Living, growing, changing cells are pretty damn dissimilar to static circuitry. Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells. The model ignores the fact neurons are constantly growing, shifting, and breaking connections with one another, and flat out does not consider structures and interactions within the cells.
Metaphysics is not required to make the observation that computer programmes are magnitudes less complex than a brain.
The trouble with phrases like ‘neural structures’ and ‘language parsing’ is that these descriptions still play into the “AI” narrative that’s been used to oversell large language models.
Fundamentally, these are statistical weights randomly wired up to other statistical weights, tested and pruned against a huge database. That isn’t language parsing, it’s still just brute-force calculation. The understanding comes from us, from people assigning linguistic meaning to patterns in binary.
You’re getting surveillance regardless of walkablity. Amazon is happy enough to hand Ring camera footage over to authorities no questions asked.
You worship the stock market and private property like a golden calf.
All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they’re eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I’d rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough…
It’s stripping out the copper wiring for cash. Buy a game studio, fire all the employees. Now their paychecks can be served up as profit to shareholders. Move all the files to your servers, it’s your “Intellectual Property”. Sell off the computers and the desks and anything else not nailed down. Do they own the building? Great, sell that too! Or, better yet, rent it out!
And your metaphor was a fun oversimplification.
Desertification has increased
Local flora has decreased
Rabbit populations have octupled
Deer populations have doubled
Micky Mouse entering public domain is historical benchmark. Cool, but also… that mouse is hollow. Good for a cheap horror game or thumbing your nose at the big theater conglomerate, but otherwise meh
Donald Duck going public domain will be a real treat
And there certainly wasn’t a neighborhood where your highway on-ramp currently is.
Corporations are an outdated means of organizing industry. While they can innovate upon existing technology, invention and discovery are avoided, as the length and uncertainties in such undertaking can eat into shareholder returns. While there are exceptions, this selective pressure is seldom overcome. This competitive evolutionary model forces participant companies into a race to the bottom. Corners are cut, labor stiffed, and customers squeezed in order to draw greater and greater profits – or else run the risk of loosing out to more ruthless competition.
In the same way large firms were able to stabilize disruptions in the supply chain through vertical and horizontal integration (thus outliving smaller, regionally managed businesses), mixed economies stabilize the shocks and disruptions of large firms, with the added benefit of re-focusing the output of industry to common goals, rather than to enrichment of a narrow few.
Overall, it is essential to see corporations as a phase in the conscious and unconscious evolution of human endeavor - a tool in the industrialized toolbox and not an end goal unto itself. It’s also important to learn to write for yourself, or you’ll be clowned on quite easily.
almost like our property codes were written for an era that is more than a century gone
squatters rights take entirely too long to kick in these days
Yeah yeah, you see the individual and not the historical pattern.
Isn’t it funny that the US keeps doing this? The presidents are incidental, flitting in and out of office with the whim of the public. But the conflicts? Those last. Nuclear rockets parked in Yugoslavia one century, flooding Ukraine with weapons the next. You know children in Vietnam are, to this day, born with napalm induced complications?
Doesn’t this all ring a little too familiar to you? Do you think maybe our grandparents had cute little nicknames for Khrushchev, comparing him to Hitler, when they were our age?
Amazing, a century latter the blame is still squarely placed on Russia. Those people must not be capable of self-determination, am I right my good Cold Warrior? Good thing we had this stockpile of depleted uranium, by jingo! So what if it leaches into the groundwater? Canadian mining firms have been poisoning Ukrainian groundwater for decades now! What’s a little rare-earth-elements between allies, amiright?
They outlawed starting a conversation in Russian. It was criminal for a business not first say something in Ukrainian. Like, imagine if Arizona tried to pass a law that criminalized conducting business in Spanish.
I wanna see Curzon Dax in SNW. Pretty sure the timetables match up there, given he negotiates the Khitomer accords.