A tool is a tool. What matters is who is using it and for what.

True, and yet a machine gun is a not a stethoscope.

A machine gun is a tool that is made with one purpose. A better comparison would be a hunting rifle, or even a hammer.

No, a hammer is useful.

Right. It's small, and compact, so you can fit in the bike, and quick swing to someone's Dome just about does it. /s

Violence is a method of action, some tools are force multipliers in that action, and thus useful in that case.

Don't get me wrong, hammers building houses and plow shears have done more to quietly change the world then guns and swords ever have, but guns and swords have.

some tools are force multipliers in that action, and thus useful in that case.

Sure. And removing those force multipliers from play can affect the state of the game.

When we get enough hammer murders, then we can talk about restricting hammer use.

I think rejecting AI is a mistake. All that does is allow fascists to have mastery of the tools. Like money, guns, media, food, oil, or any number of other influential things, you don't want a select few people to have sole control over them.

Instead, we should adopt AI and make it work towards many good ends for the everyday person. For example, we can someday have AI that can be effective and cheap lawyers. This would allow small companies to oppose the likes of Disney in court, or for black dudes to successfully argue their innocence in court against cops.

AI, like any tool, reflects the intent of their user.

It would be like a military rejecting gunpowder weapons. Except this weapon is mass mind control. There is no letting go of the horns of that bull.

If we do military comparisons, an air carrier is no good for a country without global logistics in place. A fighter jet is no good for a country all whose possible takeoff sites are under fire control. A big-big naval cannon is no good if it's not mounted on a ship, limited by terrain and can be just walked around.

Some weapons give clear advantage to one of the sides, but none to another.

Maybe these tools are good for building scrapers that can structure unstructured data. Turning Facebook or Reddit into something NNTP-accessable, for example. Or making XMPP and Matrix transports to services that don't have stable/open APIs, purely using webpages. For returning interoperability.

They are using generally same UI approaches, modern horrible ones, so one can have a few stages of training, first to recognize which actions are available from the UI and which processes and APIs they invoke, and then train for association of that with a typical NNTP or XMPP or Matrix set. Like - list of contacts, status of a contact, message arrived, send message, upload something. Or for NNTP - list available groups, post something, fetch posts. Associating names with Facebook identifiers. That being divided at least into passing authentication and then the actual service.

That can be a good thing. Would probably work like shit, like something from the Expanse or even old cyberpunk.

You probably want to hear cory doctorow at defcon 32 if you haven't already

I've read an article on his site which was a transcript of this speech, and got my thought after it, so - actually my comment is a result of that.

I mention hammers because they used a popular biker gang weapon to honest. Quite a bit of murders done with hammers.

Okay? So does it meaningfully help to restrict hammer use or doesn't it? I'm the one asking the question, you're just kind of handwaving it away, as if restricting hammers would be "ridiculous."

Sorry I guess there is a bit of a casm of understanding between us here. Yeah restricting hammers, heavy hard objects on a pole found crafted throughout human civilization, does sound neigh impossible to me.

There's a lot you can do, actually. You can put people in jail, for one. Possession in non-designated areas, such as a construction site or a personal residence, could lead to confiscation and a misdemeanor. It can just be socially impolite to have one around people—you know, like your car keys are after you've been drinking.

The chasm of understanding is that you don't want to do anything—literally anything—about abuse in your society.

And for what? So that chatgpt can give you advice on what to order next from your burrito taxi? So that you don't have to go through the pain of writing a long email to your boss that he's going to summarize with the same AI service anyway?

I don't think being able to generate funny looking pictures is worth letting Palantir, another pet project of the vampire Peter Thiel, create a nightmare social-credit system actually worthy of 1984 to deter union advocacy, palastinian-genocide protest, being remotely anti-Trump—anything found disagreeable to the state—from ever realistically happening again. In all countries, mind you.

We can't do anything about that?

...

You know what else we can't do anything about? Global Warming. When the water wars finally kill us, I suppose I'll come greet you in hell.

You seem to think we disagree on creation of a police state or massive surveillance system being a bad thing for some reason. None of which are stopped with regulations by the states that are funding and building said things ...