.
A star anchors a production, even if it's just a TV star. Johnson might be a shit as a person (maybe, maybe not), but on screen he's magnetic. I'll consider watching anything he's in because it's him. There's actors like that. A-list, B-list, even C-list (aka genre stars).
Like Jason Statham or Gerard Butler. A lot of their films are them, maybe one or possibly two other faces you might vaguely recognize, and then a whole list of cheap nobodies. But you watch because it's a Statham or Butler film; they're the draw. They're the reason the film gets made. You gave it a chance because they're in it.
Take just about any of their films, and replace them with some stunt guy, or a fit nobody who'll take a fraction of their paycheck for the chance. Sure you saved having to pay their fee, but you also end up with a movie a fraction of a fraction of the previous audience will bother watching. Because they look at it and are like "who the hell is this random person starring in it?"
Like the UK approach, where I see something in a list that sounds like it might have a decent shot at being fun or interesting, but then I look through the cast list and it's just a big block of nobodies. And maybe I put it on anyway, but after half an hour I'm like "none of these people have any draw ... they're all background actors, just that some have been put in lead roles."
Johnson might be an asshole who's had great PR up until now, or maybe he turned into an asshole because power went to his head (wouldn't be the first, won't be the last), or maybe he's just the victim of a smear campaign because some folks have an axe to grind. But in the right role, in the right conditions, when he decides to flip his switch to turn his charm on, he's a lot of fun to watch.
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Comment on AI video won't work in Hollywood, because it can't make small iterative changes, former Pixar animator says in ~movies
DavesWorld Link ParentYes, the AI generators have to regenerate the entire image to address a change. However, when you're talking about a well funded entity (such as a professional computer effects or animation...Yes, the AI generators have to regenerate the entire image to address a change.
However, when you're talking about a well funded entity (such as a professional computer effects or animation company), the computers will be able to regenerate a desktop sized image in seconds. Well less than a minute. Even if you scale up the resolution and complexity and all that, it's still really fast. And that's today; what happens next year, or five years from now? With faster computers and better AI programs?
Even today though, how much faster is it than a human team? Because I read credits on animated movies. They have whole teams that do nothing but focus on light, others that do backgrounds, others that do textures or cloth, some focus only on characters, and so on. Lot of people laboring on little pieces, and a lot of the time the audience doesn't even really take full note of it.
Further, I think the most likely use of AI tech here will initially will be via the drafting and drawing board process. The AI kicks out options, and that acts as a spark for humans who look at it.
And further still, any image an animator or artist wants to change ... they can still change. A professional illustrator or artist or whoever can take any image, human or AI, and make modifications to it. Maybe the image is great except for some little things. They could spend months having the hand animated teams redo that stuff for a high level guy to then tweak and approve and play back-and-forth with them over, or they could have the computer run overnight and then the guy comes in next morning and has the day to fiddle with tweaks.
Change is scary. I get it. A lot of people who like what they do are worried about not being paid to do it anymore.
But Hollywood has always churned through people. They capitalize on the dreams of "working in Hollywood" to not pay what they might have to if, say, working in Hollywood was considered the same as staffing a remote arctic oil field or deep sea factory fishing trawler. Which is to say, for every anyone who gives up on Hollywood, more than just that departure is waiting to step in and have their shot.
With animation, it's always been incredibly labor intensive. The corporate biography of the Walt Disney company, for example, talks about how switching away from Walt's vision of all animation all the time saved the company. Because it was taking years to produce feature length animation films. They needed revenue, and live action gave them that in a timely manner because a feature could be shot in a couple of months, then edited and prepped and released in a couple more.
Why is no one doing feature length traditional hand drawn animation now? Cost. No one wants to pay scores of artists to draw in the traditional manner for several years to produce all the frames needed for a feature. Heck, no one really wants to pay for them to do it for a four minute cartoon, much less a feature. They all use CG animation because it's cheaper, and use CG production techniques even when they bring in hand animators for some aspects for the same reasons.
I miss Don Bluth. He had a dream, and it was to do feature length animation projects. He was pretty darned good at it. But his star faded because his projects didn't earn back. Which is a shit reason to write off a creative type, but the money pays for the art. That's pretty much how it's always been, and AI is not the reason for it.
AI could save it though. Maybe.
One of the ideas in the back of my head is some pro animation team taking an AI art program, and project training it on all their key frames and hero character art and all of that. The stuff the big names on the team would draw, while the scores of people listed in the parts of the credits no one ever really reads does the bulk of it. Grinding it out while those big names get to be creative.
They train the project AI on their best bits. The style and look of the project. Is it bright, is it gritty, how angular, all the seventeen million things that could tweak how art looks. Represented by the art they give it to emulate.
Then they keep doing that, while the program team starts having the AI churn out what they need for the project. The animator team reviews and tweaks and revises, sometimes altering, sometimes ordering regenerations.
I have a feeling, once AI programs are a bit more commercial and a bit less hobby/laboratory mode, we might get some projects that look more like that lauded lost yesteryear of glory animation. How quickly could a Pixar level bank of computers generate a Secret of Nimh kind of film? I bet way less than the ~30months Wikipedia lists Nimh having taken by hand.
If the computer churns for a year, and the team spends their time tweaking and finding the magic instead of cranking out iterative frames of background stuff and getting yelled at for taking too long, that's the kind of thing that could be economical. Which could bring back a lot of animation styles we don't get anymore because they're not economical.
Or, we could scream the sky is falling and bury our heads in the sand waiting to feel the thump on our asses.
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Comment on Key moments from landmark US Supreme Court arguments on Donald Trump’s immunity claims in ~news
DavesWorld Link ParentImpeachment (with a corresponding vote-to-convict) is the mechanism designed to address this. Unfortunately, like everything else in the modern implementation and practice of the American...- Exemplary
Impeachment (with a corresponding vote-to-convict) is the mechanism designed to address this. Unfortunately, like everything else in the modern implementation and practice of the American Constitution, there are many, many, many people not acting in good faith.
What does that mean, good faith? Consider impeachment. If a President takes illegal actions, the proper response is for Congress to step in. That's one of the points of Congress; to act as a counterbalance to the Presidency, and the Supreme Court is to act as a counterbalance to them both. In theory they all balance the government so it functions.
But the whole process assumes good faith. That all actors within the system are not seeking to abuse the rules for self gain, or to avoid the rules, or to circumvent restrictions and problems. Without good faith, impeachment is either abused for malicious purposes, or not enacted when a potential impeachment target has political allies who can block the impeachment.
Note, political allies. Who would be acting for political purposes. Not for factual ones, or good faith ones. Simply out of an "own team" reason. Trump was impeached, barely, but the vote whet along party lines. As was the vote to convict in the Senate, which prevented him from being removed from office.
That's not good faith. Trump did things, and they seem to meet the general definition of bad actions and bad leadership. Of leadership and character and activities that are anti-American, against the best interests of the Nation as a whole. Jimmy Carter, as one famous example, gave up control over personal assets (modest though they were) simply to avoid the appearance of financial impropriety that might lead to even an assumption he was acting in bad faith.
Meanwhile, Trump did everything but issue an official directive under the Presidential Seal that anyone visiting Washington had better be staying in one of his properties (which he financially benefits from). Which is one of the least of the things he did that are arguably impeachable. Which he was not punished for by removal from office, simply due to bad faith actors in Congress shielding him from any consequences.
One of the points mentioned in the article, raised by conservative Justices, was "well if a President isn't absolutely immune, he can be politically punished by vindictive prosecution."
That's ultimately a separate issue, and they damn well know it. The point of a trial is to find facts and determine truth, and then take steps based on that. Can the trial process be abused? Oh most certainly. Which is another example of bad faith actions. A prosecutor anywhere in the country can more or less decide, on a whim as long as that whim has some paperwork behind it, to indict someone. And use that indictment to proceed to trial. Forcing that person to stand for trial.
Which is where checks and balances supposedly come back into it. Because those exact things happened in England and Europe back in the 1600s and 1700s. The Forefathers knew this, hated it, and tried to build a system with balance. Which is why there's a judge, who can rule on things and ride herd over the trial. And why there's a jury of your peers who can decide whatever they want, regardless of what the prosecutor or even judge would want.
It doesn't matter what a prosecutor rolls into court with. They can back up endless semi-trailers full of evidence, even actual truthful evidence. The fact is, in American criminal jurisprudence, if the jury votes not to convict, the defendant is not guilty under the law. Reference OJ Simpson as an extremely high profile example.
So while standing trial is a burden and hardship, especially if you don't have means to hire a high priced (and presumably highly skilled, since they're charging so much) legal team to manage your defense, it's still better than letting a prosecutor or judge unilaterally decide guilt or innocence. And it's better than anything else we've come up with, since the jury of ordinary people (your "peers") is less likely to show up with the kind of motive a bad faith prosecutor or judge might be burdened with.
As for power, that's why power is so Goddamned dangerous! It's power. That's why we call it power. It gives you power. And bad faith actors abuse power. That's what someone acting in bad faith does. They'll act out of selfish need, greed, malicious intent, and a whole host of negative things that have nothing to do with the good of the nation or the welfare of the citizens or the health of the government or anything positive.
Like Trump does constantly.
None of this shit would apply to a good faith President. Someone who acts in good faith, who stops to consider the appearance of impropriety, of illegality. A President who shapes their every official act (whatever they might think or even say in private) with a fundamental goal of upholding the faith and trust the American people place in them after having elected them. A President who seeks to be a good President, rather than simply just being a winner who wins and is immune to consequences.
The American Right Wing of politics has descended into extremism. Many, many, within it truly believe to their core that their intentions for the nation, the things they wish to do, are correct and everyone else is wrong. Not just wrong, dangerously wrong. And because they believe this so strongly, it's become fanaticism.
