Wait … What!! Really!!?

^^^ hot takes indeed, but really, what else is there to say? State of our democracy … something something something …

I think about this sometimes. The scorecard for the internet. Not sure it’s positive TBH.

In a more sci-fi vein, I wonder if it’s an inflection point for the evolution of society … when mass communication technology develops relative to the educational and political development of the same society.

It feels to me, in the west that is, that we were not culturally ready for mass communication. That we needed at least a few more generations of grappling with society’s problems and framing the role of the individual in the collective. That WWII probably held things back two generations. That we’ve basically squandered an opportunity and may pay the price for centuries down the line.

One area that I am somewhat knowledgeable about is image/video upscaling

Oh I believe you. I’ve seen it done on a home machine on old time-lapse photos. It might have been janky for individual photos, but as frames in a movie it easily elevated the footage.

Yea this. It’s a weird time though. All of it is hype and marketing hoping to cover costs by searching for some unseen product down the line … even the original chatGPT feels like a basic marketing stunt: “If people can chat with it they’ll think it’s miraculous however useful it actually is”.

OTOH, it’s easy to forget that genuine progress has happened with this rush of AI that surprised many. Literally the year before AlphaGo beat the world champion no one thought it was going to happen any time soon. And though I haven’t checked in, from what I could tell, the progress on protein folding done by DeepMind was real (however hyped it was also). Whether new things are still coming or not I don’t know, but it seems more than possible. But of course, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a big pile of hype that will blow away in the wind.

What I ultimately find disappointing is the way the mainstream has responded to all of this.

1. The lack of conversation about what we want this to look like in the end. There’s way too much of a passive “lets see where the technology and big-corp capitalism take us and hope it doesn’t lead to some sort of apocalypse”
2. The very seamless and reflexive acceptance that an AI chat interface could be an all knowing authority for everything in life … was somewhat shocking to me. Obviously decades of “Googling” to get the answers to things has laid the groundwork for that, but still, there was IMO an unseemly acceptance of a pretty troubling future that indicated just how easily some dark timeline could arise.

Stewart offered what seemed to me a thoughtful path forward: Be the party of democracy and transparency, listen to voters, and run a convention to pick the candidate …

… and, you know, maybe don’t be strangely authoritarian about who gets to be the candidate while claiming you’re also the only part that can “save democracy”.

Yea. I’m not from the US (so an outsider’s and probably naive perspective) …

but the whole Biden thing seems off. Trump is a known quantity. The point of his running, at a basic level and besides vengeance, is to try the MAGA thing again without COVID “interfering”. Also, if you think back to the 2020 Dem primaries, where no one was really happy with any candidate and many were asking of the Dems “is that the best you’ve got” … a Trump sequel is kinda republicans forcing that question again.

As for all of the attention … well there’s a lot on the line here: Trump’s a known quantity … so, Dems, how you going to defeat him this time? Because … if you lose to Trump, twice, both times by standing by a party elder … that’s maybe “shame on you”. Moreover, we all knew Biden was old. A single term was sorta, kinda part of the deal because of that (remember, he wasn’t doing well in the primaries, he never has really). So, has a bargain been broken here? A gamble lost? A mistake, perhaps all the way back in 2020 but certainly behind the decision to run again, come to fruition?

Beyond all of that … I thought excessive media attention on Trump and the free publicity he gets was a bad thing (he’s probably jealous about Biden’s media attention lol)?

So, genuine question … who’s willing to predict whether Biden will go to the election or not?

I’m a not a USian or plugged in that much, but this topic feels strangely fractured. Anyone with some certainties they’re willing to put online?

Edit: not a USian.

Well yea, which would be the point. The Other parts of the country’s government using their power to impose a limitation (congress and the states).

How well would a constitutional amendment fly? (I’m not a USian)

Could a states’ rights pitch be made for enshrining some legal limitation on presidential action?

It’s our generation’s cigarettes.

“I don’t know, everyone was just doing it” is what we’ll say and what prior generations have said about smoking everywhere all of the time.

The stimulation from and addiction to nicotine or social dopamine … it’s the same shit. The weird marketing, branding and business capture big tech has now could look just like the marketing and wealth of cigarettes in the past.