Because a lot of stuff you read online is made up, misleading, wrong, or even all three. Either on purpose or not. The most insidious stuff is what "seems plausible" but isn't, it's how you get stuff like common myths and misconceptions[0]. Shouting "source?" at every article is not pleasant and may sound annoying, but I think we should respect people who question things (or simply want to dig more) rather than pushing back asking for "why". The pursuit of (true) knowledge in and on itself is something that shouldn't be questioned, especially in this technological age.
I'm just like you, I have so many memories as a kid playing with my parents (mostly my dad) and my sister. From the age of 3-4, I remember my dad coming home with a new PC (didn't know what a PC was back then), "helping" him set it up, trying out games (mostly MS Paint) with him, etc. I remember playing "teaching" my dad to play with pokemon cards. I remember a lot of evenings we spent together playing Doom II, Monkey Island, Tomb Raider, and a lot of other computer games (I remember my sister would press the "shoot" key, my dad the arrow keys to move around, and I was in charge of pressing numbers 1-9 to swap weapons in Doom).
I help around Japanese language learning communities and one of the core tenets of a successful "language learning career" is being able to enjoy doing stuff with the language without necessarily trying to learn the language. Learning the language becomes a byproduct of having fun with it.
For this reason, I have this kind of conversation almost daily with people asking for help in studying or just ways to "find motivation", etc. I always ask them "Why are you learning Japanese?".
The amount of answers I get that revolve around the idea of "I want to get better at it" always amaze me. I'm the kind of person that just does things because I want to have fun. I learned Japanese because I enjoy doing stuff in Japanese. I never cared about learning Japanese, it just happened that doing so made it fun for me in the process. And yet there's people out there whose entire goal of learning Japanese is to "learn Japanese"... I will personally never understand that mentality myself, it's very puzzling.
Maybe that's lost in the brevity of answers of the people you talked to, but some things I know I only have fun doing when I'm (moderately) good at it. Talking to someone in a different language and having to think about every second word is not fun. Being able to talk and only having to think about a word every few sentences is fun. Same for sports or whatever activity. You think you like it but you're so bad that it's not fun. You try to improve in order to have fun.
Then the goal was all the things the language enables, not the language itself. You want to talk with people who speak that language. You want to function in an environment written in that language.
Even a language theorist researcher who learns a language just to study the language itself with no practical use planned, is still learning it for some other rrason, which is to study it's rules and construction and correlate that with other languages and information systems etc.
Even someone who learns a language not to use it and not even to study it, but merely as mental excercise, has that other reason, mental excercise.
> You want to talk with people who speak that language
No, there's a good chance I can talk to those people in a common language, mostly English. I didn't say my explanation was valid for 100% of the cases, only that it's a bit like that for me and there's a chance other people feel the same.
"I want to talk to people" and "I want to talk to people in their native language when I visit their country" are related, not a complete match. And honestly, I think that borders on overanalyzing. I am sure I am learning languages because I have fun doing it, but I also have fun having mastered a certain level.
Surely there is a huge difference in getting a one-time amount of "extra" money (which most people would see as a "present") and knowing you'll keep receiving the same amount of money regularly every month for a few years. Furthermore, I clearly remember when we got the covid assistance money a lot of it was to incentivise local spending to support local businesses (at least it was here in Japan, I admit I'm not American so the message maybe was different over there).
In some states in America it was a lot more than a 1 time payment. People got overpaid on unemployment and unemployment extended even to people that didn’t ever have a job to begin with. People were overpaid ten of thousands of dollars too. And on top of that businesses got PPP loans and that was even more money, hundreds of thousands if not millions. Everyone around me raised their truck or bought a camper. It definitely created a lot of government entitlement. I want to be clear I’m not judging this as good or bad but the one time “extra” money was nothing compared to the other payouts people were able to figure out
>because of an immigration system that keeps foreigners from immigrating for work
Okay so let me dispel this myth. I don't know when it started, how, and where, but Japan is not that hard to immigrate into if you have a job or are a student enrolled in a Japanese school. The biggest issue is probably the language and the fact that most jobs are in Japanese, but if you speak Japanese (or can find an English-speaking job) then it's not that hard to immigrate into Japan. Work visas are pretty easy to obtain. Permanent residency is relatively easy to obtain too, and even better, citizenship is even easier to obtain (although you have to renounce your former citizenship). With that in mind, the US are objectively harder to immigrate into compared to Japan, on paper at least.