Now, if they believed as they do, but acted in good faith, we'd all be fine. The Right Wing would stand up and argue their points, debate them, present them, all within the framework of the American political system. If they didn't see their desires codified into law or official act, they'd just try again later as would be their right. But the debate would moderate things, the need to find consensus would moderate it. That's why we vote; to find consensus.
But they don't act in good faith. They're fanatics. They believe so strongly in their desires that they're willing to lie, cheat, steal, sometimes even kill. They're willing to defraud the entire nation, abuse millions and tens of millions of people ... anything that gets a win. That puts them any step closer to being able to enact their political wishes.
And under that mindset, they don't give a fuck about Trump. In fact, punishing Trump damages the extremist Right's cause. They need someone like him to push through to the place they want American taken; a place where they're in charge.
They don't want democracy. Which is defined by voting. Why do we vote? If I want vanilla and you want chocolate, the group can argue and hate each other, or we can vote. Maybe vanilla wins, maybe chocolate wins; and either way, the group can vote again next time.
The Right doesn't see it that way. They see that as an affront. Worse, as a crime; just one they can't actually charge you with. Though they very badly want to. When they want to close the border, or remove women's rights or voting rights, or round up non-Right citizens, or any of the other things they're eagerly pursuing, they see that as their just due. Because they believe that strongly their way is the one and only way.
It's textbook fanaticism.
They can't allow Trump to be held accountable. They need him to be reelected, and do what they now very much expect him to do.
Which is remove the rule of law officially.
All of this is why it's not melodramatic to say we're on the verge of civil war. That's what war is; a failure of diplomacy. A failure to find non-violent means of resolving a disagreement.
The places the Right wants to take us have a non-zero chance of triggering that war. But that doesn't matter, because they're right. And if they can get Trump back in office, they'll have a chance to have control of the military.
Now it's really fashionable for anti-gun people to assume the US Military is invulnerable, but that's not the case. Especially not in a civil war scenario. Looking at the history of American military deployments over the last century bears out how an opponent doesn't need tanks and fighter-bombers to resist.
Further, if Trump (or any fanatic leader) orders US units to fire into crowds of US citizens, deploy into US towns and round up US citizens to be taken to internment camps is going to accelerate that civil war. The idea of being a soldier is to simply obey, but each and every soldier is a person with a brain and morals. Some are not going to do the things the Right wants.
So there'll be units fighting amongst themselves, with tanks and fighter bombers and rifles and fuel air explosives and all that. That's what civil war means. It doesn't mean "the military" is a monolith faction that will just kowtow to the leader. Some of them won't. Some of them will join the resistance. Some of them will be engaged by fanatic fellow soldiers, which is why when the war starts it's likely going to start with news of units fracturing apart as some soldiers decide "yes, finally, we get to kick ass" and other soldiers decide "hold the fuck up; this is illegal, immoral, and just flat wrong."
Good faith on the part of SCOTUS and Congress and the Presidency, and indeed on the part of candidates and parties, would head all this off. But good faith is part of history. No one acts in good faith anymore. They're too busy trying to win.
And damn the consequences. Just win baby.
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Comment on Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed in ~tech
DavesWorld Link ParentThere actually was a period, before 1993ish, up to about maybe 1995, where ads were super rare online. I mean really rare. And when ads started showing up, there were years of upheaval and...There actually was a period, before 1993ish, up to about maybe 1995, where ads were super rare online. I mean really rare. And when ads started showing up, there were years of upheaval and questions and media pieces about the whole thing. But the marketing folks persisted, kept waving money, and everyone just ... kind of ... let it happen. And now ads are everything unless you run an ad blocker.
And some marketers and even some tech companies (Google, which has turned itself into a giant marketing firm) are looking for ways to ban or eliminate ad block because it's not fair they can't earn every possible cent off your eyeballs, back, and balls.
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Comment on Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed in ~tech
DavesWorld Link ParentThat's what marketing people do; look for anything involving people, and then figure out how to inject advertising into it. The whole process is insane, and stupid. Think about it. You have...This sort of thing almost make me depressed with how the internet is devolving into an adinfested dystopia.
That's what marketing people do; look for anything involving people, and then figure out how to inject advertising into it. The whole process is insane, and stupid.
Think about it. You have something, like a bar or a community gathering. A place or an event where people come together. Now, it's almost guaranteed that this thing, this event, did not form because they want to learn about new goods, products, and services. Even if they're a hobby group of some kind, they probably formed because they enjoy their hobby (whatever it is). But it's probably just a, you know, gathering. Organic. Probably even fun.
Now, what happens is other people start showing up at the gathering. They come into the bar, they drive up for the gardening club or hang gliding group or whatever. But, unlike everyone else, all they do is want to sell you shit. "Hey, have you heard about this thing you could buy? This service you could get? I can tell you more; in fact, I will right now."
Who would let that guy keep coming? The bar patrons would make the bartender kick him out. In fact, most actual real world establishments (at least in America) almost invariably have "no soliciting" signs up specifically so some marketing person who's begging or selling or informing or proselytizing or whatever can't protest they didn't know when they're ejected.
But everything else in life is just overwhelmed by marketing dicks. Whatever it is, they're like "oooh, we could take that the fuck over, use it to sell. Cool, who can we sell our selling services to?" They're like damn cockroaches. Baseball game starts up on the weekends, Joe turns up wanting you to buy lawncare or lawn equipment from him, while Mary's trying to sell cosmetics, Frida has a line of sports equipment she'll tell you about, and Harry has all the latest news about the new movie coming out next week (and will help you preorder tickets on the spot).
We put up with this. People just let it happen. Worse, anyone who does make something that draws people is like "oh shit, I can cash it." So they do. Their group or gathering or whatever invites marketers in (for a fee), and now it's a marketing event.
The originator sells out (literally, that's what the term means), counts his payday, and meanwhile the group or whatever just sinks and slides and slumps until it's not a thing anymore. Because what was cool about it isn't cool anymore, since all that happens is "hey, buy this now. Would you like to know more? Hold still, here's more. Wait, don't not listen, that's not right; you have to listen, and you have to buy because we pay for all this you ad blocking asshole."
Then the thing isn't a thing anymore, but that's okay because they just move on to screw over the next thing.
The joke used to be "first, we kill all the lawyers." As insane as it is to contemplate, I think marketers might actually be worse. Lawyers don't hover on your damn doorstep. Sure if you end up in the hospital or the mechanic's shop there might be a couple who turn up offering their services, but you might actually even need them then. Meanwhile, everything under the sun, a marketing person is like "opportunity for me to corrupt it."
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Comment on What if we discover the answers of the Universe, eliminate cancer, halt aging. What's next? in ~humanities
DavesWorld LinkI love Star Trek, but in some ways it's always been a bit unrealistic. Roddenberry's vision was of a future where humanity was happy to help and collaborate with one another. A content humanity...- Exemplary
I love Star Trek, but in some ways it's always been a bit unrealistic. Roddenberry's vision was of a future where humanity was happy to help and collaborate with one another. A content humanity that had no internal conflict. Which is a lovely thing to think of, but doesn't seem likely when you consider the nature of humans.
A book I read years ago illustrates this I think. The book postulated the invention of an absolute Truth Machine. One that's not fallible. One that no one can beat, defeat, evade, nada.
If you're near a TM and talking, it knows whether or not you're speaking truthfully. It knows if you're hiding something. And, it certainly knows if you're lying. The machine just knows. These machines are miniaturized until they're eventually wristwatch sized. People wear them just like watches, and it has little lights that illuminate so you can see if who you're talking to is being Truthful. Idiot proof, and in the event of an idiot, you can just go to a public Truth Machine and talk there.
The book spends a ton of time exploring how society changes with this machine. One of the postulates concerns negotiations. Consider how they work now. You go to buy something with a contract, which requires negotiation. Say a house. Right now, you just don't know what you're not being told. Is the house constructed well, with quality materials and workmanship that didn't cut corners? Is the foundation solid? What problems lurk in this house that will unveil months or years down the road?
So when you negotiate, you have all this in mind. You have to keep it all in mind. You use those fears to try to help drive the price down. One of the reasons someone would want to in good faith reduce what they pay is fear of being lied to, tricked, taken advantage of; so aside from greed and so on, you want to pay less because you assume shit will happen later that will cost you to resolve the issue(s). And sellers just want the most money possible.
With a TM, all uncertainty and deception, especially malicious deception, is utterly eliminated. With a TM, two parties exchange information on the proposed deal (whatever it might be). And after working through, truthfully, all other issues that might apply, you eventually get down to price. And with absolute truth in play, that final price exchange looks something like this:
Each began by formally declaring, "I have reviewed and now understand all of my company's calculations, and have confirmed both their accuracy and objectivity using (Truth Machine) on all parties involved. I am aware of no undisclosed facts that could affect either company.
The buyer: "We've calculated the value and related costs and are willing to pay as much as $220 annually per unit, if necessary."
The seller: "One of your competitors offered us $172, but you have (various market advantages) which will help sell more units. Therefore, we're willing to sell the (item) for as little as $126, if necessary."
The Truth Machine, James L Halperin
Then they simply split the difference and they're done. Both know they didn't get fucked over, and they both know the deal they arrived at is equally fair to them both. Unlike today when even years, decades sometimes, after a deal you wonder who got fucked, how, and why.
Humanity in its current state is just too consumed with greed. All kinds of greed. It's not just greed for money or power, it's greed for prestige, position, advantage. People are greedy for having the biggest slice of cake. They want the corner office simply because it's considered to be "the best." All sorts of greed threads all throughout humanity. Big greed, little greed, puzzling greed, stupid greed, dangerous and malicious greed.
So if we eliminate aging and cancer and install nanotech medicine that makes us immortal, if we institute utopian technologies that manufacture whatever anyone might desire at the press of a button at a trivial cost that doesn't impose on anyone, there are still going to be greedy assholes wandering around wanting more.
It's nice to think, dream really, that in a world without fear and blessed with an abundance of plenty such that any conceivable material want (not need, want) is provided that people will let go of their greed.
But I'd have to see it to believe it. And it only takes one, just one greedy asshole, to throw that wonderful dreamy reality into chaos. One guy who just isn't satisfied with enough, that he wants more. What more does he want? He wants to be more important, or in charge, or the most special. She wants more friends, or a nicer island to live on. Whatever they want, they want more of it, and even with endless largess some people just, want, more.
Look at millionaires and billionaires right now. There are people walking around that have banked billions who don't stop. Who just keep earning. We're not just talking generational wealth at this point, we're talking end of the universe wealth. Money piles that, thanks to capitalism, will never diminish unless some descendant takes it as a personal challenge to spend it faster than compounding investment interest can pile it up.
And they keep earning. They keep moving and shaking, they keep cheating and lying and stealing, they keep closing deals and buying people out and just taking more. People who have demonstrated an utter lack of acknowledgement of any sort of concept involving "enough." If they had enough, they'd stop. But they don't. They just keep taking.
These are people who live in humanity. If we invent all those magic things that eliminate all the issues with life, first the unwashed masses will have to fight past all the obstacles greedy people will throw up. When everyone has what they need, that's anti-capitalism. Which is a system that needs people to need things. To fear not having things. Things like food and medicine and shelter. Anything. Capitalism doesn't function as designed if people have enough.
But even assuming we win those wars, and the magic is deployed across humanity so everyone has enough, there are just people who don't understand that concept. Those people will meddle and problem-cause and even bring it all crashing down, simply because they can and want to. Because they can't countenance a world where those unwashed masses aren't bowing to them, needing them.
People like that are always going to be the problem. Whatever utopia we see on our horizon, those people don't want it and will work to prevent it. What they will work towards is any sort of world where they're special, valuable, and lauded.
Some people just have to be unique. Can't accept that they're not singular and of importance (in their own eyes) to the rest of us. Those people will always bring things crashing down simply so they get to be special.
So I doubt we'll ever get to a utopia. As depressing as it is, something like Warhammer 40K is a more likely outcome for humanity. In the far future, there is only war. Because it's in our nature to destroy ourselves.
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Comment on US Congress approves bill banning TikTok unless Chinese owner ByteDance sells platform in ~tech
DavesWorld Link ParentWhat should happen is data not being weaponized, economized, against consumers and citizens. Obviously, that won't be addressed. This is what regulatory capture looks like. The many companies busy...What should happen is data not being weaponized, economized, against consumers and citizens.
Obviously, that won't be addressed. This is what regulatory capture looks like. The many companies busy collecting and selling information are making sure Congress doesn't meddle. They use the profits and proceeds from all that data revenue to keep Congress critters, staffers, courts, agencies, agency staffers, and so on, they keep all those people on the payroll in some form. To make sure no meddling happens.
With TikTok, clearly the governments' data people eventually figured out all of TikTok's data was going to China. The US government figured it out and said "oh my, um, problem!" while the Chinese government figured it out and said "oh my, opportunity!" And China only gives a shit about China, which they've spent literally centuries demonstrating. Currently they're a somewhat hostile, somewhat xenophobic, possibly expansionist government. All a recipe for international conflict of some form.
One of the reasons all our data (individual consumers') needs to be firewalled and screened off to prevent it being used against us is what's happening with TikTok. All that data could be used to make money, which is what Facebook and Twitter and Microsoft and Google and Apple and about five dozen other companies do with it. Or, or rather and, that data can also be used to shape opinion.
It's one thing for opinion to be shaped to favor Apple, or favor a new VR headset, or annoying bullshit like that. It's quite another matter entirely for data to be used to shape global politics from the bottom up, which is what China has, is, and will be using it for. It's what Russa has been doing for several decades, and has gotten pretty good at in the past decade. China's doing it too now. Basically, every country's going to be doing it. Fucking Micronesia will be doing it, just it'll take them a little longer to spin up, and they probably won't be able to have the sway (resources) to elevate themselves to being the Crown Jewel of the Planet in the public's eyes.
We're past the era where you have to have your diplomats yell at their diplomats. Now we're in an era where your Office of Information takes a directive to ensure Government Initiative XYZ improves its favorables in the public image. Foreign public, domestic public, whatever. OI then does that, using all that data to shape and mold and tug public opinion accordingly.
No one should be doing it. But like AI it's out of the bag. The US government is doing it, even if they won't admit it. Right now they're probably only doing it a little to Americans, but that's not gonna hold. It's too much power, too alluring to disregard.
Political campaigns are starting to do it; that's one of the things some of AOC's crop of Congresscritters have been railing against their parties about. They're of the Information generation, having cut their teeth on Social Media, and have used their new ways to obtain office. Soon enough it'll be all the government departments. Sure it's sweet to think the Department of the Interior might use that power to ensure National Parks continue to be treasured and beloved by Americans, but the exact same power can ensure people who object to a new policy initiative, or a war, are shaped out of being opposition before they even have a chance to build an opposition movement.
Denying foreign governments direct access into American citizens via TikTok is, however distasteful, a matter of national security. Yes it sucks that our government is going to use that power against us, but that's a separate issue from letting China or Russia have such direct access. Sure they can get some of it, maybe even most of it, indirectly via the free market by purchasing it; but it complicates the path from source to them. Makes it more possible to monitor and measure what they're getting, when, how often, and makes it possible to become aware of what initiatives they're trying to use it all for.
What's probably going to happen over the next quarter century is every government does something similar. Every European Union country, for example, (if not the EU as a whole, as a directive to member countries), will probably attempt to set up guardrails and such to control what data about their people leaves the country. That might mean banning some large international companies, but it could just mean those companies each have to set up in-country offices to funnel their data through, or something vaguely in that ballpark.
But right now, TikTok is an arm of the Chinese Government. There is no private in China. The shit they do to their citizens is already bad enough. Letting them have an easy way to do it to Americans is not in American interests. It just isn't. If they want to do things with that data, they need to work harder to get it, one way or another. We shouldn't be standing by letting it be easy for them.
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Comment on Self published authors, how do you market your books? Nothing I've tried has had any success. in ~creative
DavesWorld Link ParentMost eplatforms (Amazon and Smashwords are the ones I'm primarily thinking of) make "free" an option that's free for the author. So it doesn't cost you anything to give away e-copies. The most...Most eplatforms (Amazon and Smashwords are the ones I'm primarily thinking of) make "free" an option that's free for the author. So it doesn't cost you anything to give away e-copies.
The most reliable way for any one person to decide they might read a book is a personal recommendation from someone they know. However, one of the most reliable ways after that is for the author to write more books.
Each book in the catalog (and it doesn't matter that they're all not in a series; they can all be standalone from one another) is an entry into that catalog. What's one of the first things a lot of readers do after they finish a book they liked? They look for more from that author.
I'm not accusing you of this, but I'm saying it's a very common expectation and conclusion from new authors. Namely, that the book will lead to wealth and fame and perfection. Short answer: no. There are authors who are extremely well known in their genres, with dozens of books, multiple series ... and they're not only unknown outside their genre, but are not rich. They don't have fuck you money. They don't have "time to retire" money. They're cranking books out because they need to.
I mention all that because I've repeatedly run into newer authors who struggled so hard to get "their book" finished. Their book meaning the one, the only. They ran that marathon (in their view) at great personal effort and now it's time to cash in. It's a super common expectation from new authors. They feel they've done a ton of work, and should be rewarded. Because writing their book was hard for them.
The reader doesn't care. Not only are there no points for second place, there are no participation trophies either. Everyone on this planet has dozens of things they could chose to do for fun right now. Only one of them is reading, and only one of the reading choices is to read your book. Most readers know this, and are mostly looking for a reason to read a particular book, rather than a reason not to read it. They'll toss it aside pretty quick if it doesn't catch them, and move on to the next from their list.
Marketing is a whole thing. It's distasteful and slimy and manipulative down to its very core, but it's the only way other than genuine viral sensation to spread the word. And as greedy and evil as marketing often is (unless the marketers involved take specific effortful steps to not be greedy or evil, which is rare), it's also a mysterious and murky skillset. To do it successfully, parts of it are effort, parts are skill, parts are knowledge and foresight, and parts are luck.
For years Traditional Publishing has been trotting out this party line that they're good at it. They're not. They pay for a review from Publisher's Weekly, add it to their list of titles they email off to bookstores, and that's it. They don't specialize in marketing. They often don't even have marketing departments, and they certainly don't have skilled marketers working for them.
When you think of skilled marketing, PR, you think of Hollywood or Political Operatives. Compared to those, trad pubs are grade school t-ball game level, so when a trad says "we bring value" to a budding author, they're fucking lying. They don't even really bring marketing of any kind to bear for their "big names"; they just call newspapers, and TV/radio stations asking if an interview is wanted.
The only authors mainstream media will give time to are the authors who already don't need that time. Meaning, they're already successful; that's why mainstream wants them on the show or in the article. John Grisham gets a bit of a bump when Good Morning America or whoever the fuck gives him six minutes to try to be amusing and talk up his latest release, but Grisham was already going to sell many, many copies anyway.
Trads don't see the irony in this. They don't see how they could build a marketing department that specializes in helping their authors be discovered, and don't do the first thing that would accomplish that discoverability. Since indie authors don't even have the myth of "help from your publisher" to lull them into a false sense of confidence, they've started looking for options. But, as you might have already started to find, marketing is as divorced from writing as ballroom dancing is from a tractor pull.
And everyone wants free marketing. Which doesn't exist unless the book goes viral and all those mouths start talking up words about it to other ears in range. That's free, but that's also super rare.
