I don't agree that Epstein is much of a counter point. There were lots of people taking about him, it really wasn't that closely held of a secret, and he was arrested and prosecuted and murdered for it. Ultimately, with the files released, there really isn't much in them that we didn't already know.
The biggest problem with conspiracy theories like this is always the number of people involved keeping their mouths shut. Anyone that has ever managed a large project knows how impossible it is to keep a large group of people quiet about something. In real life, there are conspiracies. Often very large ones. But they didn't stay secret for long.
What is easier to believe: (1) that all these people involved, across countries with leaders of many different political varieties, all agreed to stick to a single narrative in order to cover up a deep international conspiracy to build a massive international database of people's ages online, OR (2) Meta and other orgs are doing a normal business thing and trying to reduce their liability costs.
I didn't know about that. Maybe that's plays into it too. But I'm generally a "simpler answer is more likely the most correct" type of guy.
In this case the simple answer is that Meta and others just had their "Tobacco Lawsuits" moment in court and liability floodgates are any to open wide, and they are pushing these laws to divert their liability onto someone else.
It's so funny to me how badly people want this to be some nefarious governmental conspiracy. Listen, the government already has much better tools to track you online. Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs. This age requirement thing isn't a government conspiracy to track you, they already track you.
It is a *corporate *conspiracy. It's Meta and other major websites, games, and applications companies that want to off load their liability. Meta and Alphabet just lost major lawsuits for their negligence in protecting kids on their own websites. There is a liability dam about to break for these companies and schools and other advocacy groups start their own lawsuits. That's what this is about. That's the real conspiracy.
The biggest problem with AI is that it has very poor "accuracy vs precision" problem.
It can be very precise with what it can produce, but it's accuracy is completely unreliable.
So, as it stands right now, the only jobs it can really replace are jobs where accuracy doesn't really matter all that much, like front end software/web development and art production.
For cultural reasons, it probably developed as a valuable tribal in-grouping check.
How do we know for sure you are one of us and not a spy or an infiltrator... Well, if you are an ancient Tribal Jewish person you have a special trick to prove you are in the group.
This is my go to evidence that the whole beliefs that real estate values always increase is absurd.
If real estate prices always increase, even modestly, then an apartment in Rome or Paris would cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. Obviously that's not the case, and since land speculation isn't exactly a new thing, there is a correction somewhere.
Almost all "hacks" of modern mainstream software involve users being stupid.
If you hear about a "hack" of a major corporation or hospital or something, the things that is never reported is that it likely started with someone with more user permissions than sense opening a phishing email.
I don't agree that Epstein is much of a counter point. There were lots of people taking about him, it really wasn't that closely held of a secret, and he was arrested and prosecuted and murdered for it. Ultimately, with the files released, there really isn't much in them that we didn't already know.