This very obtusely ommits the demand for new data centers and related infrastructure that using AI creates, the going "vegan for a year" option assumes less cows being born but somehow the "don't use AI" doesn't assume that the data center wasn't build in the first place.
The discrete number of cows being born is theoretically fine-grained enough to actually respond to 2–3 vegans yielding one fewer cow. It's unlikely on a one-year time scale, but one cow only goes so far.
Even a thousand AI objectors aren't going to limit the demand for a data center, in no small part because these investments are only partially driven by current demand and are significantly driven by expectation of future demand. And they're really not going to lead to smaller data centers either because if you're building a data center in the first place you're going to spec it out for future demand.
Regardless, I think in both cases it's important to be realistic about the actual impact that one person has. If that number is disappointingly small, that serves as signal that your conscientious objection isn't making the industry you're objecting to as uncomfortable as you would like to think. It may still be worth objecting for your own sense of self, or maybe it serves as an invitation to evangelize your position more, but either way there's not much value to measuring things in a way that gives you an illusion of greater impact than you actually have.
You should learn the difference between correlation and causation, and maybe read the summary of the study you're posting:
There is an independent association between problematic use of social media/internet and suicide attempts in young people. However, the direction of causality, if any, remains unclear. Further evaluation through longitudinal studies is needed.
Also your claim that "all evidence" points anything out is contradicted by the fact that "all evidence" is not contained within a single study, and the posted article points out that the evidence itself is in dispute.
Yeah, I'm sure surviving adolescence needs even more insecurities brought by comparing yourself to the ad-fueled fake happiness machinery that is social media, let's wait for the damage during a couple of decades so we can have conclusive data that satisfies you before we decide to do something, feels like not having enough people with terminal cancer to decide to do something about cigarettes.
That's an emotional statement, not a rational one, which kind of proves the point that what's going on here is a moral panic. As does a cursory glance at this thread. It's all heat and very little light.
The issue of having to prove things beyond any doubt before we do something is a systemic problem that science itself it's aware of about itself and have been discussed extensively in purely rational settings, how many lives would have been saved from lung cancer if academics had took more seriously the initial research about smoking?. So no I don't believe for a second you are discussing in good faith, instead it seems like you quite a clear agenda and wouldn't care much about any evidence against social media, maybe because you work at one of those corporations or just are ideologically attached to one, so in other words I believe you are the one here due an emotional response, specifically one against the backlash towards social media.
>instead it seems like you quite a clear agenda and wouldn't care much about any evidence against social media, maybe because you work at one of those corporations or just are ideologically attached to one.
And there it is. I don't agree with you so I must be a shill or a disinfo agent. No, I'm not. I just disagree with you.
No one is actually arguing that things have to be proven beyond any doubt. Nor is anyone arguing that nothing at all can or should be done about the negative effects of social media exposure or the use of ALGORITHMS. There are ways to mitigate the harms of social media that don't involve the government's monopoly on violence.
What's being argued is that the arguments being made to justify having governments regulate and ban social media (and by extension, free speech on the web) haven't been justified by the science. "something must be done before it's too late" isn't a valid argument. It's the same "but what if there's a bomb" argument used to justify normalizing torture after 9/11, and the abusive policing of the Satanic panic before that, and literally every other ratcheting up of authoritarianism in the face of a moral panic.
But since I know you aren't willing or able to approach me in good faith on this topic, I'm done now. I apologize for triggering you with wrongthink.
It's already impossible to even talk about Palestine in TikTok, the biggest social network used by teens, so if you think corporations will not willingly bend to distort free speech you are quite delusional, the ability to make up one's mind is also inversely related to how much propaganda you are exposed to, in other words to be free enough to think for yourself.
This exactly the issue. Anyone with common sense knows that social media have many negative effects, attention span, negative beliefs and ideas, addiction, etc. Just like inhaling smoke into your lungs can't be healthy right? But then comes so called scientist who say well since we thought the the universe was Euclidean but now we see it is non-Euclidean what is common sense is not common sense, there is no common sense. We need some sort of impossible proof to what was originally common sense.
> Anyone with common sense knows that social media have many negative effects, attention span, negative beliefs and ideas, addiction, etc.
This is common sense.
> Just like inhaling smoke into your lungs can't be healthy right?
You're asserting that social media is as dangerous and deadly and smoking. That isn't common sense.
> But then comes so called scientist who say well since we thought the the universe was Euclidean but now we see it is non-Euclidean what is common sense is not common sense, there is no common sense.