You give a book away because it's an entry into your catalog. You give it away to remove the "yeah, but it's X dollars to get it" barrier. If it's free, they're more likely to download it. And after that, they're more likely to read it. At that point, first line and first paragraph and first chapter equations all come into play, along with genre and character and plot, giving you a chance to keep them reading.
Short version, if your firsts can get them to the second chapter, and get them interested enough to decide they want to keep turning pages, you might get them to finish. If the book can keep them reading through to the end, there's a chance they'll buy another of your books. There's even a chance they'll become a fan, and would not just be very likely to get your catalog, but also be looking for your next new release.
The cheapest marketing you can get as an indie is placement on the Hot Lists at Amazon, who sells one out of every two books purchased in America. Their lists are very granular, starting with "best seller" as tabulated across the entire platform, and then dialing down into the genres from broad to very narrow (think SciFi vs SciFi/Apocalypse vs SciFi/Apocalypse/Zombie, for example). Sales are what rank books on those lists, and that's where a good portion of readers will scroll at least sometimes when they're looking to buy.
The release is the easiest and most likely period in a book's life where sales can be concentrated. The more fans who exist, who are eagerly awaiting the release of a title, the more purchases can get condensed down into that period of time. If you have a thousand purchases spread over a year, that does very little for a book's sales visibility. If eight hundred of those thousand purchases happen within a week (hopefully within a day or two), that can place a book on one of those lists.
There's no magic free marketing sauce. Well, unless you're just not only that charming, but also that popular and know that many people personally. Then you have access to some free marketing. If you know a thousand people who love you, and have managed to write something that's not a piece of shit, you probably can use your charm to talk most of them into buying a copy.
You see this constantly in the way not just trads, but a lot of creative industries operate now. Hollywood operates this way, for example; even though Hollywood rarely makes a movie they're not going to then invest millions (sometimes hundreds of millions) of dollars more in to market after it's finished. But they still want personalities who have "personal platforms."
One of the reasons The Rock, for example, continues to command huge paychecks is he has tens of millions of social media followers (which he has because he is that charming). The same calculus applies to smaller actors, and authors too. Maybe an up-and-coming actor or director or writer doesn't have nine or ten digit follower counts, but even thousands of followers has value and companies are more willing to collaborate with someone who has such a platform than they are to a pure artiste' who only does the work.
Which is why you see a lot of successful indie authors with social media platforms. Which is why you see so many podcasts and authors and everyone under the sun who's online begging for you to join their mailing lists and Discords and Twitters and whatever.
Some of them are good at social media building, but some of them have hired people to do it for them. It's a marketing skillset, and when done correctly can build a nobody (or a struggling author) into a somebody whose followers can show up and buy a book, boosting it on The Lists, which makes it more discoverable to unsuspecting readers.
Few people are that charming though, or know that many other people. And few know, or want to, know how to boost their social media presence to something that can be relevant. Or want to pay for it.
This is what the power of social media can do. Turns lemons into a fucking empire, not a single forgotten pitcher of lemonade.
The rest of the author community relies on trying to figure out marketing. Most give up and just keep writing. Some manage to find workman success as they continue to crank out books in a genre where fans are hungry. A lot of genres that exist today didn't really so much even a decade ago, because trads thought "there was no market." Turns out, if you feed the beast, the beast will eat. Readers who want their particular flavor of jam will show up with tongues out, eager for a taste of something they have a hard time finding anywhere else.
Look, it sucks. Okay. It just does. I know it does. Most people will agree that it does. Even as most readers still look for the exact results that only come from marketing, they hate it and think it's complicated and expensive and manipulative. But few authors are going to go viral. The ones who have, you know their names already. They went viral. Grisham, Child, Rowling, Sanderson, King, Steele, among others.
Nothing about those big names means they're great authors. It just means they went viral, and popularity feeds into itself. Once you're known, it's much easier to stay known and pick up newcomers to add to the "who knows me" array. It's not writing skill that goes viral, or that finds success. Something else that pisses people off, but it's true.
Popularity with creativity is fickle, elusive, and almost random at times. You can never figure out what's going to catch on and rocket up to the top of consciousness. Your choices are to dig into marketing, which takes time and money (usually money, and the less money you're spending the more time it'll cost).
Or ... you write the next book.
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Comment on Why do negative topics dominate social media sites, even here? in ~tech
DavesWorld Link ParentIn a literary (storytelling) context, conflict doesn't mean fighting, arguing, and that sort of thing. It can, but what it actually means is obstacles. Issues. Problems. None of those things have...- Exemplary
In a literary (storytelling) context, conflict doesn't mean fighting, arguing, and that sort of thing. It can, but what it actually means is obstacles. Issues. Problems.
None of those things have to be Huge or Dramatic or Violent, but an interesting story character can't be interesting if they go from A to B to C in a straight line without any bobbles whatsoever. The bobbles make it fun and interesting, it's not the getting to B or C that makes it fun for readers or viewers. The audience enjoys it more if it feels earned, and straight lines without issues or hindrances feel like a gift. A gimmie.
If a lovely single woman who works as a florist lives alone, and dreams of traveling the world but never does because she always convinces herself of some reason why she can't ... that's conflict. It's internal to her.
Her story doesn't have to have a single character anywhere who argues with her, or puts her down, impedes her, or anything else. No mustachio twirling villains need to be present, no evil aggressors, for there to be conflict when she (again) sighs and doesn't actually buy the tickets for a trip or get in the car to drive off on one.
All the conflict would be her against herself. Her giving herself excuses why she can't go, shouldn't go, won't go. Reasons, however believable or not. She tells herself the shop needs to stay open, that she has flowers about to bloom that'll need tending or they'll wither and die. Maybe she has a few touchstone customers she chats with and feels like she'd miss them, or they her, if she were to jet off to wherever for a week or two.
The story here could be about how she'll want to travel, has always wanted to travel, but never does. Why not? Why doesn't she just go? What stops her? Oh, just herself? Why doesn't she get out of her own way and go after this thing she says she loves and wants, instead of just dreaming about it and never actually doing anything to engage in it?
She's her own obstacle. Her parents, neighbors, customers, everyone can always want her to go travel and enjoy a little piece of her dream, even offer and attempt to help her, but she just shows up in the shop, day after day, never going. All those people can be lovely and polite and helpful and anything but villains, and the story still has conflict because Flora the Florist says one thing (I long to travel) but always does another (but I won't go anywhere).
Flora is in her own way, and while she doesn't have to change necessarily, she would have to spend the story examining herself and taking the reader along her journey of dreaming but never doing. At the end of the story she can get on a plane and start traveling, and that's one ending. Or she could stay at the shop, and decide she's okay with that, and that'd be another. But along the way, we'd be there with Flora as she thinks and reacts and decides.
If you go on vacation, and it's just perfect and lovely in every respect, when you come back your friends and family will listen to your story of "oh it was great, and we had tons of fun, and it was all so lovely" politely enough, but it's dull.
If your friend comes back from a horror show, you're interested. Heck, if your friend comes back with a tale of "well, it was nice but one night the fire alarm went off, and we weren't dressed, then they wouldn't let us back in to get dressed, and a local news photographer was there taking pictures and we didn't want to be in the paper in our PJs..." well, you're obviously not thrilled your friend had a not-great night.
But you are more interested in hearing about that night than you are about the other six where it was all "we woke up, we laid out on the beach, went dancing at the club after dinner, had fabulous sex and fell asleep in each other's arms, and that was it." You're happy they had fun, but there's just nothing there that feels interesting. That fire alarm night though, that feels interesting and you'd probably talk to them an hour about just that, and maybe five minutes about the rest.
The bobbles, the obstacles, and how someone overcomes them, are interesting. And in many instances are often the only really interesting thing. Everyone's got problems, and it's fun to hear how someone else (even a fictional someone else) deals with their problems. None of those problems have to be Uber Dramatic or Earth Shattering, but there do have to be issues and obstacles (however small and slight) that must be addressed. The addressing is the part that'll help hook the audience, and allow the character(s) to showcase themselves.
Mary Poppins, for example. She's practically perfect in every way. But she's a great problem solver, and watching her fix things is fun. If the whole movie was Poppins being perfect, and running her clients' lives just as perfectly without issue, no one would care about Poppins. With some issues for Poppins to resolve, she becomes interesting. We care about her qualities, because we look forward to seeing new aspects of her, and how she'll use the ones we already know about for the latest bobble she's trying to steady.
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Comment on Is Tildes failing to thrive? in ~tildes
DavesWorld Link ParentThe way this forum presents threads helps tremendously. By automatically highlighting new entries, and literally minimizing large chunks of the older ones (that, presumably, someone returning to...The way this forum presents threads helps tremendously. By automatically highlighting new entries, and literally minimizing large chunks of the older ones (that, presumably, someone returning to the thread already went through) it encourages ongoing attention.
Contrast to Reddit, where it's only popularity that rises by default. And that popularity is set within the first hour of any thread that gets more than a handful of responses.
I used to test it out, until I satisfied myself that's how it worked on Reddit. If you get into a thread immediately, your posts have a chance to be at the top where they'll continue to gather votes by default since most people see them. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy on Reddit, that the earliest posts are the ones that are extremely likely to be the "highest voted." It has only a little to do with the post itself, and a lot to do with when the post was made.
Meanwhile, on Tildes, you can stumble into a necro thread and get engagement when you post. Threads here aren't over thirty or sixty minutes after they go up. Sometimes they're only starting to get truly interesting after a few days, as people come and go and lines of discussion form.
I see a thread here that has dozens and dozens of responses, it's almost always because a lot of actual content has been contributed. Meanwhile, on Reddit, any popular thread is just full of meme shit, lame jokes, stupid empty contextless quotes from wherever. The bigger the thread, the higher the noise.
