You don’t see the harm in requiring telcos - famous for handing over data without warrants or court orders - being forced to have identifying data for every subscriber?
I can think of a half dozen ways that can get abused. Remember that in the states policing is decentralized. There is always some department somewhere willing to abuse their power. Look at how flock has been used to stalk partners, or how geofencing was used to sweep up everyone in the area of a protest, or how stingray is used to listen to all calls in an area. This is opening up avenues of abuse for almost no benefit.
> famous for handing over data without warrants or court orders
More concretely, famous for supplying bulk data to the surveillance industry for a nominal fee. That is ostensibly the goals behind this development - all of these companies demanding phone numbers for "verification" and snake oil "2FA" want to reliably dox 100% of their users rather than just 80%.
Realistically, it is for 99.9% of people who have phones. The 0.1% have to go out of their way to buy, with cash or crypto, prepaid SIM top-ups on flip phones, and by doing so they stand out like a sore thumb.
Back in the days of rotary phones, not only did the phone providers have your name, they even listed it, your home address, and your phone number in the white pages of the phone book, and everyone in town had a copy of it. Before the rise of microcomputers which enabled data tracking and robocalls, which in turn gave rise to demand for privacy from spam, having that information out in public wasn't a problem except for edge cases like domestic abuse victims or people in a witness protection program. The 99.9%, though, are still getting tracked no matter what, and I sometimes wonder if we've sacrificed the convenience and confidence of the phone-book age for an illusion of privacy that relies on anxiety.
I grew up in the phone book age. We had one phone with a really long cable, but it wasn't long enough to take it with me everywhere I went. And, as you point out, nobody had robots to call it, either.
at times? we can't even decide if women are allowed to control their own bodies. we're now open to states stopping people with dark skin from voting, and we have giant internment camps where we keep innocent men, women, children because they have a spanish accent. vaccines are apparently not a worldwide health miracle, education is overrated, we're bringing back jobs in coal and oil, and invading/destabilizing latin american countries is back in vogue. in two years we might be so backwards that women's suffrage becomes questionable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_...).
> we're now open to states stopping people with dark skin from voting, and we have giant internment camps where we keep innocent men, women, children because they have a spanish accent.
you weren't aware of the recent revocation of laws that prevent southern states from gerrymandering black communities out of a vote, in addition to voter ID laws?
there are many, many public reports of ICE detaining individuals merely for having a spanish accent. they've detained US citizens multiple times, even deported some, because they were hispanic.
Almost no one has physical phone lines anymore. It also used to be a given because they had to send a physical paper bill to someone, and hence needed an address.
Neither of these are true anymore.
Also, the tone is set from the top.
Do you think the current admin cares about actually tackling fraud and abuse?
I'm the creator of a newsletter using AI to make the science behind a rare disease, Kabuki Syndrome, more accessible.
In this blog post I walk through the steps I took to translate scientific papers into sparkling prose that maintains tight links between generated sentences and the passages they're based on, and touch on some of the broader issues related to what an editor is in a publication that is AI-generated, and why I think rare disease reporting is a uniquely appropriate and ethical use of AI!
yes it all comes back to iteration, the original "vibe coding". for me, programming has always been about making it up as i go along. like an artist starts with one stroke, i started when i was 10 years old typing '10 print "hello, world" 20 goto 10' and i've never really stopped programming that way 47 years later. For me programming is the same as refactoring, they both happen in a continuous Zone throughout the day. The idea of spending this big period at the beginning Defining the Architecture then letting AI fill in the blanks makes no sense because I only know what the architecture is, what the product is, as part of a process of typing all day for days and weeks and months, that never ends.
I've been reading "Elusive Cures" by Nicole Rust, about the failure of neuroscience to cure major ailments like schizophrenia and alzheimers, despite decades of work modeling neurons and other brain systems (costing far in excess of $500M).
Here are some thoughts that that book sparks ...
"the whole is other than the sum of its parts" - someone, based on Aristotle. The way Nicole Rust puts is that the whole->part relationship is one way. In other words, you can determine the parts from the whole, but not the whole from the parts. A cell is a complex dynamic system with many overlapping and interacting feedback effects and diverse homeostatic drives. Its state emerges into its own entity that, once formed, bears only a tenuous relationship to its parts.
Understanding of our bodies and minds may be more tractable at more common levels, levels where the life system is at (whole), not where it was (parts) is where I think she's going: language, art, kinship, etc. But I'm not done yet.
Philip Ball helped me understand this in his book "How Life Works." He makes the point that you can't understand language by understanding letters. Walking up to someone and just saying "L" won't have any effect. And given just an understanding of the alphabet, you would never be able to use that on its own to understand a whole book, you have to move up. The whole has its own kind of existence. I think about how hard it is for one individual to influence a culture. You kind of have to speak and operate at the highest level to change things. I know that's super vague but those are just the terms I've been thinking about it in.
For the rest, they can still exist as apps inside this OpenAI smart phone but the OS layer will "see" everything and be able to ingest everything you do into a context. Next time you want to do something or ask for something, the AI knows a lot more about you.
Being just another app on iOS, it's impossible for OpenAI to do the above.
> the OS layer will "see" everything and be able to ingest everything you do into a context
that makes sense, i could see it being useful. though it would be a feature easily replicated by Apple or Android if it got some traction.
Maybe this idea of apps being "replaced by agents" is less literal than I'm thinking.
Like with music, maybe it could be an agent that in general helps me be a cooler, more informed music listener by constantly thinking about new ways of accessing myriad sources of info about what's cool, or what I would think would be cool.
that makes sense, i could see it being useful. though it would be a feature easily replicated by Apple or Android if it got some traction.
There is no doubt in my mind that Apple and Google are going this way. They may have a huge advantage over OpenAI. But OpenAI can't breakthrough without making their own phone so they have to try.
it may be hard to measure, but it's definitely helping everyone who uses it to be more productive in certain aspects of their work. that's clear to me.
but it might be, say, 20% more productive in 20% of your workday, or 1000% more productive 2 days per month (the days when that perfect dream spec hits your desk that you can just paste into claude and get a slick working system back), which works out to just 4% more productive overall, or whatever, which is hard to measure with all the noise.
in the end companies will pay for these tools because their employees will be demanding them, same as they demand other things that make their workday more pleasant - email, coffee, air conditioning, a conveniently located office, etc.
that said, I see the intelligence itself being rapidly commodified/free. the companies that extract rent in the sector will be the ones that effectively bundle and sell corporate-friendly features with the core intelligence - compliance, tracking, productivity, systems integration, authentication, etc. etc. etc. Which is a competency companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Google already possess, so they are likely to win. Plus a weird Euro variant of course.
| iterate on their product faster.
i've run into a situation where it really slowed iteration down, because i wasn't able at some point to explain in english what I wanted it to do and had to go into the code, which, lo and behold, I didn't understand. Ended up scrapping everything that had been generated and starting over by hand!
don't see the harm in this? isn't this already the case for 99.9% of phoneline havers already?
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