It’s true, those types will use your own rules against you to wipe you out if you let them. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the playbook of bad faith arguments.
I bet you we’ll see a version of that very argument with the Fediverse when Meta brings “Threads” onto the scene. They’ll preach inclusion then use the old EEE tactic to kill us off.
Yes, but the “censorship” and “freedoms” they talk about isn’t about malicious censorship (I.e. Spez going around quietly editing dissenting comments) or freedom about how our content is used (I.e. Reddit refusing to let people delete their comments).
Their version is about spreading misinformation and hate speech of all kinds, alongside racist and facist ideologies unfiltered and unimpeded. They’re malicious actors acting like victims.
We don’t want any of that, we want all folks to feel welcome, which is why we have to shoot that down. To maintain a tolerant society, we must only be intolerant of the intolerant.
If Huffman came out and said this was a revenue move right off would everyone be as upset as they are? Are people upset because Huffman completely mishandled the move or because they got their ad free experience turned off? If Reddit had an app the same quality as Apollo only with ads, would they be OK with it. I’ve only used Apollo so I can’t speak to the other apps.
The initial spark definitely came from Reddit’s clear backstabbing of 3rd party developers with the API change. There was no attempt to work with developers, just to remove them indirectly.
This being particularly bad when 3rd party developers were basically holding up most power-users, most moderators, and basically anybody who actually needed accessibility features (seems like Reddit’s never heard of blind people by the way they made their app).
When you combine that with the catastrophic mishandling of the situation with that incredibly awkward AMA, the internal leaks, and the accusations towards Apollo Dev, it made it incredibly obvious that Reddit wasn’t acting in good faith…
That’s really what started the shit storm that’s still raging now with the blackouts, subs and mods being blackmailed, subs converting to NSFW, the John Oliver stuff. It’s all because of how badly Reddit mishandled the situation. It’s almost like they forgot their website is mostly ran by the same volunteers they were screwing over.
However, I think you are right to an extent that if Reddit had taken the time to add accessibility and moderation features into their apps, and just improved the interface in general instead of just focusing on sucking the most money and telemetry out of their audience possible, then things would never have advanced as far as they did…
But I also think that’s one mighty big “what if” because if they would have had the foresight to do any of that, they would’ve had the foresight to not mishandle everything else as badly as they did either.
My gripe with the Chinese room is that Searle argues that his inability to understand Chinese means the program doesn’t understand Chinese, but I could say the same thing about the human body.
The neurons that operate your vocal chords have no idea what they’re saying, nor the ones in your hands any idea what they’re writing, yet they can speak and write exactly because your brain tells them what to do. Your brain is exactly like that book as far as your mouth and hand neurons are concerned.
They don’t need to understand language at all for your brain to be able to understand it and give instructions based on that understanding.
My only argument is at what point does an algorithm become sufficiently advanced that it is indistinguishable from a conscious being?
Because at the end of the day, most of what a brain does is information processing based on what it has previously learnt, and that’s exactly what the algorithm is doing based on training data. A sufficient enough algorithm should surely be able to replicate understanding.
Sure, that isn’t ChatGPT as we know it, as you can tell from its sometimes very zany responses that while it understands what words are valid responses, it doesn’t understand what the words themselves mean, but we should reach that at some point, no?