And that's by design, because for all Reddit used to be a bit different, they're basically just one more social media company living off the churn now. They have no interest in quality posts, just posts. Anything, as long as people are clicking and sometimes typing. It shows the advertisers and sponsors and tie-in companies there's an audience for the shit those entities pay for.
In some ways, I think Reddit might be improving from the supposed bot infestation there. Used to be, a bot was just like those old "10 Print "hello" 20 Goto 10" programs you learned to write in basic computers in school back during the 80s. The bots posted lame shit, poorly, and it was obvious. With LLMs presumably getting tied into these things, if nothing else the stuff bot accounts are coming up with to post is starting to get better, more interesting, than the absolute crap most Redditors throw up.
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Comment on Scientists push new paradigm of animal consciousness, saying even insects may be sentient in ~enviro
DavesWorld LinkGerrold likely cribbed that quote from somewhere, because it's far from a unique sentiment, but that series is where I first heard it. And always what I think of when this kind of subject comes..."Mother nature doesn't give a shit." David Gerrold, from The War against the Chtorr
Gerrold likely cribbed that quote from somewhere, because it's far from a unique sentiment, but that series is where I first heard it. And always what I think of when this kind of subject comes up.
I question the motives of those scientists. They're claiming consciousness exists in many, probably most based on the article, members of the animal and insect kingdoms.
“When there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal,” the declaration says. “We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.”
Their point seems to be, without perhaps outright saying it, that PETA and similar animal rights viewpoints are the correct one, and everyone should hew to those rules of behavior. Namely, no use of animals or animal products for reasons of morality.
Okay, so that's a viewpoint. But, let us think for perhaps a moment or three? If animals are conscious, and that makes it immoral to do or use them in basically any way ... what does that make predators? If animals are conscious, predators are animals. That'd mean they have some understanding of their actions. Are wolves, lions, bears, any predator animal/insect immoral? Are they evil? Should they knock that shit off too?
Oh, but wait. They'd more or less die out then. A lot of carnivores need protein diets. Or, at least, don't currently have the instincts to retrain themselves to not hunt and kill, but instead forage for ... what? I'm not sure what a carnivore that relies on meat might be able to "switch" to if it somehow decided its diet is immoral and requires change. And if it even could retrain itself somehow.
Do the scientists have any proof of morality on the part of these supposedly conscious animals? Guilt? Shame? Not generally; specifically related to their "immoral" carnivorous natures. Does a wolf feel shame or guilt for hunting, killing, and eating a deer? And doing a large portion of that activity while the prey is alive? After all, not all prey takedowns die upon falling; it's not entirely uncommon for some of these prey animals to be alive when the victorious hunter begins feeding.
Everything in nature uses a lot of other things that exist in nature. To survive. Much less to grow, thrive, and multiply. Plants grow up and out seeking sunlight, water, nutrients. Plants that have adapted to grow quicker, or broader, are better able to out compete plants that don't; and the shade those victors cast (or the water or nutrients they take for their own use) will hinder (even kill) the lesser plants without those adaptations. Trees will take over and reform many ecosystems, for example; because trees get first crack at the sun.
On our planet, to our scientific knowledge, everything alive kills to survive. Plants extract nutrients from the soil (removing them from the soil, and thus from the possible use of other plants). Plants usually need sun, and some will prevent others from getting it.
Animals evolved to eat the plants. My understanding of evolution indicates animal life (including humans) takes advantage of the efficiency of doing this to make better use of the energy. A food plant takes weeks, months, to grow. So you need a lot of them, but they're all busy collecting that energy in parallel. An animal then comes along and eats the plant, taking the energy.
Some animals eat other animals. This is even more efficient than eating plants. Any cursory look at animal biology tends to show how herbivores are usually less developed than carnivores in various ways; often slower, or less adept either physically or mentally, and so on.
A lot of herbivores need to devote much higher percentages of their time and effort to consuming and digesting food to stay alive, grow, and eventually reproduce. Whereas predators might go days, sometimes weeks, between meals; but those meals are very energy intensive and can sustain them for those hungry times.
Which brings us straight back to this notion of it being immoral to use another entity in this way.
This is not a new debate. Argument really, in my experience; because the people who favor the PETA/vegetarian side of it are often pretty vocal and insistent that they're right. That their side is more moral, more good, less evil, less abusive. They love to tell you that, in fact. They'll preach against anyone who doesn't agree with their moral position quite enthusiastically.
But if most everything (apparently) in the links of the big chain of life above single celled organisms is probably conscious, then that just again calls into question the validity of the "morality" of that pro-animal position.
Again, are we arguing a wolf is evil? Immoral? If we are, then someone start popping the corn because oh my that's an argument for the ages. But if we aren't, if we're not going to rail against predators, then this whole notion is just designed to make humans feel bad for not reverting to an exclusively plant diet. Because, according to the morality being alleged in this case, eating an animal is like eating a person, and thus is not just wrong but evil.
Mother nature doesn't give a shit. You live, you die, whatever happens happens and mom don't care. If you starve to death, bye. Next example of your species needs to do better or else, well, eventually that species isn't around anymore. That's how evolution works; all the everythings compete, and the ones that can't eventually die off due to it. When you can't eat enough to survive, you're history.
I'm not interesting in the omnivore vs herbivore in humanity argument. It's a moral question, and morality is up to individuals. If someone wants to not eat meat, not use animal products, that is that person's individual choice. Just as an omnivore has no right to get in a herbivore's face and trash them for only eating plants, the same works in reverse. If you bother someone, you might find yourself in a competition you didn't plan for, or be able to win in.
Consciousness is an extremely nebulous subject. So is sentience. Some people argue they're the same, some argue they're different (if somewhat related) things entirely. If animals can and do communicate with one another, and if they do so related to their higher order goals and decisions, then they might qualify as conscious on some level.
Which means the predators know they're killing something conscious or sentient. And don't feel hesitation in doing so since I don't think it's exactly common for the "moral" wolf in the pack to have much success in convincing the others to stop chowing down on reindeer. Assuming that non-killing wolf has the energy to keep up with the ones hunting for their next meal.
It also means the prey animals (some of them, if conscious) know they're regular targets by predators. Have we any signs of revolts or uprisings by prey populations? Deer banding together and waging war against wolves, anything like that? Sure some herds have instinctive in-the-moment defensive behaviors, even group defensive behaviors, but the moment their predators make a kill and start eating, the surviving prey don't get revenge or plot to eliminate them.
The deer just go back to eating plants until the next time they might get hunted.
So the whole argument these scientists seem to be trying to start, or at least feed fuel into, doesn't really feel supported by the evidence of life. One way or another, everything kills to survive. Everything. Large or small, mobile or not, everything takes from someone and something else. Usually many someones and somethings. They do it to survive.
Humans are the ones that do it out of greed. But the fact that humans take advantage of their genetic advantages (mobility, opposable thumbs, conscious brains) to use animals in a variety of manners (including as food) to support all those advantages doesn't make humans evil. Or immoral.
It just makes humans more evolved.
Humanity got there first. If it hadn't been us, perhaps some other offshoot of the primate family would be in our shoes. Or perhaps it might be dolphins. Or something the we of today haven't ever met since the we of many yesterdays ago already out competed it and that rival died out.
Mother nature doesn't give a shit. But only something with so much consciousness they have time and energy to devote to things other than survival could come up with a theory like this one. That everything's conscious, and thus immoral for stepping on that which is lesser.
That's a theory born out of an organism with enough time on its hands that it doesn't have to spend all day every day coming up with enough food to make it to tomorrow. From a species that figured out how to out compete the other things on its planet, find efficiencies that free up time to figure things out that free up more time, and so on and so on. Building efficiencies one upon the others, until we get to a point where that entire process is being labeled immoral by those who've benefited from it in the first place.
Perhaps it's not only mother nature who benefits from not giving a shit?
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Comment on Tesla recalls Cybertrucks over accelerator crash risk in ~transport
DavesWorld Link ParentSorry, I can't take it. Friendly reminder follows. Brake. Cars have brakes. Slowing down is braking. Breaking is what happens to language when break is used to indicate brake.Sorry, I can't take it. Friendly reminder follows.
Brake. Cars have brakes. Slowing down is braking.
Breaking is what happens to language when break is used to indicate brake.
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Comment on Trap | Official trailer in ~movies
DavesWorld Link ParentI mean, I was there for all of that. Sixth Sense hit huge. Came out of nowhere, and absolutely blew people away. And everyone turned Shyamalan into "the twist guy." Not just studios, audiences...I mean, I was there for all of that. Sixth Sense hit huge. Came out of nowhere, and absolutely blew people away. And everyone turned Shyamalan into "the twist guy." Not just studios, audiences too.
People started trying to figure out his films just from the trailer. They'd huddle together on forums (which were this thing that existed pre-social media, kind of like Tildes now in many respects) and hunt for clues, propose scenarios. Groups would go to the films and actively dissect them in the first act, figuring this and that out instead of watching the story.
When your audience is demanding you twist them, but refuses to sit back and let the story play out so the twist can happen in the natural course of the story's flow, the whole thing fractures and falls apart. Which is what happened. Every Shyamalan story had to have a twist, and that twist was measured against the one nobody saw coming (Sixth Sense).
Then, when it became common that the group hivemind was figuring twists out even before the movie released, much less in the first half hour, the group hivemind consensus was "Shyamalan sucks, bored now."
My position is simple. Shyamalan is pretty good writer, and he's a pretty good director. The only problem he has is "the twist." You can't sell everything on "the twist." I mean, for fuck's sake, there's been TV shows and stuff where the braintrust behind them got pissed and began struggling to wholesale change entire unreleased episodes just because they saw hivemind posts about their show that had figured things out. That's what people do; they look for spoilers, and spread said spoilers.
