Fair enough. And it does seem to me like the action will be new laws, though you're right it's hard to predict.
This one isn't quite a product though, it's a service. The company receives a request from a criminal: "gather information about such-and-such person and write a personalized phishing email that would work on them". And the company goes ahead and does it. It seems very fishy. The fact that the company fulfilled the request using AI doesn't even seem very relevant, imagine if the company had a staff of secretaries instead, and these secretaries were willing to make personalized phishing emails for clients. Does that seem like something that should be legal? No? Then it shouldn't be legal with AI either.
Though probably no action will be taken until some important people fall victim to such scams. After that, action will be taken in a hurry.
Yeah, this is really dumb. I wonder if it would've gone better if the AI profiles had been more honest to begin with, using actual datacenter photos as their profile pics and so on.
Are AI companies legally liable for enabling such misuse? Do they take the obvious steps to prevent it, e.g. by having another AI scan all chat logs and flag suspicious ones?
For every person saying "religion gave me a hangup about sex" there will be another who says "religion led to me marrying younger" or "religion led me to have more kids in marriage". The right question is whether religion leads to more anti-reproduction attitude on average, but I can't see how that can be true when religious people have higher fertility.
I've held this view for years and am even more pessimistic than you :-/
In healthy democracies, the ballot box could beat the intelligence curse. People could vote their way out.
Unfortunately, democracy itself depends on the economic and military relevance of masses of people. If that goes away, the iceberg will flip and the equilibrium system of government won't be democracy.
Tech that increases human agency, fosters human ownership of AI systems or clusters of agents, or otherwise allows humans to remain economically relevant
It seems really hard to think of any examples of such tech.
But many do maintain an explicit approval hierarchy that ranks celibacy and sexual restraint above typical sexual behavior
I think we just disagree here. The Bible doesn't say married people shouldn't have sex, and no prominent Christians say that either. There are norms against nonmarital sex, and there are norms against priests having sex, but between these things you draw a connection and generalization to all people which doesn't sound right to me.
Yeah, I missed a big part of your point on that. But another part maybe I didn’t? Your post started out talking about norms against nonmarital sex. Then you jump from that to saying they’re norms against reproduction - which doesn't sound right, religious people reproduce fine. And then you say (unless I'm missing something) that they're based on hypocrisy, enabling other people to not follow these norms, which also doesn't sound right.
I think this is wrong. First you say that celibacy would be pushed on lower status people like peasants, then you say it would be pushed on higher status people like warriors. But actually neither happens: it's not to the group's advantage (try to explain how making peasants or warriors celibate would advantage the group - you can't), and we don't find major religions doing it either, they are pro-fertility for almost all people. Celibacy of priests is an exception, but it's small and your explanations don't work for it either.
There have been many controversies about the World Bank. A good starting point is this paragraph from Naomi Klein's article:
Whether she's right or wrong, I like how the claims are laid out nicely. Anyone can fact-check and come to their own conclusions.