Now you're trying to discredit any scientist who disagrees with your premise with a ridiculous straw argument that doesn't at all describe any claim being made. This is what's called "motte and bailey." You started with an actually uncontroversial premise but then started arguing for something far more controversial, drawing the false equivalence between the two.
You keep saying "common sense" and even try to imply that "common sense" should take precedence over science, and that is exactly the issue.
Why is a risk supposed to be taken by all society instead of a controlled environment? If you really believe in science you wouldn't believe in experiments done to uncontrolled amounts of population, just like the FDA doesn't just let everyone release all possible drugs and only after that start investigating them to check which ones are the harmful ones then why you believe that is the scientific approach to social media? It makes absolutely no sense even from the scientific standpoint that you supposedly believe in.
Yeah, tell that to those parents with 3 jobs and can barely make any time with their kids that they have to keep an eye on even more things, things that weren't even a thing in their childhood or their predecessors.
Wouldn't the correct solution be to empower those parents with subsidies or free child care? If you have to work 3 jobs, parent or not, there is something wrong with how we've structured our society. Banning social media in your example seems like a bandaid put on a person with external and internal bleeding. You'll stop some of the bleeding but the person will still suffer and die.
Yeah, there is almost always better solutions to all problems than the one society goes to, but history has taught us that that a lot of times if we wait for the "better solution" we end up years and even decades without either solution.
But this solution has several negatives that likely make it net negative.
It normalizes age verification online which will likely lead to a less free internet. We could wait for decades until a really privacy-preserving way of age verification will come but what will happen is we'll have to give up our privacy and anonymity to a few large governments and companies.
It opens to door for regulating any kind of communication channels amongst the people. It will start with big social media but it will likely expand to any kind of forums, chats and even open protocols like AT. It will normalize the government interfering in all kinds of online activities.
These may seem distant and abstract to most people but the people in power want or will want to get power over every kind of communication. We should oppose this now, not when it's normalized and has happened for "platforms bigger than X users".
The people should be able to form any kind of group where they communicate freely. If you want to regulate commercial addictive algorithmic content suggestions... OK, maybe, sure. Do it. Don't regulate where people communicate, how they do it, what they talk about and what they share. People who can use the internet, even children, need a way to share their ideas and concerns. They need to be able to belong to whatever community they please.
Did you know the DOJ is starting to use subpoenas to unmask reddit users that criticize ICE? if you really care about free communication that's the kind of stuff you should be worrying about, not shilling for corpos trying to convince your daughter that she looks ugly so she ask her parents to buy more beauty products.
I am worried about this and completely oppose these subpoenas. In an ideal world all communications would be over a censorship/subpoena-resistant protocol and the government wouldn't try to infiltrate or stop any kind of online communication. I wish we can collectively ditch Meta, Google, Twitter, reddit and all the other centralized crap for something better. I don't have accounts there and if I had a company I wouldn't even make a company account there even it would mean I'd lose visibility and potential customers.
I hate those companies with a passion. I know most of us here do even if some of us work there (I don't and will not; I'm not even in IT right now). Yet I see how easily regulations against these centralized platforms will expand to regulations on communication in general, whether it's commercial centralized ones or an FOSS decentralized E2EE ones.
not to sound callous, but that's not good parenting.
my partner and i have reasonably good jobs, but we work 12-14hrs. we make mortgage and have some extra money. we are currently debating whether or not it is financially, morally, or ethically responsible to bring a child into this world and be able to provide them with the attention that they need and deserve.
Why? If asbestos is killing us we ban it, if hipotericllly some new form of asbestos is more harmful to young people than the rest we ban it too, why put the pressure of that responsibility in already stressed out population. Corporations know this very well, that's why they love when people have the opinion you just shared here.
From what I know, asbestos is bad when it gets airborne. If it's installed correctly, if workers wear PPE when handling it and if there are periodic checks for cracks, leaks and so on, it's safe. From what I've read, at least - I'm not an expert by any means. I've removed asbestos from a few old buildings but wore PPE. It was very uncomfortable to have the masks and suit on. I even threw away the cloth bags I had to my tools in, just to be safe. We disposed of the asbestos as per regulation. I feel safe and would do it again.
So maybe banning asbestos altogether is overkill.
I'd love to be proven wrong. I don't have any financial interest in asbestos besides the few jobs I've done over the years removing it.
The average person interacting with social media doesn't have a bunny suit that protects them from its ills, like you did with asbestos. This is doubly true for children.
