On Fri, Dec 20, 2024 at 7:37 AM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote:
> I think AI is making the censorship problem worse by reducing the cost. > Social media is undergoing a transition from human generated content to > human moderated to AI moderated to AI generated. Ultimately humans will > only interact with AI and lose the ability to communicate with each other, > even face to face. > > I was reading on Reddit (banned in China) that Pornhub (banned in China) > will also be banned in my home state of Florida starting on Jan. 1 due to a > law that requires age 18+ verification for adult sites. When Louisiana > passed a similar law, the site complied by requiring users to upload an > image of their drivers license, but traffic dropped 80% as users just went > to other sites. They decided it wasn't worth the effort and just block by > IP address. And it's not just red states doing this. Biden has been pushing > the Child Online Protection Act, which would have the effect of requiring > ID to use any social media. Australia already passed a law banning children > under 16 from using social media. I think anyone familiar with the tactics > of totalitarian governments can appreciate the need for anonymity in > journalism. > > I had thought that internet censorship would hold back China's rapid > economic growth, but that does not seem to be the case. How can > manufacturers export their products if they can't access the foreign sites > where they need to advertise and sell them? > The ban is not waterproof. Even the ultimate purpose of the ban is not to be waterproof. Chinese routinely use VPNs techniques to "climb over the wall" as they call it. But the real purpose is to kill *solidarity* among people. To make people feel FEAR, that certain things cannot be said, cannot be questioned. This phenomenon is common in Russia, North Korea also. In Iran the situation may be somewhat different, where they replaced the dictatorship of communism with Islamism. The Chinese economy is strong nowadays, probably because they occupied the lower-end of technologies in the last century. Now that they "upgraded" to cell phones, drones, electric cars, network equipments, and other electronic appliances, these products are hugely profitable. Whereas the US economy seems unable to find new niches comparable to those. On the other hand the Chinese economy may not be in such terrific shape as commonly perceived. Someone mentioned the Indian "call center" economy, where thousands of workers sit in huge buildings taking calls from all over the world, but these workers are very low-skill and only studied instruction manuals. What's going to happen when their jobs are replaced by AI? I guess people in the West should explore the future post-AI economy in earnest. We've got to believe there is a future beyond that horizon. If not, then China would not be a problem either, it'll be the global funeral, anyway 😆 > I did a quick Google (banned in China) search for a list of websites > banned in China and found this one on Wikipedia (banned in China). > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China > > When I wrote my distributed AGI proposal in 2008 ( > https://mattmahoney.net/agi2.html ), censorship wasn't even an issue. I > imagined a global message pool that anyone could post to anonymously, > signed and dated cryptographically. Messages could never be deleted or > modified once posted, making it censor proof as a byproduct of > computational efficiency. This was when social media consisted mostly of > USENET and mailing lists, a year before Bitcoin, and 2 years before the > Arab Spring when the dictators of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt were overthrown > because they didn't recognize the power of the internet to organize the > opposition. Now we know, which is why every government wants to regulate it. > That's what I want to build too. (One side problem is *spam*, but we can also have special policies to get around this problem.) ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T8685950780e86bd5-Md4fea41cf21a153c1d74a896 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
