Yes, but it didn't get there overnight. At what point was it too late to stop? We've already deep into the self-censorship and stuggle session stage. With many large corporations and institutions supporting it.
>With many large corporations and institutions supporting it.
Corporations don't give a shit, they'll just pander to whatever trend makes them money in each geographical region at a given time.
They'll gladly fly the LGBT flag on their social media mastheads for pride month ... except in Russia, Iran, China, Africa, Asia, the middle east, etc.
So they don't really support LGBT people, or anything for that matter, they just pretend they do so that you'll give them your money.
Google's Gemini is no different. It's programed with biases Google assumed the American NPC public will accept. Except they overdid it.
Corporations consist of humans and humans do care. About all kinds of things. As evident from countless arguments within the open-source community, all it takes is one vocal person. Allow them to influence the hiring process and within shortly, any beliefs will be cemented within the company.
It wasn't profit that made Audi hire a vocal political extremist who publicly hates men and stated that police shouldn't complain after their colleagues were executed. Anyone could see that it would alienate the customers which isn't a recipe for profit.
Corporations and governments do consist of people and people do care...but it's also the case the being a cog in a large organization does have a tendency to induce stuff like "I was just following orders" or "It's not my problem, someone else needs to fix it" :-/
>It wasn't profit that made Audi hire a vocal political extremist
Sure, the problem with these huge wealthy companies like Audi, Google, Apple, etc is that the people who run them are insanely detached from the trenches the Average Joe lives in (see the Silicon Valley satire), and end up hiring a buch of useless weirdos in positions they shouldn't be in, simply because they have the right background/connections and the people hiring them are equally clueless but have the imense resources of the corporations at their disposal to risk and spend on such frivolities, and at their executive levels there's no clear KPIs to keep them in check, like ICs have.
So inevitably a lot of these big wealthy companies end up hiring people who use the generous resources of their new employer for personal political activism knowing the company can't easily fire them now due to the desire of the company to not rock the boat and cause public backlash for firing someone public facing who might also be a minority or some other protected category.
BTW, got any source on the Audi story? Would love to know more?
> So inevitably a lot of these big wealthy companies end up hiring people who use the generous resources of their new employer for personal political activism knowing the company can't easily fire them now due to the desire of the company to not rock the boat and cause public backlash for firing someone public facing who might also be a minority or some other protected category.
Exactly. This has been my experience. The political axe grinders get hired. They bring their personal politics to work. Slowly they hire people who agree with them. Then they're all bringing their politics to work. Finally, the entire company changes and becomes dysfunctional.
This is what Coinbase and Kraken FX stopped in their company saying it was destroying them.
The Cultural Revolution could only have happened due to the very specific ideological backdrop that existed in China at the time. The heights of it were sudden, but it didn't come out of nowhere.
It kind of did. There was a civil war in China, Mao pushed out all competing factions, and had complete political power.
This is a bug in a chatbot that Google fixed within a week. The only institutional rot is the fact that Google fell so far behind OpenAI in the first place.
I think the ones shrieking are those overreacting to getting pictures of Asian founders of Google.
You have your history very confused. Nearly 20 years elapsed between the end of the Chinese Civil War which left the CCP in power and the commencement of the Cultural Revolution.
> Nearly 20 years elapsed between the end of the Chinese Civil War which left the CCP in power and the commencement of the Cultural Revolution.
That’s not at all inconsistent with what the GP said. The point was that the impacts of thr Cultural Revolution depended on it being imposed top down by an authoritarian, unitary state with no constraints.
The cultural revolution was initiated by Mao because he was losing power and wanted to regain it. Even then it didn't happen overnight. It was preceded by a generation of buildup (in fact many of the violent perpetrators were young teenagers who were born after the Civil War had ended).
And even if you start counting from when Mao initiated it, it still didn't kick into full swing overnight.
That's what everyone thought just before every single horrible thing that happened in history. The Cultural Revolution or, e.g., the Holocaust didn't happen overnight. Things change slightly every day and then afterward you realize that everything has gone wrong, right around when people come knocking on your door.
Who got executed/sent to prison for treason? I don’t keep up with current trends genuinely curious if they’re sending people to jail for not being woke
McCarthyism is generally understood to be the witch hunting that went on in Congress and Hollywood. Not the execution of the Rosenberg's, who really did give the Soviet Union nuclear secrets and earned their just executions. The causal link between McCarthyism and the Rosenberg's execution goes the other direction as what you're suggesting; their actual betrayal of the country inspired witch hunting. McCarthy was full of hot air and liked to accuse lots of people of treason, but he never managed to get anybody executed (or even convicted) for treason.
(More incidentally, the Rosenbergs were executed for espionage, not treason. Nobody in America has been convicted of treason for anything done after WW2, and none of even the WW2 treason convictions resulted in executions.)
And the problem with McCarthyism wasn't so much what was happening in congress, it is that the accusation of being a communist made you unemployable in Hollywood or elsewhere. It's extraordinary that Hollywood re-established a black list after having produced so many movies complaining about those years. You are now required to show loyalty to the woke agenda in university admissions, research grants, hiring and promotion process in large companies.
Lots of professors getting fired, or not promoted, guy who wrote the google memo fired, lots of censorship, canceling. You’d have to be intentionally lying to not notice this
During McCarthyism people weren't executed or sent to prison for communism. They lost their jobs and were shamed. The exact same thing that has gone on during wokeism.
What exactly did they "do about the Landlords" other than murdering middle class landlords in favor of an inescapable Fedal Lord that is the Communist State?
Hiding much or all of the rent on the balance sheet of the State, while paying prison wages for mostly-compelled work and making people live on the edge of resource starvation, is simply barely hidden feudalism and even slavery.
Where is the people's Government, exactly? All communist governments are only extreme charicatures of Feudalist Lords, free to engage in the worst excesses over people who they demand not only be slaves but give into psychological enslavement. Communism is psychological feudalism, in addition to physical. At least medieval Serfs were free to openly dream of something better.
Communism is a Three-Card Monte psychological trick that creates Feudal Lords in the Upper Ranks of the State, and abuses the Serf into seeing Serfdom as the most virtuous lifestyle.
It's not a deep mystery as to why many upper class psychopaths like communism. It seeks to neutralize a lot of feudalist inconveniences, mostly with an origin in the otherwise free mind of the Serf.