Which brings me to...
>and in part because of lots of systemic racism
I think the main issue of Japan is just cultural and the language itself. A lot of what can come across as racism is just a misunderstanding of societal expectations and behavior. Language barriers are really hard to overcome and Japanese is one of the hardest language to learn if you come from an English speaking background (or most European languages, really). The fact that most people in Japan don't speak English well, and that they are a culture that is significantly different from a lot of the west doesn't help.
And yes, there is still quite a bit of sexism and racism (although I'd argue the latter is more from a position of "unknown" rather than actual hatred/disdain). Stuff is improving fortunately, but it takes time.
This said, I don't think racism and xenophobia as a whole, or the country's own immigration policies, are what are keeping Japan so non-diverse.
source: Live and work in Japan, speak Japanese. This is obviously just my opinion.
What if some people that would usually be in the group that enjoy playing table tennis realize they actually want to run a marathon and they find out that most marathon gear is only built to help group A run better? What if there were shops that sold marathon gear but there is limited supply and since 9 out of 10 customers are group A people then those few group B that would like to buy the gear cannot because it's always sold out? What if I specifically started selling gear saying that 50% of it was reserved for group B to help them participate in marathon and that I cannot sell it to group A people? That's clearly discrimination, isn't it? And yet...
The problem is that there's so many variables in this equation that it can't simply be resolved in a simple "racism bad" or "discrimination bad" and "if they really wanted to they could but in reality they don't want to". It's a bit more complicated than that.
That's not what they are suggesting. That's what you came up with as a solution for the problem which they presented. You're arguing against your own conclusion.
The implication might be obvious because that might be the most immediate solution to an evident problem. Just because the analogy works and you don't like the (obvious) solution it doesn't mean we should throw out the baby with the bathwater in the process.
> the harm in that case is the embarrassment and you can achieve the same results in 10 minutes with any image editing software
The harm is not the "embarrassment" of seeing someone in the likeness of yourself (or your son, your friend, your partner, etc) doing something shameful. The harm is the fact that people are very likely to believe it is true and it's not a fake obviously edited photo or video.
You can disagree on the seriousness of the harm or risk or danger or whatever but I think the distinction between an obviously silly/embarrassing fake (a puppet, papier mache, badly done photoshop picture) and a realistic convincing deepfake video is pretty obvious. They aren't even in the same ballpark.
> IMO most of the harm from AI is likely to come from people not believing things that are real, and dismissing reality with “that’s just a deepfake”.
This is also a really good point and I agree it's a danger.
Further to this point, there is plenty of collected evidence of the harms this kind of image-based abuse, of both real (sometimes coerced or often surreptitiously taken) and faked images:
See, for instance, this study of "sextortion" in minors:
> Similarly, there are lots of reasons why improving the security of google is a good thing _even if_ you think google itself is evil.
Especially when you consider the fact that a lot of stuff that Google security researchers do directly affects and influences (for the better, I'd say) the current industry too. See: Project Zero team, etc.
Disclaimer: I work at Google. Opinions are my own, etc etc
> a lot of stuff that Google security researchers do directly affects and influences (for the better, I'd say) the current industry too. See: Project Zero team, etc.
Yeah, and a lot of stuff that Google security researchers do directly affects and influences (for the worse, I'd say) the current (and future) users.
Perhaps. Security teams in general (including the ones at Google) are in the business of compromises. Sometimes they end up making the wrong ones. Many of the people I know who are at Google joined, at least in part, to be in a position to help the company do better.
Because a lot of stuff you read online is made up, misleading, wrong, or even all three. Either on purpose or not. The most insidious stuff is what "seems plausible" but isn't, it's how you get stuff like common myths and misconceptions[0]. Shouting "source?" at every article is not pleasant and may sound annoying, but I think we should respect people who question things (or simply want to dig more) rather than pushing back asking for "why". The pursuit of (true) knowledge in and on itself is something that shouldn't be questioned, especially in this technological age.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions