This was clarifying? It reads like a sleepy undergrad's first attempt, complete with the constant meandering to satisfy some word count. The irony is a SOTA AI could make this person's case far more succinctly and convincingly. You really need to hold yourself (and the people you read) to a higher standard.
This entire brain dump of a blog post could be summed up in one famous sentence: Man is a political animal.
I never understand people who seem to have a need to grasp at such poorly written blogs for an understanding of today's affairs. Humans have really been remarkably consistent in their nature. The answer to your question has already been written, maybe even centuries ago by someone who thought about this a lot harder than you. Sometimes it feels like LLMs are so good simply because most people are far less interesting than they think they are. At some level humanity has been asking the same fundamental questions since the dawn of civilization. At a certain point what more does the average person have to say that we haven't already heard before?
Assuming you can still sue McDonalds I am not sure if this is a problem in the robotic llm case. I'm also trying to imagine a case where you would want to sue the llm and not the company. Given robots/llm don't have free will I'm not sure the problem with qualified immunity making police unaccountable applies.
There already exist a lot of similar conventions in corporate law. Generally, a main advantage of incorporation is protecting the people making the decisions from personal lawsuits.
>Police officers are human. In the United States in the vast majority of cases you can't sue the police, only the community responsible for them.
Police are a monopoly; nobody has a choice about which police company to use. McDonalds are not a monopoly, and many customers would prefer to eat at competitors run by entities that could be sued or jailed if they did anything particularly egregious.
You are missing the point. The point is you can still sue the McDonalds. With the police there is a human intuition to also want to sue the officer, given the officer is a human being who has free will and thus made a choice to violate your rights.
The same intuition applies if you walk into McDonald's and a person there mistreats you. You want that person held responsible.
But the LLM is not a person. What is there to even sue? It just seems like it would simply pass through to the corporate entity without the same tension of feeling like we let a human get away with something. Because there is no human, just a corporation and the robot servicing the place.
Put another way - if the LLM is not a person, what is the advantage of a personal lawsuit?
Just sue the McDonalds. Even in a case where the LLM is extremely misaligned and acts in a way where you might normally personally sue the McDonald's employee, I'm just not sure the human intuition about "holding someone accountable" would have its normal force because again - the LLM is not a person.
So given we already have the notions of incorporation and indemnification it doesn't make sense to say what is precluding LLMs from running McDonald's is they can't be sued. If McDonald's can still be sued, then not only is there no problem, there is very likely not even a change in the status quo.
> given the officer is a human being who has free will and thus made a choice to violate your rights.
The purpose of qualified immunity is for when an officer does something that turns out to be illegal but they were both told to by their superiors and did not think it was in violation at the time.
An officer making a choice to violate your rights would not be eligible for qualified immunity.
Wow yes excellent point, because of course a police officer facing the threat of legal action would never attempt such a low bar lie. Oops my boss told me to. Oops I didn't know. Case dismissed.
Excellent standards for people authorized by the state to run around with a badge and a gun in a free society. Your comment history on this is so unimpressive. Would you countenance the same excuses in anyone else? A man puts on his police uniform and suddenly you think he should be immune from civil prosecution because "my boss told me so" and "I didn't know"?
I wonder if you will make similar excuses for robo cop. Or if your principles merely extend to whatever human you can find in uniform willing to tolerate your friendship.
You seem to have read a lot more into my comment than was there.
Plus, qualified immunity is only for civil precedings. Individual officers are still liable for any criminal actions they take. I see a lot of people say that some officer should be in jail and blame qualified immunity when those two things are not related at all.
I'm not arguing, at all, that police should be immune to prosecution individually. I'm trying to make the point that, if you are trying to hold police individually accountable for their _criminal_ actions, qualified immunity isn't the thing that's preventing that. There's a whole legal system and union/police culture that's responsible for that.
Qualified immunity is thrown around so much in contexts where it makes it clear that people don't understand what it means and gets used, as it was in your comment, as a bogey man that's to blame for all the times police get let off the hook for their misbehavior. All I'm trying to do when correcting you (and others) about qualified immunity is to both redirect your anger and effort into changing something that will actually make a difference and/or prevent you from spending the mental or physical energy chasing a dead end.
You're not correcting anything. Nothing in my comment suggested I don't know what qualified immunity is or I don't understand the difference between criminal and civil liability. Quite the contrary if you are capable of reading.