One person is not going to out-clever the entire Internet. No matter how hard you work to bury something, how hard you try to obscure it, someone somewhere will figure it out. And it'll spread. Or, worse (and almost more common these days), people will be pissed they didn't figure it out, be pissed they didn't recognize the clues, and complain that "none of it makes sense."
So you're fucked either way as a storyteller. If you somehow manage to be subtle enough to have a twist play out, people accuse you of being lazy and of bad storytelling by not showing your work. But if you do make it obvious enough, they crow about how stupid you are for being lame enough that it's all really obvious.
If people would just watch the stories, the movie or the show, and let shit happen ... I feel most people would have more fun. When the goal is to "figure it out", that doesn't leave much room for watching or fun. It certainly doesn't allow for an organic unforced experience.
Kind of like what happened with Sixth Sense, when in that first two weeks (before the last gasp of monoculture mainstream media caught wind and blew the story up nationally) we all just bought a ticket and sat down to enjoy a movie. Only to gasp in shock as everything that'd been right in front of us the whole time suddenly snapped into clarity with the drop of a ring by someone we didn't realize had been a widow the entire time.
That was a fantastic movie experience.
I'm not sure where the story this trailer seems to tee up is going, but it's interesting. It's got Hartnett who I was just starting to like when he more or less disappeared. It's got Shyamalan, who I still like despite all the hell he's been put through. And the concept of a stadium concert as a sort of holding action for hundreds of cops to somehow find a serial killer in the crowd ... intriguing. I'd like to know more. And I will.
When I watch the movie.
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Comment on How one author pushed the limits of AI copyright | US Copyright Office grants copyright for work made with AI, with caveat in ~tech
DavesWorld LinkDangerous territory they're treading into. Some of those individuals (asshats would be my preferred term) quoted later on in the article are the ones eager to drag the legal system into that...- Exemplary
Dangerous territory they're treading into. Some of those individuals (asshats would be my preferred term) quoted later on in the article are the ones eager to drag the legal system into that dangerous ground.
USCO gave her a copyright on the book as a product, not as a work of art. Meaning, no one else can just grab it, copy whole, and put back up for themselves. However, anyone can take the text of the book and do pretty much whatever they want with it, including derivative work of any kind, free and clear. They would have a much easier time getting a favorable summary judgement if the copyright holder took umbrage and initiated a suit against them, as one example of how narrow and weak this "copyright" is compared to a "normal" one.
Sure it's nice that this specific person apparently put in genuine, honest effort and used an AI generator as an assistive tool. It basically served as her much less expensive ghost writer, and one that would never get upset at her when she (again) insisted on rewriting or revising what she was receiving.
But she could have done all that with voice software; dictating to the computer. Except, you know, she'd actually have to write. She couldn't just say "I need some paragraphs about John and Marsha talking over X" and then pick through what the AI (ghost writer) comes up with to fiddle with. What she did is cute, and is a use for the technology, but what she did wasn't exactly writing.
The problem with where this leads is lawyers, and greed. Lawyers are a problem because they're professional problem makers. That's what they do. They're paid to figure out how to get away with shit. Paid to pick through rules and find loopholes, exceptions, oversights, where there's room to push and succeed in pushing. On its face the profession serves a societal purpose, but in practice lawyers often stand ready to assist with problems other lawyers created in the first place.
On greed, I specifically mean the greed people have for finding the lowest possible effort level in anything. Now when you're trying to figure out how to dig a ditch (or similar tasks), that kind of greed is actually useful. And has contributed to the rise of humanity.
But the greed that a decision like this from the USCO is going to enable is the kind of greed demonstrated by Thaler and Abbott (highlighted in the article) who simply want to enable copyright for computer generated material (e.g, AI copyright).
Abbott is a supporter of Shupe’s mission, although he’s not a member of her legal team. He isn’t happy that the copyright registration excludes the AI-generated work itself. “We all see it as a very big problem,” he says.
Abbott is a lawyer with a legal group organized to push for AI copyright. From an article of his:
Patent protection should be available for AI-generated works because it will incentivize innovation. The prospect of holding a patent will not directly motivate an AI, but it will encourage some of the people who develop, own, and use AI. Allowing patents on AI-generated works, therefore, will promote the development of inventive AI, which will ultimately result in more innovation for society.
I categorically disagree with that intention. He says he's talking about patent protection, but he wants IP created by AI to enjoy the same protection human IP does, except it won't be AI that actually owns it.
In a perfect world, it's nice to think that an AI researcher (like Thaler) could "benefit" from AI he or she develops, by securing copyright protection for works generated by the AI that computer scientist develops. But what'll actually happen in such cases is whoever controls the AI will receive the financial benefits of that copyright.
Remember, copyright is not about creativity, but legality. Copyright is the legal system's framework for safeguarding (and encouraging) creators. Occasionally you see copyright cases pop up where an author (here, any artist, not just a writer) sues over creative differences of some sort; but copyright cases almost always hit the courts because of money.
Society cannot afford to let computers generate copyrightable work. As James Cameron wrote so memorably in Terminator, "... and (it) absolutely will not stop. Ever!"
What happens if AI material qualifies for copyright is easy. Everyone and their mother, and certainly every single company (along with a whole slew of newly incorporated ones) with even the vaguest connection to a creative industry sets up computers. Banks and banks of them. All doing nothing but churning out endless Creative Work. Looking for the payday.
Sure 90, 95, even 99.9% of all those computer cycles might do nothing but crank out worthless trash, fluff never to be seen beyond the minimum wage employee who might glance over it while tying it up in a bow to send off to governmental copyright offices for certification, and those government officials who issue the copyright. That won't matter to the companies though, since if they only get one qualified homerun every year or so, that's free money.
Even the energy is becoming free, since solar and other renewable energy sources are coming online and improving at a steadily increasing pace. But we digress.
Everything and everyone will be swamped. Period. That's what corporations do; whatever it takes to profit right now. They don't give a shit about "societal harm" or "long term issues." Gotta get the money in the bank now, before this quarter closes. So The Market can see it and react favorably. So my bosses and corporate board can reward me.
Copyright offices will be buried. There's already a long delay to review and act upon applications. What happens when the volume goes up tenfold (or much, much more) within the span of a year. Which is exactly what'll happen if the USCO is maneuvered, manipulated, or tricked into allowing computer (that does not stop, ever) created material to qualify for copyright.
Because, again, it's not the computer that enjoys any income from all that work; it's the person who wants that income. Even if it's only pennies per work, they just crank out more work and get more pennies. A penny here, a penny there, soon enough you're talking real money.
Scammers and conartists already flood ecosystems like Amazon with all sorts of tricks looking for those pennies, as one real-world example happening right now. Amazon's already started to struggle with, and respond to, those scammers turning to AI. Before, scammers would use random text generators, or outright theft, to pull together some sort of text that could be posted and start pulling in pennies. Now they're using AI to do it, and those are harder to catch with minimal effort. Amazon has responded by starting to enforce AI restrictions that are headed towards a ban, because the people turning to AI aren't disabled honest actors like Elisa Shupe, but asshats panning for pennies.
Sure the US has the economic capability to scale up their copyright office to meet the demand of a world that drops a blizzard of "content" on it every single day. But why should they need to just to accommodate bad actors working in bad faith simply to generate revenue off vast volume?
What about other countries though?
And what about consumers? In books, something I've heard from people about indie publishing is they hate it because "it lets so many people just write. Who's vetting any of this?"
In other words, there are readers who prefer the out-of-sight, out-of-mind gatekeeping traditional publishers do to keep most books from ever seeing a reader's eyes. That's another digression, but I mention it here as an example. Old school radio would be another example; the DJ curated the playlist, and you relied on the DJ to do it. Some music lovers don't like how Spotify makes "everything available" and long for curation to help guide them to find things to listen to.
Now I see some validity in curation, but I feel that's a market problem. Or, rather, a market opportunity. People who can spin up to become recommenders. Except, of course, if that becomes a thing (recommenders) corporations will just do what they did to radio, and take over the recommending to push their only own shit.
But who curates when it's not hundreds of books per day, but tens of thousands? Each and every day. Probably that many songs. Probably at least ten times that number of individual pictures of some sort. And rather than dozens and dozens of TV shows, and another dozens and dozens of movies per quarter, scale that up by at least a factor of ten too.
Consumers are going to be buried just like the USCO will. You'll think "okay, I have a weekend coming up, I need a show to watch." But when you go looking, it'll be hundreds. How do you know which ones are to your tastes? That you'll like?
And remember, you won't even have some of the indicators you have today. Like, for example, I knew I was interested in Shogun because I was familiar with Hiroyuki Sanada and always love to see him in anything aimed at the English market. I was familiar with the original Shogun mini series from the 80s.
AI generated content won't have any of that. No actors you can use as a touchstone, knowing you can rely on reacting favorably to their charm or their style or anything. No lineage from the writer or director, where you can again decide you might like this new thing because you liked older things from that person.
Nope, just an endless flood of material. All enjoying copyright protection, meaning they can just churn and churn and keep churning until they come up with something viral that becomes valuable. Something that goes nova straight to the top of the charts. And because they'll own it (since their computer created it), they'll have all the same protections someone who honestly creates something will.
The legal system will collapse under that weight too. Copyright cases are bespoke because human creativity is bespoke. A human sits there arranging words or paint or whatever, and other humans have to examine it to decide how similar (or not) something is to something else. And people sue all the time, thinking "their" idea was "stolen", not understanding how creative frameworks function and mean that "okay, stories of this genre are going to have shared elements and just because both stories involve a father seeking revenge on a criminal who did his family wrong doesn't make the one a copy of the other." And so on.
What happens when that flood of AI content starts coming out? On a daily basis, some company will look over their back catalog of forgotten crap that never took off, and find examples of things that "seem real similar" to something that goes viral. They'll reach out to that viral owner and demand money or else. And the or else is cranking up the lawyers.
