Whatever I do for money isn't a huge part of my identity, so telling a boss (if/when I find myself in that situation) to stuff it with the AI nonsense isn't going to be difficult. Decoupling one's self-worth from the job makes it much easier to roll with being fired.
"Playing along" is a great way to be part of someone else's potentially-harmful project. Consider your values, and don't cross those lines. If the boss is upset about it, they have options. I don't do their work for them.
Collective action with your fellow workers against enshittification is a humanist way forward.
It's Not "AI"
Its Boosters Are Misanthropic
The Hype Sucks And It’s Encroachingly Ubiquitous
Its Obsequity Is Annoying And Its Prose Is Vapid
Its Boosters Don’t Give A Shit About Consent
So What Am I Even Fucking Doing Here
"Surely, you have one job and that is to deliver tech that works—not to waste users' time by giving them irrelevant copy to read which has no functional value."
Microsoft has been doing this for years, with its messages during Windows setup, along the lines of "sit back and relax while we work our magic" which is at best annoying.
95, 98, Me, and XP all at least provided screenshots of some new features in the release. 10 and later just have the fuzzy "getting things ready" flavor text.
Tbf most os‘s including windows install extremely fast. It’s the shit show you need to do after the installation that is annoying. Even starting edge after you did the worlds slowest after installation wizard. You need to fucking await it’s fullscreen feature announcement until you can download another browser.
Huh. Us meatbags are not just artificial intelligences, we're organic intelligences and thus more important than robots (who are not alive; even if we make golems and infuse them with "life", they are not human animals), and all of us are in training throughout our lives, so this means training on copyrighted material is fair use.
Edit: I see another commenter, presumably human, clarified: "legally-acquired copyrighted books"
Even with the arguments about AI being potentially helpful to disabled humans, one healthier route is to help each other out directly instead of dividing and conquering with technology, in the name of helping. Feels like one of the aims of Capitalists is to put us each into our Matrix (1999 movie) battery capsules and bleed us dry while we're distracted.
Our federal government is currently being torn down from the goal of "[stirring] action towards not accepting the status quo." Details matter, it turns out.
To what end, all that work?
If ultimately to enrich Capitalists, that's not a train I want to ride or indoctrinate anyone else to ride (I'm a teacher).
How much time does it take to meet our needs in a community living on healthy land, with access to clean air and water? That might well fill our days, but I'd consider bonding with others to be a basic need, something many college students do.
Also, this focus on STEM is harmful. Even STEAM isn't enough. History, Philosophy, Languages, learning about arts and cultures- these are as, if not more, important than learning how to convert minerals into tools, because they get at the Why.
The early USA gave rise to a party known as the Democratic-Republicans which had the critical mass of officials and candidates to rival the Federalists and eventually dominate them so badly that by 1824 no opposing party even had a candidate for President. There were actually 4 candidates on the ballot though, but they were all from the same Democratic-Republican party. In that case none had enough electoral votes, so Jackson won that one when it was decided by the House. He had a total nationwide popular vote of 151,271, so you have to figure that each vote had so much of a stronger voice back then under a system quite similar to today. Unless you were there I don't think the difference in scale would be easy to fully comprehend. The party was supposedly doing well in lesser races across the growing US too.
Then apparently the party just kind of split up and re-organized into the "two-party" system that has continued to dominate ever since.
There was no threat until decades later when the Free Silver parties arose based strongly on reversing the trend where increasing economic opportunity was being systematically pushed further beyond reach of average citizens, in the face of bonanza precious metal discoveries that would have been able to pull the whole population ahead of Europe decades sooner if the Free Silvers would have had their way. Bipartisan effort was resurrected as if from a single party again, and the third party was crushed by a well-maintained machine which was bigger than either one of the major parties on their own. Before the citizens could be allowed to get a little taste, the Silvers were assimilated by the Democrats in a platform expansion that was over-dramatized but badly diluted their objectives. It does seem to be the first real big platform deviation between the Democrats & Republicans to start off the 20th century with, but the Silver supporters continued to be systematically disadvantaged for decades to come.
No third party movement has presented that level of threat to include such economic clout, but if so, deeply rooted underhanded countermeasures would be deployed, it would apparently take more than anyone could imagine, so no third party for you.
> The early USA gave rise to a party known as the Democratic-Republicans which had the critical mass of officials and candidates to rival the Federalists
The Democratic-Republicans formed before the Federalists, actually.
> There were actually 4 candidates on the ballot though
Unlike the modern system, there weren't even ballots in a quarter of the states (a popuar election for electors is not a Constitutional mandate, and it wasn't a statutory requirement to have such an election for a states' electoral votes to be considered regularly-given until much more recently.)
And the candidates weren't on the ballots that existed, party electors were (unlike modern ballots, where the Presidential candidate is listed and you get the associated electors if they win, the actual electors -- and not usually the candidate they were pledged to -- were listed on the ballots, where they existed.)
And in most states, there were not electors for all four candidates on the ballot, the four are just the candidates that received electoral votes from somewhere in the country.
> In that case none had enough electoral votes, so Jackson won that one when it was decided by the House.
Jackson won a plurality—but not the required majority to win outright—of the electoral vote, but the House elected John Quincy Adams in the contingent election required to resolve the absence of an electoral vote winner, not Jackson.
> He had a total nationwide popular vote of 151,271, so you have to figure that each vote had so much of a stronger voice back then under a system quite similar to today.
As discussed above, the system was not "quite similar to today".
> Then apparently the party just kind of split up and re-organized into the "two-party" system that has continued to dominate ever since.
The new Whig Party which was its initial main opponent did form in part from dissident offshoots of the Democratic-Republican Party, but a lot of its strength was from bringing in existing regional parties that were never competitive national parties (like the Anti-Masonic Party) as well.
> There was no threat until decades later when the Free Silver parties arose
Kind of leaving out the entire rise of the Republican Party and the displacement of the Whigs...I could go on with responding to the blend of oddly selected facts and complete distortions, but I'll just note that it doesn't get better.
"Playing along" is a great way to be part of someone else's potentially-harmful project. Consider your values, and don't cross those lines. If the boss is upset about it, they have options. I don't do their work for them.
Collective action with your fellow workers against enshittification is a humanist way forward.