You seem to be arguing with yourself, not with me. If you are satisfied with a cop only facing criminal liability (often from the same prosecutors that rely on police to make other cases, among other issues as you pointed out) fine that is your prerogative. Don't file a civil case. But don't misrepresent my position. Criminal prosecution does not preclude civil, nor the other way around. Citizens should not face such hurdles to file civil suits, irrespective of whatever happens re a criminal case. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Surely your comprehend that one can be found liable both criminally and civilly in many cases. Or tried for both but subject to different penalties (including none) depending on how each goes. Why are your LEO buddies so special as to be largely exempt from the rules that govern the rest of us?
The fact your comment history is riddled with these continued misrepresentations on this topic while you claim to educate is simply galling. Have a good day, I don't think I can continue in good faith with someone who seems to predicate engagement on this topic with unfounded assumptions about others education on the issue. Your own comments on this topic indeed are indicative of a severe projection in this respect.
McDonald's are franchises - you generally want to sue the local owner or threaten them in addition to the holding company.
That only requires someone own the ai managed McDonald's though. so long as they can't avoid responsibility by pointing to the AI I don't see why you couldn't sue them.
Unless the moral position is something akin to realist self interest, in which case the apparent "inconsistency" is actually internally quite consistent. Perhaps the lack of consistent moral positions in competing paradigms is less an interesting phenomena to point out and more a tell that someone is laboring under an extremely naive conception of human morality.
Indeed. Qualified immunity is a stain on American jurisprudence.
You can almost never hold anyone in government accountable. You are forced to sue your own community to get some shred of justice while the actual people who violated your rights face zero accountability.
Tell lawmakers who want your vote this November that you want an end to qualified immunity. Agents of the state should not be less accountable to the laws of the land than regular individuals.
IMO this case is a good example of one that ought to void qualified immunity as it currently stands, though I know in practice it's more difficult. I think it's plain that a "clearly established" constitutional right was knowingly violated here.
The problem with this summation is the government is complicit in their actions. Thus it undermines this simple private gain, public pain argument.
A lot of the times when Meta does something like this the fact the governments in question essentially demand that action seems to be ignored. Would you have a better view of corporate power if corporations could unilaterally ignore the laws of sovereign countries in which they operate?
Wouldn't it normatively be more in keeping with a proper distinction between public and private to say lobby your congressman to stop the ceaseless funding and weapon deployments to countries in the ME that don't share our values? I have the same feeling when people complain about Meta and privacy. I mean at least they are giving you a "free" service and you essentially take part in a transaction. The NSA has all your data anyway. Does anyone remember their congressional rep trying to convince them this is a good idea? You can log off from Facebook at any time. In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten. Try sending such a request to the NSA or your local police department. Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?
If you want a new public culture you should probably identify the real target is not private companies which really don't care about these questions and just want to do whatever moves margins. Your real problem is a lot less easy to propagandize about - the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East. They want cheap oil and cheap products.
Not sure how many election cycles American liberals need to live through to get this through their heads.
I hear you, there are countless problems to solve. My "..in a just world.." was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
> I mean at least they are giving you a free service and you essentially take part in a transaction.
Yes, it is akin to a transaction, but we cannot ignore the power imbalance between the user and the corporation. They actively engineer their platforms to keep you glued to the screen. It is far from free. You pay with time, money spent on whatever is advertised to you and a lot of other things.
My proposal was analogous to say tobacco tax or carbon tax and the like. We somehow made it essential to be on social media, it is proven to be harmful, policy action to shift priorities.
Fair enough, I appreciate the response. Just note in this case I think the precedent should not be private company can ignore public demand. If they can unilaterally ignore the demands of the Saudi government then why not any liberal government? If you operate in a country you should have to follow their rules. If the rules themselves are bad that is a different question.
The remedy in that case then would not be a tax but to ban them from operating in that country. We already have these sorts of export controls with other countries. It is just the case that despite their egregious human rights record (bone saw, anyone?) the United States has propped up the Saudi regime since basically it first came to exist roughly a century ago.
The reason is obvious - Saudi brutality is a feature not a bug. It secures access to cheap oil.
