As evidence: How the fuck is a company as big as Microsoft letting their CEO keep making such embarassing public statements? How the fuck has he not been forced into more public speaking training by the board?

This is like the 4th "gaffe" of his since the start of the year!

You don't usually need "social permission" to do something good. Mentioning that is at best, publicly stating that you think you know what's best for society (and they don't). I think the more direct interpretation is that you're openly admitting you're doing the type of thing that you should have asked permission for, but didn't.

This is past the point of open desperation.

Perhaps he considers society not insisting their politicians kick them out societal permission.

Feels like most trending tech these days. I'm so tired.

The useful AI is in scientific research and accounts for a fraction of a percentage of electricity used in "AI". It's not sexy. It's not hip. And it's not going to replace any workers, so the tech bros don't care.

Our cogs do not feel amplified.

My dad is saying that he won't hire anyone who doesn't use AI, while he hires engineers from India for pennies.

If only it were a paycheck amplifier

Like a president but good?

leader of the free world

Well, they at least have investor permission...which is the only people they care about anyway

Probably in the Hobbes sense that they're not actively revolting

[Microsoft are] just literal thieves.

Always have been.

(But now it's worse because it's the entire public, not just their competitors)

On the one hand, I get it. I really do. It takes an absurd amount of resources for what it does.

On the other hand, I wonder if people said the same of early generation comptuers. UNIVAC used tubes of mercury for RAM and consumed 125KW of electricity to process a whopping 2k operations per second.

Probably not. Most people weren't aware of it, nor did they have a care for power consumption, water consumption, etc. We were in peak-American Exceptionalism in the post-war era.

But, had they, and computers kinda just...died. Right there, in the 1950s. Would we have gone to the moon? Would we have HDTV? iPhones? Social Media? A treacherous imbecile in charge of the most powerful military the world has ever seen?

Probably not.

So...I do worry about the consumption, and the ecological and environmental impact. But, what if that is a necessary evil for the continued evolution of technology, and with it, society? And, if it is, do we want that?

And, to go a step further, could AI potentially aid in finding realistic ways to undo the harms that it had caused? Or those of anthropogenic climate change? Or uncover new unforseen dangers?

Did the inventors of UNIVAC ponder if its descendants would one day aid in curing terminal illness, or predicting intense weather, or realize how much it would evolve in the coming decades? Moore wouldn't have even coined his iconic law for another 14 years.

What I don't like...what I really don't like...is that this phase of technological evolution is coinciding with rampant pro-capital/anti-social rhetoric and governance. I like that it's forcing conversations around modernizing copyright law, licenses, etc...but I don't like who is involved in those conversations.