[–] 9 points 3 days ago

Instead, labor and computing power are being diverted toward a singular “frontier-model effort” led by Pieter Abbeel, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab whose robotics company Covariant was hoovered up by Amazon in 2024. At the time Abbeel joined the tech giant, Covariant’s founders were working on AI models for robots, which lines up pretty well with Amazon’s push to automate everything it possibly can.

I’m wondering how long it will be until corporations will have their own private robot security forces to suppress any remaining unionizing employees and terrorize protesters. 😬

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  • [–] 205 points 4 days ago* (9 children)

    I would wait and hide, allowing the T-Rex to tire itself out. Then one night, when the T-Rex was especially tired and soundly asleep, I would carefully climb into the T-Rex’s cloaca. There I would stay for the rest of the month.

    That’s it, you can keep the 500 million. I’ve already won.

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  • [–] 46 points 5 days ago (19 children)

    What? The risk of an unelectable third party is that it bleeds enough votes to cause the majority party to lose. It’s kind of the main drawback of the two party system.

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    Beyond the broad impact the COVID crisis had on society, it feels like it kicked the one-percent’s authoritarian instincts into overdrive. I have a theory that they saw their extreme wealth was not the impenetrable bulwark they thought it was, and it shook them to the core:

    • Before broad adoption of reliable vaccines, they were conceivably vulnerable to the same indiscriminate illness as everyone else.

    • It demonstrated that the government can and will shut down your business with the full regulatory weight of the US government, in the interest of public safety over profit.

    • For the first time it demonstrated that a universal income model is not only possible, it is completely affordable and can be quickly implemented.

    • The luxury services that their money had always effortlessly bought could be quickly ended by decree, scarcity, and the loss of human labor to illness.

    What do you think? Did COVID deeply terrify the rich? Or was it just another opportunity for them to make money and maximize hegemony?

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