The export control angle is interesting. I was treating addiction, radicalization, capitulation to authoritarian govts, abetting human rights violations, productivity loss, etc., as the symptom of a common cause: the hyper-optimized engagement model and curbing it with a policy. You're right that some of these harms might warrant categorical exclusions rather than pricing the whole business model out.
I may have had an overly optimistic ideal of people running small federated mastodon servers for friends and family for free/donations being the only type of "social media".
I appreciate your optimism actually. Someone (it's me) can also share your ideal for social media while also having slightly different takes on what makes the prevailing model wrong exactly.
> Wouldn't it normatively be more in keeping with a proper distinction between public and private to say lobby your congressman to stop the ceaseless funding and weapon deployments to countries in the ME that don't share our values?
If an individual lobbying the government wouldn't be overpowered by monied corporate interest in the government, maybe. Sadly that's not the case, at least in the US.
> The NSA has all your data anyway.
Yes, and this is incredibly unpopular and if we had a real representative democracy we'd be able to do something about it.
> In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten.
This too is popular and would be codified more broadly if, again, it wasn't for corporate lobbyists.
> Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?
To beat a dead horse...
> the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East
Factually untrue.
The Iran war is incredibly unpopular, beating Iraq and Vietnam in unpopularity this quickly into the operation [1]
Most Americans want us to stop funding Israel [2]
Most Americans are against spying on fellow Americans (esp democrats/the left; tho republicans love a good ole police state)[3].
I'd argue strongly the reason these numbers aren't more in favor of anti-intervention and privacy is decades and decades of propaganda and fear mongering (about socialism/communism during the Cold War and before, about the Middle East/muslims since the oil crisis and before) because of, you guessed it, corporations lobbying for military engagement, oil contracts etc.
There is a thoroughly documented history of American corporations lobbying the government to, here is a brief list:
- Hawaiian overthrow (1893): sugar (dole, spreckles)
- Spanish-American war (Cuba, Philippines, Puerto Rico) (1898): sugar, tobacco, shipping
- Columbia/Panama (1903): canal rights
- Nicaragua (1909-1933): United Fruit, banking
- Honduras (1903, 1907, 1911, 1924): United Fruit and others
- Dominican Republic (1916–1924, 1965): sugar again
- Iran (1953): oil
- Guatemala (1954): United Fruit!
- Congo (1960-61): copper/cobalt
- Brazil (1964): mining
- Indonesia (1965–66): mining, oil
- Chile (1970-73): copper
- Iraq (2003): oil, war contractors
- Iran (2025-26): oil, war contractors
There are many more - some more contested than others - but the above list have clear historical documentation linking them to corporate interests.
Socialism, communism, "terrorism", the war on drugs, "democracy", and Iran getting nukes have all been helpful tools for US corporations to curry influence with bought politicians to have the US colonize or dismantle other countries for their benefit.
Your analysis puts all the blame directly on citizens vs looking at root causes and the obvious successes of corporate and government propaganda on the opinions of Americans.
Let's instead look at who benefits most from these wars and try and dismantle their ability to influence opinion and government and work towards a more representational and fair government we have a say in.
The Iran war is unpopular because of prices at the pump. Prior interventions in Iran (and elsewhere) that also violated rights did not garner the same reaction because to the average American they incurred no cost. If for some reason the war had caused prices to go lower the war would be popular. The fact you think otherwise would lead me to simply conclude you are in denial re the psyche of the American electorate.
You aren't telling me anything I don't already know. You cannot be pro democracy and at the same time treat the electorate like children. Propaganda is part of electioneering. Parties advocating for their own interests should be a feature in a healthy democracy. Are you suggesting the electorate is incapable of dealing with their basic obligations as citizens of a free society? And your scapegoat for this is the corporations?
What is your theory of democracy if the population is so susceptible to "corporate lobbyists"? Why trust such a body to make decisions if it can't even cope with basic propaganda?
Have you been to red counties? I think you are severely over-indexing on your own biases. Corporate lobbying has nothing on tribalism, racism, and general parochialism. You seem to be well read enough when it comes to history. I am surprised your assessment of human nature has not caught up.
The fact is most Americans don't care. If they did they would elect different leaders. If your theory is that the electorate is simply brainwashed well that seems to me as much an indictment on the notion of democracy itself as a criticism of any allegedly brainwashing entity.
Of course I put blame on citizens. Your attempt to shift all the blame to "corporate lobbyists" is about as convincing as the "they were about to get a nuclear weapon" responsibility shift.