And Abbott wants to enable all of that shit. He's a copyright lawyer. Who gets hired to legally debate and litigate copyright cases? Could it be copyright lawyers?
He's a bottom feeder looking for job security. But because he's a lawyer, he knows how to "work the system."
I pray he fails spectacularly. Because only someone like him benefits in the world he wants to create.
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Comment on If we can't block users can we at least filter out topics posted by those users? in ~tildes
DavesWorld Link ParentI don't necessarily mind video posts. What I do dislike, greatly, is when they can't be bothered to describe and perhaps offer a summary of what the video is, why someone might click on it. No,...I don't necessarily mind video posts. What I do dislike, greatly, is when they can't be bothered to describe and perhaps offer a summary of what the video is, why someone might click on it. No, just a drive-by "here's a vid link" and nothing.
I also don't like posts, vid or otherwise, that go to a paid link. Medium or Substack, for example. Especially when I suspect the person is posting their own link, or the link of someone they know. That's basically marketing, and they're doing it out of self-interest rather than any desire to foster some sort of discussion.
It's a big subject, one with so many moving parts and social/economic/civilization concerns, with a variety of (good and bad) actors involved or injecting themselves into it, that it seems impossible. But any journey is accomplished by putting one foot in front of the other.
It's not impossible. Which isn't to say it won't be a journey, a tale that'll definitely make the history books and be taught in school to the amazement of the utopian children as those innocent kids boggle over how backwards and greedy the world before their time used to be.
Between here (capitalism teetering on the edge of dystopia) and there (a world where basic material needs such as food, housing, utilities, and medical care are readily available to everyone at no real cost) is the history part. And is the part people will tell you is impossible.
For example, capitalism is diametrically opposed to anything involving utopia. Any utopia technology is anti-capitalism, because capitalism only functions if you have scarcity and fearful masses. The fear has to revolve around not having enough, so prices get bid up and that fear can be used as a lever to convince the masses to accept what owners and the wealthy tell them. Which will be "do as we say, work here, take what we offer, and shut up the whole time."
So if you have what I'll be calling a "Bot" technology, the earliest stages will involve capitalistic concerns pulling strings and pushing buttons to delay or destroy it. They'll use governmental capture to inject obstacles and detours that add what'll probably be at least decades to the full natural adoption. All sorts of rationals will be trotted out, dressed up as safety or fairness concerns, and so on. Anything that allows Owners to keep control of what would be (in this example) a steadily decreasing cost of supply while they continue to charge and enjoy vast profits.
Because when the major actors in capitalism are megacorps, they have the resources to ensure they continue to rule. They invest in government, they invest in societal manipulation and control (look me in the eye with a straight face and say "professionals" don't know how to leverage today's social media to manipulate, manage, and control the masses), and they do all that so they remain in charge.
They do it to beat back upstart competitors. They do it to deny the basic rules of capitalism, which (in theory) describe how more efficient and agile and clever competitors will force prices to fall as supply rises (among other basic tenets that don't apply in the actual practice of capitalism as influenced by today's mega-entities). They do it to remain in charge.
For this purpose, a "Bot" technology is an increasingly automated technological solution to a production need. That need could be some form of manufacturing, of refining of some raw good, of production of some raw good. It's what would almost certainly be a growing collection of component technologies that increase the automation and reduce costs.
For example, if you plant a field by hand, weed and water and tend it by hand, then pick and deliver the food by hand, and finally process the food by hand prior to it finally arriving in some location (a store, a market stall, whatever) where a citizen will obtain it, take it home, and eat it ... that's expensive. Not simply in money; but in raw capital costs. Human capital like time and energy.
At every step, many humans were involved. Primitive farming techniques are immensely labor intensive, which is why a major source of technological advancement throughout human history has been looking for ways to get more food out of the same field with less human interaction.
Which has worked; what used to be an entire village spending a pretty sizable chunk of their collective time to ensure they have food for the year until the next major harvest season has steadily shrunk. Until today a vast farm capable of feeding hundreds for a year can be operated by a small handful of "farmers." Right now, they use a lot of machinery. Planting machinery, watering machinery, fertilizing and pest control machinery, harvest machinery, and of course transportation machinery that delivers the raw food to a processing facility (full of more machinery) which will clean, and often cut and sift and filter and cook and package the raw food into finished food.
The agricultural revolution freed vast segments of human population from needing to produce food, enabling other professions to be given human time to focus on. That's what the shift to BotTech will finish doing; completely free humans from needing to make all these necessary processes happen. From having to be involved step by step to ensure they take place.
It's not at all a stretch to imagine how technological progress continues to advance. Right now, farm machinery still has a human in the driver's seat. Many, possibly most, farm jobs in most foodstuffs involve sticking someone behind a steering wheel, perhaps a steering wheel next to some levers and buttons that Do Things, so that human triggers off or monitors the machinery doing the actual work. Actually shoving seed in the ground, or spraying water over the furrows, uncovering mature plants so they can be scooped up, and so on.
Automating today's semi-automated harvesters isn't a big leap of any kind. Especially not in a controlled environment like a farm field. Maybe a human might (drive, tow, or remote control) a machine to the corner of the field and push a go button, but even that will eventually fall before the advance of tech. So eventually you have the farm basically operating itself.
There's land, suitable for growing. Someone rolls up with machines and sets them up. There's a barn or whatever they park in when not in use. Then they drive out as needed, to clear and plow, plant, water, monitoring, all of it. Completely automatically, no human needed. When you can do that, just drop off machines, ensure the site is getting needed deliveries of seed and water and fertilizer and whatever else, and come back three or six months later to see the machines have trucks full of grain (or potatoes, strawberries, whatever) ready to be delivered ... that's BotTech.
If you have BotTech, you pretty much probably have (or will shortly on that technological advance timescale) BotTech that delivers it too. And also have BotTech that processes it. If the farm can plant, water, tend, harvest, and finally drop off truck after truck of potatoes at your factory, all without humans having to sit there and "work" to make it happen, there's likely no real reason your factory has to have humans "working" to have it process the potatoes.
Maybe it just washes and bags them before they get loaded into another truck that delivers them to the store. Maybe it cleans and cuts and fries them into chips before they're bagged and delivered to the store. Maybe they're dehydrated and boxed up for use as instant mash potatoes.
Whatever the actual product is, we're talking about raw foodstuffs showing up as a factory input. If the farm side is fully capable of full automation, the factory side probably is too. At that point, you have BotTech covering farm all the way to the store.
If you can get food to the store via BotTech, it's not much of a stretch to assume a little BotTech doesn't help at the store too. And if not immediately, during the first wave of those BotFarms feeding those BotFactories, probably quickly enough afterwards. If the farm can BotDrive potatoes to the BotFactory, and the BotFactory can prep and drive them to the store, then the store can probably have automated receiving that unloads them into the store's storage, and then probably even some form of a Bot that takes them as needed out into the store to wait on a shelf for a human to decide "ooh, I want to eat that".
Maybe you might have a human lift them out of the StoreBot to put on the shelf or whatever, but soon enough that'll go away too and it'll be completely fully automated from farm to consumer. Where, at no meaningful point during the process, was a human required to make it happen.
Sure humans are almost certainly monitoring, but as for having to actually work, not so much. Humans might approve decisions for where fields go, but that can be Bot since computers can take all the same information and run algorithms and analysis and all that to decide "no, this field sucks for wheat but would be okay for carrots" or whatever. Humans might check reports, "today Field 4C got water and there are no major pest problems; it's on track to yield a great load of carrots in another five weeks." But as for working, no at this point in the tech human work isn't needed like we know human work is needed today.
If you can do it with farm fields and food factories, you're probably already doing it with the rest of the supply and manufacturing sectors. As well as the transportation arena to deliver all those goods here and there. Again, we're talking about collections of tech, that build one atop the other. Combining to automate it all.
It doesn't have to be a Star Trek molecular assembly matrix like a replicator to be BotTech. After all, what would any of us care about the details? All we'd know is you send these (detailed list of probably six or eight) machines out to (farm site), make sure they have power and inputs (water, oil, seed, whatever), and come back at the end of the season to find potatoes are ready to go. Sure they didn't appear "magically", but they basically kind of did anyway, even though they did get planted and grew the way potatoes always grow once planted.
If everything's automated, it removes human labor as a major cost. Which is where part of the disruption will come from, because capitalism (giant agrocorps in food, but it'll be all corps in all major market sectors) will want to keep the gains for themselves. They'll want that humanless farm, that humanless food factory, and so on. Which doesn't work, because if society requires everyone to pay money to get (insert anything they need, survival or luxury or other) you can't fire the entire populace.
But that's a social concern, not a technological one. It'll take time, and require the people of the world to endure what I'd expect will be decades of needless upheaval, but eventually the truth of BotTech will win out.
Sure agricorps will be able to control FarmBots and FoodFactoryBots for a while. Sure they'll probably be able to pay or force government to insert roadblocks and laws and so on that keep "little people" from using the tech to tear away from the capitalism need to buy from corporate sources, but sooner or later the truth wins out.
What will the truth be? Again, we're postulating increasingly automated technology. Mining tech, tree harvesting tech, rubber harvesting tech. If you can automate factories, you can probably (and if not immediately, then at some point in almost all cases) figure out how to automate anything. Shove raw inputs in one side, and out the other comes whatever you wanted that factory to make. Bleach, rubber, computer chips, lawn ornaments, it wouldn't matter.
It's not "impossible", it's just an application of tech. You have technology that processes the thing, whatever it is. If there are steps, they figure out tech that does each step, and sometimes they'll figure out tech that can do multiple steps all in one machine, in one stop. Then you need other tech to move and hand off the whatever to the next step. Conveyor belts, robotic arms, self-drive carts, whatever; any tech that plugs into those gaps between the processing, so the flow can continue without a human having to "work" and fill that gap is what we're talking about.
