Somewhere along the line software went from being $99 for life to $9.99/month for life. The net result is massive inflation. I dusted off an old video game system recently and the game still played, through the end, for just the cost of electricity. I realize that maintenance is important and should be paid for, but let's be honest maintenance is a small sliver of your monthly subscription cost.
It was $99 for a specific version which (maybe) got updates. If you wanted the next version, it was another $99 (or maybe it was $129 now, or $149...).
Some software essentially maintains this model, and I think it's fine. If something is going to charge monthly I expect it to either be much cheaper, or have some web service that they need to keep up.
Thank you for offering an objective analysis of the story. Too many people go to it with pre-conceived bias against this particular carmaker. If you replaced it with 'Ford' the article would never have been published.
How can you get a machine to have values? Humans have values because of social dynamics and education (or lack of exposure to other types of education). Computers do not have social dynamics, and it is much harder to control what they are being educated on if the answer is "everything".
It's not hard if the people in charge had any scruples at all. These machines never could have done anything if some human being, somewhere in the chain, hadn't decided that "yeah, I think we will do {nefarious_thing} with our new technology". Or should we start throwing up our hands when someone gets stabbed to death like "well, I guess knives don't have human values".
The short answer is a reward function. The long answer is the alignment problem.
Of course, everything in the middle is what matters. Explicitly defined reward functions are complete, but not consistent. Data defined rewards are potentially consistent but incomplete. It's not a solvable problem form machines but equally likewise for humans. Still we practice, improve and middle through dispite this and approximate improvement hopefully, over long enough timescales.
Well, it’s pretty clear to me that the current reward function of profit maximization has a lot of down sides that aren’t sufficiently taken into account.
That sounds like the valued-at-billions-and-drowning-in-funding company’s problem. The issue is they just go “there are no consequences for solving this, so we simply won’t.”
Maybe if we can't build a machine that isn't a sociopath the answer should be don't build the machine rather then oh well go ahead and build the sociopaths
Imagine making this argument for other technologies. There is no opt-out button for machine learning, choosing the power source for their datacenters, the coding language in their software, etc. Conceptually there is a difference between opting out of an interaction with another party vs opting out of a specific part of their technology stack.
The three examples you listed are implementation details, so it's not clear if this is a serious post. Which datacenter they deploy code in is (other than territory for laws etc, which is something you may wish to know about and pick from) an implementation detail.
A better example would be: imagine every single operating system and app you use adds spellcheck. They only let you spell check in American[1]. You will get spell check prompts from your Operating System, your browser, and the webapp you're in. You can turn none of them off.
[1] in this example, you speak the Queen's English, so spell color colour etc
Unrelated but interesting to think about terms like "queens English" now that the queen is gone. Will we be back to kings English some day? I suppose the monarchy might stay too irrelevant to bother changing phrases.
Not sure how this fits in the analogy, but as a cyclist I would add some people get more exercise by having an electric bicycle. It makes exercise available to more people.
I tried to look for a 'dumb' tv for a long time to get to a setup like this. The ultimate setup would be 1) a totally dumb and stupid tv + 2) a streaming box like Apple TV or whatever. I just want the audio/visual aspect of the screen, nothing else.
My trick has been a simpler/faster/dumber HDMI switch that isn't the TV so that you can leave the TV on a single HDMI input and delegate any input switching to the the switch rather than the slow TV UI.
That adds extra complexity in terms of an extra remote. In my case, the simpler/faster HDMI switch is also the surround sound receiver so that moves volume as well to the simpler, dumber remote.
It's not ideal either, but reducing use of the TV's terrible UI is reducing temptation to just go back to the TV's terrible apps. (Also as the sibling option points out, the other trick is isolating the TV out of the network entirely. Sometimes the UI gets even slower to "punish" you for not allowing its smart features and ads to work, or the UI is just badly written and relies on a lot of synchronous waits for network calls for things like telemetry [six of one, half dozen of the other], which gets back to reasons to use a dumb input switch and get away from the TV's own UI.)
You can purchase commercial signage displays that are just dumb screens, but the markup is quite high. Easier to just get one of the 'smart' ones and never let it connect to the internet.
I got mine 2nd hand on eBay as new old stock. £300 for a 55" 4K panel. The only thing I can ding it for is that the backlight local dimming is done in columns which is extremely distracting, so I turn it off. You have to remember this thing is designed to sit in a shop window in direct sunlight.
Ticks all my other boxes though, powers on as soon as my finger leaves the button on the remote, same with input switching and any other interactions with the OSD. Its completely braindead, just how I like it.
Oh, they also sent me the model with the touch digitizer installed. So I've got capacitive touch and pen input, it has a USB-B port on the side to connect to a computer.
You don't need to connect it to the Internet or use the built in OS for anything else than just navigate to your box. I just use my NVIDIA Shield for everything.
Dumb TVs really don’t exist anymore. You just have to buy a smart one and treat it like it’s dumb.
Over Christmas my mom was complaining about her TV and I found a setting to have it start up with the last used input, which meant no more dealing with the smart interface and motion remote. I have an LG as well, but I wasn’t able to find the same setting available, unfortunately. Thought the automatic selection seems to work decently well when I turn on a device.
I have an old Samsung from 2017 that’s dumb. I mainly bought it because it was the size I needed (~40”), smaller than most people these days want.
This is what I do, I'm a little confused by the issue. If you have a device that outputs HDMI just never connect the TV to your wifi. It's not like you need or want firmware updates if there's no internet connection.
A much more fair retort is that an extra device to output video costs more, though I might argue that if you don't use the TV's built in system the manufacturer is losing ad revenue. So if you only use it as a normal TV you kinda are buying it subsidized by everyone else watching ads on theirs.
got a Sony last year that gave me the option on startup to enable or disable the smart TV os, picked the disabled option, TV isnt connected to the internet and the thing works beautifully.
Given enough determination, you can learn how to locate antennas in the TV and remove them, which would render the TV dumb for all intents and purposes.
I have no experience with it, it just might be less work to remove antennas from any TV than finding a dumb TV in 2026.
I'm sure sooner or later TVs will demand to connect to an "activation server" before they start working. And soon after that continuous internet access.
You know, for your own protection of course. You wouldn't want to miss out on exciting content recommendation features and AI integration! Your life isn't complete without a constant guided tour of all the wonderful things surveillance capitalism has to offer, after all.
That is true and we have certainly seen our fair share of that.
Adults are however also better equipped to deal with that, especially if they have not been subjected to such abuse as children.
It is worth noting that online bullying is however not the most serious matter here, rather (in my mind at least) it is the systematic targeting of kids/teenagers to get inside their head and get them to perform violent acts against themselves or others around them.
There are end user benefits to apples approach too, due to better governance and control over what apps are available. Governments also have incentive to maximize their power and are not benevolent actors in this scheme.
This really depends on the definition of a 'crash'. For example, fatal accident > insurance claim > minor incident.
If we use insurance claim as the definition then:
- The average driver files an insurance claim for a car crash about once every 17.9 years [1]
- The average driver drives 13,476 miles per year [2]
- This means one insurance claim per 241,220 miles driven by a human driver.
However, by percentage far more accidents happen in cities (including minor scrapes while parking etc), and the average driver's miles are a mix of city and highway (perhaps around 50/50? Numbers for that are hard to find).
The waymo/robotaxi driving is basically entirely city driving, so I think I think it's reasonable to say human accidents for that type of driving are higher, possibly nearly twice as high as the estimate you got.