Citizens are responsible because in a democracy they are the ultimate arbiters. You don't get to shift the responsibility, it's not optional. The notion of democracy itself rests on it. If you feel a need to control what information citizens consume so that you can personally legitimize their decisions I would suggest to you perhaps you don't really believe in democracy. As George Carlin said, garbage in garbage out.
Like who? Notable candidacies are predicated on million dollar budgets, and pretty much everyone who runs on justice and gets into an office in the US then neuters themselves.
It's not a democratic state, and US society has very little tolerance for or understanding of democracy.
If your point is to suggest no alternatives have ever been contemplated then that is simply factually untrue and I think you know that. In some cases, such people succeed locally/statewide even if failing nationally.
My point is simply you don't get to rob the electorate of its agency because you don't like the choice its made. That's about as silly as the grandparent to your comment citing random polls to establish some authoritative notion of what Americans believe.
What "agency"? Participation in US elections is junk level, politicians openly and routinely 'redistrict' and suppress voting, and the median US citizen is revulsed by the prospect of egalitarian organising.
The current US president is an Idi Amin style autocrat, and the "electorate" is responding by lulling around in the streets with one hand occupied by a live streaming spy device and then getting beaten by cops or cop adjacents.
Are you aware that the current US president won the popular vote? What redistricting and voter suppression came into play in that case?
I'm supposed to conclude from this election that the electorate didn't support the current president?
Your post is really unimpressive. You care about these things yet you need me to provide you the name of progressive politicians? You want to take agency away because of redistricting and voter suppression yet immediately claim that the "median US citizen is revulsed by the prospect of egalitarian organising"? So do they have agency or not? Did the politicians program their revulsion too? Or was that the corporations? Maybe they need to hang out with you for a few weeks to be sufficiently deprogrammed.
I'm sure it will look like many other such ventures in that domain. I can see the people desperately trying to crawl over the walls now as you go into another second paragraph non sequitur.
I think what is clear is you don't believe in democracy. How can you given the obvious contempt you show for the American electorate.
Unlike you I know the difference between someone who doesn't have agency and someone who isn't worth my time. Have a good day.
At best, just a little more than half the electorate voted in that election so I'm not sure what you mean by "popular vote".
For an electorate to have agency it has to be informed, egalitarian and politically organised. None of this holds for the notable usian elections. There are local exceptions of course, but on average usians do not organise politically and loathe those that try. This is why "activist" is an insult in the US and union busting widely tolerated. It is also why the US does not have political parties in the sense other countries have them, i.e. groups of people self organising and making collective decisions.
In the US, elections are commonly bought. Variations on this practice is also exported, and has been an issue for decades, including in Europe where the US has used a little of everything from mafia mediated terrorism to high tech psyops to get their way.
As for the parliamentary practices of the US, issues brought up in those contexts are often treated in a way that is absolutely inscrutable to most voters and in a way more reminiscent of televised game shows than actual democratic deliberation. Recently there was a proposal made but the initial sponsors did a miscount so it actually had a chance to pass, so they suddenly turned around and voted against it. Deceptions like that seem to be everywhere in usian politics.
So if I'm correct, your post basically implies that individual voters are 100% responsible for everything, is that your claim?
That billions in lobbying into political campaigns, advertising, etc have no effect on how people think or vote?
Your entire argument seems to be "if people can be influenced, why democracy?" That's such a simplistic view of the world and human psychology.
I can guarantee you too are influenced by propaganda in ways you're not aware, I'm sure I am, we all are. Humans are influenced by culture, propaganda, family, religion, etc. To think we're all perfectly rational actors who have pure agency is nieve at best and disingenuous at worst.
My argument is that we should do what we can to combat the influence of corporate interests in our elections. I backed up why I think this is the case. I've made my points as clearly as I care to.
Yours is, what? Individual voters want everything that's happening? That because Trump won the popular vote, everyone who voted for him wanted every thing that's is happening (e.g. invading Iran despite him being the "anti-war candidate")?
If your entire argument is "people asked for this" than there is not much more to discuss...
Whatever he had in mind there is surely a warning in how rapidly his efforts were reversed once he passed from the scene.