Your example thus kind of shows the opposite: dangerous things can be made safe, with a solid understanding of their risks and techniques that are proven to make them safe. We have neither the former nor the the latter for social media.
The bunny suit for a child is the parents, teachers and social workers.
Like I said in another comment - if a parent is working 3 jobs and doesn't have time for their children, change the subsidies given to the parent for having children. Make child care free or really accessible.
A child needs a parent or at least a role model. If you ban social media, the children will still see random crap on the internet, whether it's YouTube videos or content from random sites too small or shady to be regulated. Do you want 100% of the internet regulated or do you want the government to empower the children and their parents? We have the resources, we just haven't allocated them correctly. Otherwise a parent would have time to spend with their children.
I get what you're saying but installing asbestos correctly is much easier than writing an app that could have security implications in C, is more easily detectable where things go wrong and it affects less people if things go wrong.
And the people using asbestos in their homes, or buying homes with asbestos, are endangering themselves. How likely is that an improperly installed or maintained asbestos is going to affect a whole neighborhood?
But the people in each house would suffer from from asbestos in their own house. [0] If I bought a house in such a neighborhood, I'd have it checked from cracks or deterioration. If the results show a risk, I'd inform the neighboring houses, too.
Similar to how if you're using a insecure program written in C, whoever finds the bug should tell you immediately - don't use that program.
[0] You might say that asbestos from 1 house would affect the whole neighborhood but that would be similar to how a smoker smoking in the streets would affect the neighborhood. Second-hand smoking and second-hand asbestos are bad but they're negligible compared to living with a smoker who smokes indoors with the windows closed or smoking yourself.
Yeah, like Google doesn't know other hundreds of companies are also generating videos and will without the slightest shred of doubt will use reinforced learning to bypass this detection, meaning directly asking Google's AI if a picture they modified is AI or not to improve their algorithms, they know vouching for video is as useful as vouching for AI generated texts, zero.
I bet the cameras' companies will start automatically uploading the real footage to their servers for attestation, and allow the camera owners to get those links, so people will just add that link on YouTube or whatever and say "See, its real, Sony vouches for it", heck maybe they will make their buyers to sign up with YouTube and do it for them.
How on top of security do you think all the camera manufacturers are going to be? That is, how long until people can sign videos that were not, in fact, shot with their camera?
Proving that you were able to upload something that is not real would go viral so it's very attractive to people to share such findings, meaning it would not last long, then they fix it and that's it, specially because they can require you to upgrade your camera's firmware if you want to keep using their attestation service.
Perhaps that could work in certain situations, but you don't even necessarily need digital signatures for that. A link to a reputable news site claiming they've verified the footage as real would be good enough in like 95% of cases, people just don't bother to check.
You'd also need close to 100% adoption for this to be effective, otherwise people will just assume the fakes were recorded with one of the cameras that doesn't have that feature, or that they didn't bother to upload the raw footage anywhere.
Joking and all but sexting would benefit from this technology, if it can vouch about the time, GPS location and email address of the owner then the receiver can have some certainty about the pic (if the sender decides to share such attestation link/info, of course)
Attention is valuable these days, so making people go to their websites for people to check if something is real is good for them, its people they can try to sell more cameras (or phones) and all that.
Attention span is finite and Steam took a big chunk of it from gamers, in other words there is a chance that in a world where everyone hated closed platforms like steam (for not allowing reselling or any other reason) direct ads would be more favorable for developers than steam, or word of mouth, or any of it's alternatives.
Ok, so now you're criticizing them for being too successful.
They don't own the OS, they don't (until very recently) own the hardware, they haven't really made any major uncompetitive or anti-consumer moves I'm aware of, and they provide a service that the majority of devs consider worth it.
I guess you could argue they're taking advantage of a bit of a "natural monopoly", but there's still plenty of room for other people to eat their lunch, and things like itch seem to have carved out a niche for devs that would rather keep their money than get the additional services Steam offers.
I don't think Steam is flawless, but for how powerful they are, they sure seem a lot less evil than almost every other large corporation.
Sure, if we were in an alternative reality, things would be different.
Valve built a platform that gamers like, and gamers like it for all the choices Valve made.
I also find it interesting you chose "not allowing reselling" as a thing that would have made users not like steam... but not allowing reselling is probably the feature that game developers like the most! I wouldn't be surprised if developers would choose to keep the 30% fee over dropping the fee but changing to allow reselling.
My sweet summer child, the "profession" will become an agent managers talk directly to, like many other professions.