>It would be awesome to develop some theory around what kind of problems LLMs can and cannot solve. That should deter some leads pushing for solving the unsolvable with the technology.
That could have unfortunate consequences. Most people stopped looking at neural nets for years because they thought that Minsky's and Papert's 1969 proof that perceptrons (linear neural nets) couldn't solve basic problems incorrectly applied to neural nets in general. So the field basically abandoned neural nets for a couple of decades which were more or less wasted on "symbolic" approaches to AI that accomplished little.
There's a fair amount of usage of it on Itch.io, if you are into that indie crowd. I was skeptical of it at first -- the whole 1-bit dithering aesthetic seems a bit too retro-twee, but I find it it is the best Hypercard-alike in terms of functionality -- it "just works" as compared to most Hyperclones that seem more like a proof of concept than a functional program.
A lot of physical "property rights" are equally dubious though and probably shouldn't have the reverence people have for them. The reason why land ownership reform (splitting up of big land holdings owned by the wealthy but farmed by the poor) was a big issue in 19th century Britain (and Ireland which was completely part of it then) and still is an issue in the developing world today, is ultimately it is arbitrary that somebody gets to "own" land just because they are descended from aristocrats who conquered it centuries ago.
Only if you count "home ownership" as just owning your apartment (many Eastern-bloc countries sold cheaply their state-owned apartments to their residents after 1989). At least in the US, "home ownership" largely implies owning a single-family house with a yard. That's the (perhaps unsustainable) "American Dream".
> At least in the US, "home ownership" largely implies owning a single-family house with a yard. That's the (perhaps unsustainable) "American Dream".
scoffs At least in my canton, "home ownership" largely implies a three-story house in the hillside overlooking the Alps with the nearest 200K+ city within 15m travel distance. I'm sorry to say that what you present is more comparable to being unhoused.
I mean, even assuming the technical challenges to self-driving can be solved, it is obvious that there will still be human drivers because some humans enjoy driving, just as there are still people who enjoy riding horses even after cars replaced horses for normal transport purposes. Although as with horses, it is possible that human driving will be seen as secondary and limited to minor roads in the future.
Companies anywhere have no ethics. If you want them not to do things that have negative consequences to others (squatting on domain names, polluting the environment, etc.) the only way to do it is to have laws against the behaviors and enforce them (ideally with fines that exceed the financial gain the companies get from the behavior so they don't just see the fines as a cost of doing business).
Lawmakers and enforcers anywhere have no ethics. If you want them not to do things that harm the public (passing corrupt laws, selectively enforcing rules, ignoring corporate crimes, etc.), the only way to stop it is to have strict accountability systems and enforce them; but wait, they are the accountability system and the enforcers. Uh-oh.
This is bullshit, plenty companies have plenty of ethics.
I don't disagree that laws are important, but to claim that companies can't behave ethically removes responsibility from the people who are, primarily, responsible. To behave as scummy as Lieferando has been doing here is a choice and plenty similarly successful companies have not done things this bad. People make up a company and when these people behave badly, we should call them out and not only say "it's the government's fault for not making/enforcing laws about this!"
> but to claim that companies can't behave ethically removes responsibility from the people who are, primarily, responsible.
That's literally what happens today everywhere. Companies are downright evil everywhere and nobody's held responsible.
But what I think GP means is that companies don't inherently have any ethics since they are not people.
If a company behaves ethically it's because its owners and employees are doing so, but the company can't have any ethics of its own.
Regular people doing their day to day jobs on these criminal health insurance companies, for example, will perform acts that are extremely unethical as an individual, but since they're representing "the company" all that goes out of the window.
> we should call them out and not only say "it's the government's fault for not making/enforcing laws about this!"
We can call them out but we, the people, can't enforce anything. Maybe we could collectively try to sue them, but at best that's a civil lawsuit and they'll have to pay a bit of money (likely an already accounted cost for businesses that use shady tactics). But to make that criminal, as many times it should, then only the government is empowered to.
But we should never forget that we are the ones that keep the government accountable. If they don't do their job and we let them, it's all of our faults.
I mean, one of the reasons companies exist in the first place is to allow individuals to behave unethically IMO. Anyone can do bat shit crazy things that they would never get away with when they're behind the protection of a company.
> Companies are downright evil everywhere and nobody's held responsible.
As the co-owner of a small company I'm more than a little offended. We're not evil at all, we try our best to do right by our customers, our people, and our community.
The idea that no company can ever be held responsible for anything is a weird ultracapitalist pipe dream (and consequently a marxist straw man). Companies are groups of people. Yes we need laws to restrain badly behaving companies but that does not mean people running badly behaving companies get a pass until an inevitably slow and imperfect government gets their shit together.
I'm happy that there are exceptions, but the fact is that most companies will throw ethics out of the window the second it hits profits. It's easy to be ethical when it's for free.
> The idea that no company can ever be held responsible for anything is a weird ultracapitalist pipe dream (and consequently a marxist straw man).
I never said that. What I said is merely what we see in today's capitalism: barring a few exceptions, companies are almost never held responsible.
Probably one of the most egregious examples of this is the health care industry in the US but we often forget how banks ruined millions of people's lives in 2008 and almost nobody from the big banks went to jail. We bailed those criminals out and they felt zero consequences. They got a pass.
I agree with you that nobody should get a pass, but I'd be naive if I said they don't.