This is not merely a matter of "favorites" or "imitation" but one of legitimacy. Rome was not built in a day and so forth. Often the most successful paradigm-shifting leaders are ones who can deftly command the legitimacy of the past while adapting their society to a new future. But attempting the latter while disposing of the former usually fails, as in the case of Akhenaten.
By virtue of its position, the state often does things it forbids all other actors under its jurisdiction from doing. Thus your comment has much less force than it would seem, even if the apparent contradiction you pointed out is somewhat amusing.
It is good to diversify but people should really not make Europe out to be some sanctuary. European governments (and thus companies) are still going to cooperate with America. When the day comes when they do not, America's reach will still be long.
Never mind the fact that incentives in Europe are not so different from the USA. It may look that way now, but often moving across the globe just means trading one villain for another.
Still a good idea, just a word of caution. If people make a move such as this based on some assumption about the stability of the European regulatory scheme you may want to examine that assumption with a little more rigor.
This. The privacy threats are somewhat different, but they still stem from government. The EU has tried to attack end-to-end encryption more than once, and they will try again. They are now requiring logging of IP addresses, and ever more tracking of use activities. The legislation requiring age verification is the camel's nose in the tent - expect them to require full ID soon. Etc.
All Western governments have clearly decided to restrict individual rights to privacy, political advocacy, and free speech in general. The way this is happening simultaneously in so many countries seems a clear indication of a coordinated effort.
European sanctuary is good for Europeans. The USA is not a reliable partner and has uncaused a massive amount of global instability that impacts European lives.
I also heavily disagree that incentives in EU are not different from the USA. The USA is an oligarchic government with pro-corporate politic parties. This is not the case in the EU. Not too mention workers in the EU often live better lives than workers in the USA.
Hard to not see how the incentives are completely unaligned. I mean FFS the USA made a very credible threat to invade Greenland, so credible that they were preparing for an invasion. An invasion started by your "ally."
However it seems odd to not follow your ending paragraph with more circumspection re the earlier ones.
If we stipulate that the USA is ending a trend of relative reliability and stability and as such constitutes more of a risk to Europe - including invasion of Greenland - why would we assume from this a stability in European regulatory regimes?
You don't think changes in the United States portend changes on the European continent? Do you imagine the USA descends into apocalypse while Europe remains unchanged? Will the incentives that push the American government to threaten "digital sovereignty" not loom in a Europe that has to increasingly face a more dangerous (given your own premises) world alone?
Yes, the current American administration is a disgrace. That is quite obvious and no achievement to point out, as you seem to well know. Don't let that automatically lead to the conclusion that Europe is some sanctuary. That does not logically follow. A relative improvement in conditions may end up being temporary. Caution is warranted. Especially from Americans who follow this "move my infra to Europe" trend without knowing Europe or its conditions with any intimacy.
As I said it's a good idea in principle. But some skepticism and caution is warranted.
For corporations this shift isn't about sanctuaries or ethical questions anyway, but about fear of running into EU road blocks placed for political reasons (maybe to penalize tariffs), long-term EU regulation enforcing data to stay in EU or even fear of retaliatory actions by US against EU economy.
Just to volunteer an example: An editorial by Assange that explicitly called out the panopticon was on my mind today.
The rise of "meta glasses" and reading ICE also wishes to employ them was what reminded me of this I believe.
Sociology (like philosophy, like math) is one of these subjects were a good teacher makes all the difference. I guess true of any subject. Many people come away from a subject thinking it's bunk or not relevant to them for all sorts of reasons. Teachers are not meant to be babysitters or proctors they are supposed to offer context and connect the dots.
The amount of bad teachers (it is a hard job) is quite staggering. Education is in large part a mess because we've tried to scale a system that was designed for the very few to the very many without the proper investment.
The term/design is not his but he offered an interpretation or extrapolation inspired by the concept that was unique enough that if you mention panopticon in the context of Foucault it means something unique.
This entire brain dump of a blog post could be summed up in one famous sentence: Man is a political animal.
I never understand people who seem to have a need to grasp at such poorly written blogs for an understanding of today's affairs. Humans have really been remarkably consistent in their nature. The answer to your question has already been written, maybe even centuries ago by someone who thought about this a lot harder than you. Sometimes it feels like LLMs are so good simply because most people are far less interesting than they think they are. At some level humanity has been asking the same fundamental questions since the dawn of civilization. At a certain point what more does the average person have to say that we haven't already heard before?
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