After you have the tech, it'll start miniaturizing. It'll become more efficient, require less energy. Become faster, become less wasteful. What's a huge factory spanning block after block in size initially becomes, at some point, a collection of machines that are a more manageable size. Sooner or later, tech marches on.
Most factory work for humans, especially in recent decades, has been gap plugging. The machines do most of the actual work, but humans are needed to use human manipulation (with human hands and human minds controlling those hands) to take the work item out of machine 24 and hand it into machine 25. Just with tech that automates that "handing off" step humans are needed for now, you're quite a ways towards full humanless automation.
Economically, prices would start dropping towards the cost of supplies. Raw materials, of any kind. Which would see their prices dropping as well; if you can set a MineBot loose on a mountain that has (insert whatever desired minerals) and just see mined minerals roll out ready for processing, and the processing will be done fully automated too, prices will drop.
Again, it might take time, as firms of the era fight to keep their place within the loop, and they'll almost certainly succeed in adding decades to the transition time. But eventually things get too cheap for anyone to be able to argue they're a necessary part of the step.
Take food again, but (again) this applies to any market, any product. When anyone can run publicly available analysis to find suitable land, show up with FarmBot tech, make some arrangments for inputs to be made available (more Bots of various kinds), and just get food at harvest ... that's what you call readily available.
When BotTech is new and shiny and costs tens of millions per "bot", it'll still be a corporate thing. And we'd still be in the midst of "if you don't hire anyone for a paycheck, none of them can afford to buy your foods, which is why you're angry about how store shelves are regularly stripped clean by hungry thieves". That's the upheaval transition period I keep referring to.
But what's new and expensive eventually becomes not so much. BotTech will feed on itself. As (whoever) develops Bot technologies, those techs begin to eliminate costs from the process. Supplies become more available, and easier to process. Think of what CNC machines being available at a "hobby" level are doing, for example. CNC used to be million dollar machines, but now most people (maybe they save for a few months, but my point stands) can afford to purchase and operate them. Sure it's not industrial scale, but it's affordable. And next year, next decade, (etc) it's even more affordable and more available.
So the BotTech will advance, and at some point becomes so cheap and so available that it becomes patently obvious to society as a whole that trying to pretend most of what society needs to function is scarce will stop being something society believes. That's about the point you'll see governments, for example, deciding to just deploy FarmBots to feed their citizens. They'll take food (probably a lot of basic necessities, but let's just discuss food) away from profit oriented concerns and simply make it available to citizens.
Right now, that's something impossible to consider. How expensive would it be for the United States Federal Government to assume all farming operations in the country? Probably way, way, way more than they could afford, even if they diverted all federal income to the need. Paying to plant and maintain and harvest and deliver all those fields?
But with BotTech, when it's automated, it's mostly a one-time cost to install the Bots. And at that point, they're also equally cheap to maintain, and likely the maintenance is largely automated too. After all, if you have BotFactories, there's no reason you can't have MaintenanceBots that fix stuff or haul it off to the FixFactory to be fixed. And the Maintenance sector has all the same cheap raw goods and BotFactories to product parts and so on that the rest of the market sectors have.
So at some point, large concerns (probably some form of government) begin taking over basic market sectors. Food just shows up at the local "store", but it might be more of a distribution center at that point. And with Bots, it's not like you're trudging in to collect your burlap sacks of potatoes and grain and so on. You'd be looking at shelves of stuff you look at now; boxes of instant mashed potatoes, bagged minute rice, packages of chicken breast, whatever.
Which, again, would start happening everywhere. If you can Bot a farm and a factory, you can probably (again, sooner or later) Bot construction. So the barn, the house, the office building, the whatever, is mostly built via automation. Eventually completely by automation. Raw materials flow into BotFactories, are loaded into BotTrucks, and delivered to BotConstruction site. Come back a few days or weeks (whatever) later, and that place you pointed to and said "make a house be here" now has a house here.
Everything starts to work like that. Especially when so much of the basic needs work like that. A world where you never ever have to fear an empty stomach because the store/center is always there and always has more than enough food for you, that's a world where people eventually stop thinking in terms of fear. In terms of being afraid of scarcity.
Clothes, household goods, same. Clothes are at the clothes store. Bleach and soap and whatever, closet racks, shelves, anything; these products just start showing up. Governments can just push buttons and say "okay, so we opened up two new housing sectors here and here, and anyone who wants to put in for a room (or a house, shed, shack, condo, whatever) just needs to let us know."
Everyone has shelter, is fed, has clothes and basic supplies, and when they're sick they get treated.
Because what does "labor" and what would remain of the "labor economy" look like in a post-scarcity economy like we're postulating?
This is where people will bring back their "impossible" notions and cling to them. Because, again, right now all the stuff you need for life is expensive, so it's tough to think of a world where all that expense has been eliminated. Food takes dozens and dozens of people to grow and process and deliver to you in the amount you need to survive over a year, so "free food" seems impossible. But when it's very possible, where does that leave the market?
Luxury and innovation. Creativity. Sure anyone can get a bag of potato chips, even a bag of hot pepper cheese coated potato chips even. But some foodie oriented person who wants to play with settings and figure out new inputs? Who wants to come up with new flavor combinations, new preparations, and so on? That person, all those persons, can and will be doing that. Again, if not immediately during the early waves, eventually they will. Sooner or later. The tech keeps becoming cheaper and more available, and after it's out from under corporate and wealthy control, the advancement of Bots will keep happening.
And again, not just food; any market. Someone wants a new smartphone form factor, a new shape for it perhaps, they'll pretty much be able to make that happen. And if they like it, someone else might. Or might after they see it. Life begins to become incredibly trendy in an agile manner unheard of today. Right now, you talk about the "season's fashion" or "the latest model of (insert gizmo here)." And "latest" is measured in terms of annual or even multiple years.
When "latest" is "from this morning", trendy is definitely something I can see large segments of society latching on to. Something they'll seize upon to fill their time and amuse themselves with. Some people will be changing out their clothes, their "cars", their phones, their desks, maybe even their interior decorations, as often as it occurs to them to do so.
Right now that seems not just impossible, but insane. You read about billionaires who say stuff like "I never wear the same socks twice" and you think that's incredibly wasteful. But when socks cost literally nothing, and the "used" socks can be automatically cleaned and/or recycled to be repurposed without cost, that kind of decision becomes society wide. Right now, one rich guy can indulge himself, wallow in the amusement of knowing the socks he puts on are his and his alone. But eventually everyone's socks are one-time use.
Capitalism preaches that post-scarcity is impossible. Worse, insane. Capitalism doesn't exist in a society that has access to all its necessities basically for free. Capitalism will fight to hold that turnover off, fight to delay and prevent it, but sooner or later (knowing humans as I do, probably much more later than sooner), the availableness of BotTech will win over.
At that point, humanity will have begun to reorganize itself. People will devote themselves to the "fun" stuff, and I don't mean recreation. There'll be a lot of actual fun, actual recreation, but most people will probably be "indulging" themselves in creation. Innovation. Thought. Some people will actually create in the way we think of that word now, as in artistic creation.
But some will have the time to think. Every great thing you and I love came about because some human thought it up. And probably multiple humans got involved to continue the thought, innovating and developing and processing the thought until it became a reality, then a developed reality, and finally a piece of our reality we never think of because it's so ordinary and common and accepted.
Used to be, night was scary. Everything gets dark when the sun isn't there. Someone harnessed fire, and then candles and lamps came along. Someone else eventually figured out light without fire, and we had light bulbs and spotlights and so on. These days we have LED lights that are insanely energy efficient without sacrificing brightness.
There's a reason most serious science fiction thinkers eventually conclude a post-scarcity society sees a dramatic acceleration of human advancement. Because if you sit down and think it through, there's no real reason that a human society that doesn't spend the bulk of its waking hours struggling to survive (working to afford rent and food and so on) wouldn't find itself awash with ideas. Some of those ideas will be good ones, and when implementing them wouldn't be a random "win the lottery" kind of quest, a lot of the good ideas will take hold.
New technologies, new processing methods, new whatever. Sooner or later basic physics starts to fall. What happens when it's not a handful of "lucky" and "dedicated" physics professors scattered around the world who are paid to sit and consider physics. What happens when it's a lot of people, all of whom have time on their hands, who find physics amusing and enjoy its problems and issues. How much advancement happens when you have millions upon millions of people considering something like "physics."
Sure people will be considering better light bulbs and better water slides too, but some will be working on base techs. Like physics and physics manipulating techs. Engines are a physics manipulation tech; you take a mechanical linkage and drive it via explosions supplied by gas. Then we invented magnetic control techs and came up with electrical engines; just supply power and they spin.
At some point, someone figures out how to harness technology that can manipulate things on a molecular level. Why? Because that's what humans do, when they have time and aren't prevented from doing so; they think about things. Someone will be thinking about how to use fields and energy waves and whatever else to do what they want. And that person will eventually (either directly, or down the chain from someone else who finally puts it all together) come up with something like a replicator.
And at that point, you are living in Star Trek. With a magic machine that creates basically anything you want, so long as you hook it up to power and a soup bowl of raw materials.
Replicators are probably centuries away, maybe even millennia. But BotTech, we basically have most of what we need for BotTech now. Little pieces here and there might need a bit of work, and someone has to put it all together. But the only real reason we don't have FarmBot now is economics and "it's impossible" thinking.
Sooner or later, the involved tech pieces continue to advance, and someone will decide to start putting them together. Then there will be fighting and resistance and corruption, but the tech will keep advancing. Becoming cheaper, more available, less onerous to obtain and maintain.
Sooner or later the turning point happens, and BotTech takes over society. And we begin to enter post-scarcity.
A journey happens when you keep putting one foot after the next. How long you walk is up to you, but if you keep walking, you get somewhere. Sooner or later.