You could say the same thing about rewiring a human’s neurons randomly

Can you? One is editing a table of variables, the other is altering a brain by some magic hypothetical. Even if you could, the person you do it to is gonna be cross with you – the programme, meanwhile, is still just a programme. People who’ve had damage to Wernicke’s area are still attempting to communicate meaningful thoughts, just because the signal is scrambled doesn’t mean the intent isn’t still there.

A statistical model strings a sentence together with a great big web of statistical weights, settling onto the next most probable word, one by one. People write with the intent to share a meaning. It is not the same.

That statistical (or “predictive”, if we’re gussying it up) model has no understanding in it - no more than any other programme. It’s a physical chain reaction, a calculation that runs until the sums even out to a state of rest. Wipe the web of statistical weights clean, and re-weigh them so the sums spit out the colour of pixels in a JPEG rather than the content of a .txt document.

Hell, weigh the web at random and have it spit out nonsense numbers. It’ll do that for as long as keep the programme up. It will never ask you why you took the meaning out of its task. The machine makes no distinction between the sort of calculation you run it – people are what project meaning onto the blinking lights.

“AI” in fiction has meant a machine with a mind like what people have. It’s had that meaning for decades. Very recently, there are programmes that do predictive text like what your phone does, but large. You can call the predictive text programme an “AI”, but as the novelty wears off, it’s gonna sound more and more like advertising than a real description.

Ok, but that’s a select group of people who choose to spend their free time typing about politics online. If you look at the actual election results, it would appear to back up the claim you’re quoting.

random people who happen to vote for a Republican or a Democrat aren’t to blame, sure

but the actual Republicans and Democrats; the representatives, the party functionaries, the people who’s checks are signed by the RNC or the DNC? Those people certainly deserve some blame.

The stated goal of the US State Department is to drag out the conflict for as long as possible. Years ago, Boris Johnson threatened to cut Ukraine out of financial markets if Zelenskyy held peace talks with Russia.

There’s a group that wants as much suffering as possible out of this war. But it’s not the people who recognize that being the proxy in a struggle between the US and Russia is only going to hurt the people of Ukraine.

depends. lotta places pump you full of toxic preservatives so you can have a pretty corpse at the funeral. Then all those chemicals get buried in the ground 🫠

We already know the NSA is keeping tabs on everyone

yeah. Honestly, I don’t think it’s that unreasonable to look at the system we have and conclude that it doesn’t make that much of a difference.

I mean, it does and people should vote… but it would be really really nice to have a parliamentary system.

Isn’t it more like 30/30/40?

But that’s clearly not the only option. They assumed the public backlash would be in their favor and it was. Now they get to keep on making money, which is the best outcome for them.