Youtube has sided with Hate
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
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Wait, wait, wait.... are you telling me that, in a Capitalist system, those on top have different rules placed upon them compared to those with less money and influence
Colour me shocked
You realize this applies to literally ever social-economic system ever made right?
There is always a top. They might pretend there is no top, but someone makes decisions, someone rules over others, someone polices others, there is always a top. ALWAYS.
Wasn't that long ago that several YouTubers were getting banned because of bots posting in their streaming chats while having inappropriate avatars. Like, why is the streamer held responsible for the avatars of people that can just enter their stream at will? It's mind boggilingly stupid.
Except in this case it's a "nobody" successfully evading punishment while a "somebody" gets punished for trying to speak out about it.
Dude, this is the exact opposite of what you described.
Algorithms.
My guess is that someone wrote a shit algorithm to flag up inappropriate images, but failed to include the distinction between images in the channel creator's content and the YT user avatars, and that algorithm was duly set loose to take action. They probably fixed it eventually, after the usual little trail of devastation.
As I have said before, I have a YT channel (with zero public posts, just a few things to share with friends), and I got a deletion and formal warning for a private video made with clips from a zombie computer game with captions for covid: like fortifying a house "Stay at home and avoid public places", or people running away from zombies "Observe social distancing". Apparently, that was dangerous pandemic misinformation. I'm willing to bet it wasn't a human that made that decision.
A couple of compscis making a string of numbers are much cheaper than a load of (much less well paid) moderators who would have much better judgement. Also, Google is the sort of place that ideologically wants to drive everything to algorithms, not just for money but an instrinsic vision of a computer-run future. Although, honestly, bearing in mind my country's current PM and leading party, a Google algorithm is looking pretty attractive for governance.
Somewhat off topic but have you ever read the book, Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, Agema?
I have not - but I'm vaguely aware of it and as an avid consumer of SF, I'm aware of the concept in narrative form.
One might note for instance Iain Banks' Culture, and its philosophically poorer relative in Neal Asher's Polity: here the AIs are benign because, well, they just decided that being ethically responsible was the right thing to do. The other end being Skynet from Terminator, or the AIs in The Matrix. In the middle of these, an AI that far surpasses us may just see us as a sort of irrelevance, as we do ants and weevils, like perhaps HAL from 2001. It might squash us just because it doesn't care - we're secondary to its objective, or it might not even have ethical understanding at all.
The other in a more general sense is a sort of learned helplessness. Even before AI, tasks were taken over by machines. If the machines go dead, we don't know how to do and make things our ancestors centuries ago did: do you know any weavers? I don't: better hope those T-shirts you have left last. The more we hand over, we may gain efficiency and productivity, but also become less resilient to shocks.
What bothers me most is that the mindset of techbros is that they should just do it, and fix the consequences if they happen. But the danger, of course (like Terminator), is that one day we won't be able to control the consequences. Maybe we'll all cheer when Elon Musk starts bringing back an asteroid to mine for $$$$$$, and then gawp in horror when an error or terrorist drops it straight on the planet like a hundred nukes at once.
Yep. You basically summed up everything I was going to bring up. Only part you didn't bring up is just how pedantic an A.I.s goals could be. In Superinteligence the author used the example of an A.I. tasked with counting paperclips and how even something as trivial as that could lead to an A.I. destroying everything in its task to make sure it knows how many paperclips there are. An A.I. could even think it's doing the right and good thing for humans as it does unspeakably horrible things to them.
As for the destruction of civilization, it's interesting how so much fiction about that kind of thing assumes we'd return to an existence similar to that we had in the past but the actual result could be much scarier, like us relying on a machine to provide us with food that we barely understand enough to keep running and not enough to be able to fix it if it breaks. And that kind of situation has actual examples in history.
It'll be easy for humanity to make an AI smarter than themselves; humans are, as a whole, complete imbeciles. What we need is to make an AI that's better than us in feeling bad about what it does.
Not really.
I mean, policing is the obvious one because for most of human history police didn't exist. Heck, for most of human history, there probably wasn't much in the way of social control at all, certainly not in the sense that we would recognize as policing. I don't want to go full anprim here, but for most of human history there's really no evidence of any kind of hierarchy in human beings. Even today, many hunter-gatherer societies are remarkably egalitarian. The amount of labor required to sustain such a society is actually very low compared to a settled agricultural society, so economic specialization (and thus inequality) doesn't really make sense.
Sure, once you live in a society larger than a small band, there becomes a need to mediate access to collective decision making, but even in our society we, however dishonestly, draw a separation between making decisions and ruling, or between policing and ruling. We call the people who do these things public servants, not public masters. Sure, in our society that's clearly a lie, but it is a statement of intent and a goal our society ultimately has sought to realize for centuries. Is the whole project a lie? Should we give it up on the idea that power can be shared within the human population? Should we go back to monarchies because that's the law of nature and its going to happen regardless?
It is not impossible to imagine a world in which the people who makes decisions on behalf of the community are not placed above the people they make decisions for, but instead borrow that power only with their consent. That is what democracy is, on paper. It is not impossible to imagine a world in which the people who investigate and resolve social harms and disputes do so by the popular consent of the communities they serve. That is what policing is, on paper. The hierarchical nature of our society, the economic and social inequality that turns decision makers into rulers, is not necessary and inevitable, it is actually actively counterproductive and hypocritical towards the very ideals our societies have been built on.
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Are you claiming the YouTube doesn't favour big channels over small?
In this case, the 'person' evading punishment is YouTube for not holding the same standards they have for their employees as content creators over doxxing
Well, now your getting to the root of the problem. I.e. the problem isn't socialism/capitalism/communism
I think one of the things noone really talks about in regards to the Culture series is the concept of ability and ableism. It's never explicitly mentioned but it's kind of implicitly there.
There seems to be an assumption we all have that in a society where one group of people is more able than another, those people will inevitably come to view the less able population as inferior and thus unworthy of the same treatment as they are. That fear often comes up in stories about AI. The minds might use "meat" as a jokey swear word amongst themselves, but there's an implicit ethos to the Culture that intelligence does not make you more or less entitled to rights, and that's actually pretty consistent all the way down to humans being grossed out at eating non-synthetic meat.
It's one of those things that's probably an oversight or the result of Banks not really thinking about it because at the end of the day it's a cheesy sc-fi series that's really just Star Trek on better drugs, but develops interesting implications when you do think about it.
I'm going to link to Universal Paperclips again.
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
It's a browser-based clicker game which is really just an illustration of how exponential growth works, but there's quite a cute implied story to it which ties into this idea about the dangers of "instrumental" artificial intelligence. Also paperclips.
To me it's actually one of the more interesting ways AI is used as a metaphor, because I'm pretty sure it's a metaphor for specialized labour. We all know our society is doing enormous harm to the planet, but we're also all specialized workers who need to keep working to make the numbers go up and aren't really supposed to think beyond our particular role. The AIs in these scenarios are really us, we don't have control over our own lives, even though our actions might have enormous negative implications for people down the line, because we've had to make ourselves so specialized to fit into the economy.
I would say particular people, hierarchy in general and power
Not everyone abuses power
Everyone causes abuse because of power. "Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."
You're falling into the same trap that has killed the souls of those before you. Power causes abuse by its very nature. A good person may cause less abuse, and a bad person cause more, but abuse they will still bring about.
Slight tangent, but apparently that was sorta how pirate bands were often supposed to operate. The captain gets a greater share of the loot, but not massively so, and the crew can vote for a new one any time there's not an emergency currently going on.