> until an inevitably slow and imperfect government gets their shit together.
How else are we going to do anything? Aside from taking justice into our own hands like Luigi Mangione, the best we can do is try to sue them and spend huge amounts of money to maybe get them to pay a small fine. Or perhaps employees inside of these companies can be whistleblowers and blow up their own lives trying to get some sort of justice.
I hate that this is the reality we live in but we can't pretend it's not.
I'd wager the the majority of small and medium business in my hometown act ethically. You pick out the worst behaving faceless bigcorps and generalize that to every company out there. But the vast majority of the world's economy is small local companies. By and large, these companies aren't evil. Also some larger companies try their best (eg eco-banks, brands like Patagonia, etc). I'm not saying they always succeed but to blanket call all of these "evil" as you keep on doing is ridiculous.
Companies exist for one reason: to generate profits. There's not way around it.
An ethical company will pay fairer wages, will not exploit users, apply dark patterns, stifle competition, etc. and non-ethical companies will do all of the above to generate more profits than the ethical one.
In the utopian world where there's endless competition, perhaps people could choose the ethical companies and they'd win fair and square. But the second you add reality back in, you add monopolies, oligopolies, geographical restrictions, etc. into the mix and these companies can get away with whatever behavior they want since consumers don't have a choice.
That's not even accounting for the fact that many people couldn't give a single f** to ethics, as long as they can buy their products for cheaper. Many would love to care, but simply cannot afford it, since all companies optimize to compress salaries.
I could go on, but hopefully my point is clear. Traditional companies will eventually become evil in their pursuit for profits even if they don't intentionally do so.
Ethics is not part of the equation at all.
It's bleak but until I see proof that this is incorrect, my point stands. Both the logical conclusion of capitalist theory and the real world we live in right now agree. Small and medium businesses are not yet big enough to optimize themselves to become evil (although it doesn't stop them from being evil for other reasons). Since the end game of competition is monopoly, we can see how big conglomerates are straight up buying up the competition which will eventually tip the scales to being a majority of big companies.
The reality is that the only businesses that stay small are the ones that don't scale. Otherwise big players would've already swooped in and enshitified them.
I'd love to imagine when I grow my company I'll be ethical, fair and structure it in a way that the goal is to make everyone in it rich while producing something good. But the most likely outcome is that it'll get crushed by competition that will not care or if I hit big, it'll grow enough and become evil.
Yeah yeah I know the theory but then how is it possible that my local bakery pays fair wages, does not exploit customers, does not stifle competition etc? I keep bringing this up and you keep responding with abstract generalisms. Look around you, there's plenty non-evil companies. Something in your theory doesn't hold up in practice.
My local bakery pays workers that actually do everything to run the bakery as little as possible while the owner has a mansion, sports car and a boat.
It's more likely our definitions of "fair" are very different. Besides, I already wrote why small companies may not yet be evil, which you seem to completely ignore, so whatever, there's no point in arguing anymore if it's not in good faith.
You moved the goalpost from "all companies are evil" to "well, some companies are not yet evil". I indeed jumped over that but only because it's a ridiculous accusation! You can call anyone "not yet evil" and they'll have no way to prove you wrong. It's a completely meaningless thing to say.
Frankly I'm baffled that you think I'm not arguing in good faith for skipping over an argument as weak as that, and instead choosing to address your general point (which I think is a lot less more sensible, even though I disagree with it).
Companies are inherently evil because they capture the surplus profit from the workers that actually do the work.
I agreed with you that small companies are many times not yet taking this to the extreme and might not be as evil as a mega corporation, but they are still evil by default.
We've definitely normalized this, but being normal doesn't make it good.
I didn't mean to skip over that but since it's the entire base of capitalism so I thought it would be implied.
I admit that I should've guessed, but I'd have appreciated it if you had led with "I'm a Marxist so I think any form of entrepreneurship is evil". Our definitions of "evil" are so far apart that we'll never come to an agreement, and you well know that yours is (totally fine but) not the mainstream definition on this site. You're not going to convince anyone by using words completely differently than the rest.
If you had said things like "inherently exploitative" or something like that, then we might've gotten a lot closer. I think I might actually concur with that (but then argue that it's possible for businesses to also do good, eg provide a service that people need and a compelling job and bread on the table etc, that may offset the badness of the "inherently exploitative" part, so that below the line it's a net positive for society). We'd then have an IMO much more interesting argument about how bad it is for companies to, by definition, be at least slightly exploitative, and whether it's possible to offset that or not. By just calling me "evil" instead (for running a business), you removed all nuance.
>In a way, this is not much different from foundational understandings in human–robot interactions, strengthening the claim in many humanities and environmental fields that humans should analytically be considered an animal
That seems a bit reversed to me. As a biologist, I fully agree that humans are animals and a lot of our behavior is evolved instinct not very different from other animals, but the traditional humanities way of thinking is that biology is irrelevant to understanding humans who are thought to be completely influenced by their culture and not their genes.
But that's not what is being expressed. You might as well complain that the ratio doesn't give you information on the price, weight, or power usage of the TV.
That could have unfortunate consequences. Most people stopped looking at neural nets for years because they thought that Minsky's and Papert's 1969 proof that perceptrons (linear neural nets) couldn't solve basic problems incorrectly applied to neural nets in general. So the field basically abandoned neural nets for a couple of decades which were more or less wasted on "symbolic" approaches to AI that accomplished little.
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