I may not know AI very well but I know that automatic sinks, soap dispensers, and toilets don't work for me because they weren't tested against people with my skin tone. And these are low-stakes use cases.
I really don't like thinking about that same problem, but with AI thrown in the mix. And I'm not even factoring in malicious intent yet.
I may not buy in to the "Horizon Zero Dawn incoming" mentality yet but I do know there's great potential for great harm if we don't get ethics in place before AI really takes off.
Of course there was another solution (I’m assuming you’re not still in the chute, by the way) - which is to make them so big that even a large adult male can’t get stuck.
But the main reason they’re gone now is that people put the laundry on the same floor as the bedrooms in modern homes.
When I was younger lightning struck our apartment building and it killed my consumer router. I replaced it and put it on the surge protector.
A few months later we got struck again. The router survived but the building caught fire.
Now that I'm older I just accept the risk that "sometimes nature hates you". Instead of jumping through hoops to protect my gear from nature I just set aside money to replace anything I can't afford to lose.
Life's too short to play tug of war with the planet and I'd rather set aside $50/month to pay for replacements when I need them.
I don't want an office. I don't even want to go outside.
More pay would absolutely bring me into the office though- especially if it means I can afford the wear and tear on my car plus the 20 hours of my life drained being stuck in traffic each month.
But at the same time, I'd much rather be given the freedom to prioritize life over working... So I'd consider coming in every business day if I could make full-time rates at part-time hours. Just cut my salary and working hours in half and let me do my thing!
IDK, back in my edgy years I was suicidal due to "loneliness"- even though I had friends and family. I even (kinda) had a partner.
I had no money, because you can't pay almost $100K in student loans and $900/mo in rent when you make $37K/year before taxes. I never went anywhere when my friends did.
I was the only person in my friend group that liked certain hobbies and social media wasn't that big back then (my main social media sites up until that point were blackplanet and geosites- Facebook had JUST come out) so there was no way for me to connect with like-minded individuals about things I really cared about.
I went to school ~600 miles away from my family in a city of ~35k people and only 88 of them were the same ethnicity as I, so I had to suppress most of my personality to "not stand out", which strained my relationship with my partner and led to a surprise breakup.
By the time I hit 22 I was legit prepared to end it all- I even left a "final farewell" note on /b just to give them one last "rofl" on the way out.
A full decade later I look back and realize that it wasn't my shitty job or financial situation. It wasn't being in a minority group in a hostile school or the breakup. I wasn't (committed to being) suicidal. I was literally just being an edgy dingleberry. My problem was 100% made up and I was just looking for ANY reason to stay trapped in a cycle of sadness. Eventually it just... Went away? At some point at 24 something changed in my brain where all of a sudden I want thinking about how lonely I was.
None of it had anything to really do with social interaction, at least not ACTUAL interaction. It felt like I was just bitter because I couldn't do all the stuff I WANTED to do, and that stuff just happened to be related to social interaction. Maybe my scenario isn't the same as what you're describing but I don't think smartphones/social media were my issue. I just needed to mature a bit more and not be so focused on what I COULDN'T do.
Having said that while I think smartphones are one of the most influential inventions to come out since the turn of the millennium... The biggest social media sites are a net drain on society and I would not be sad to see them go in the slightest.
Now throw in access to a gun and the odds of you being able to take your life in a vulnerable situation rise dramatically.
Throw in access to a smartphone where you’re bombarded with images and videos of the best version of everyone you know’s lives and you start feeling even more like you are the problem and are more likely to take your life when in a vulnerable position.
Throw in cyber bullying and if you happened to be bullied by any groups you’re part of that bullying would continue even when you’re home.
The one good thing about the internet is that it may have allowed you to communicate with others in your situation and help you realize you’re not the problem.
But we don’t need smartphones (and an always available camera) for that.
>"...Throw in access to a smartphone where you’re bombarded with images and videos of the best version of everyone you know’s lives and you start feeling even more like you are the problem and are more likely to take your life when in a vulnerable position..."
This is exactly my point- it is NOT the smartphone's fault. This is the fault of social media/advertisers and the fact that people refuse to get off of social media (because why work for money when you can just trade your privacy for a sponsorship deal and 10k followers). Nobody is "bombarding" you with anything if you just don't use those services, and if you replace "smartphone" with "Internet", "computer", "TV", etc... Your statement is still 100% true. I'm no expert but to me this is a dead ringer that the _smartphone_ isn't the root problem, and it would be unreasonable to blame this on "every device capable of displaying a webpage."
This is a "corporations suck" issue- not a technical issue. Smartphones are a convenient punching bag to blame, just like how millennials were "being corrupted" by violent video games.
Your other points are absolutely rock solid- no objections (especially the always-on camera bit, and not just because of bullying). It's this one point I take issue with. The social media and advertising companies are at fault- not the technology those companies use (yet. I love VR/AR but I do NOT like where it's going right now).
If it helps make sense of how I view this problem, the gun industry is a direct parallel. To fight gun violence we want to go after the sellers. Replace "gun" with "smartphone" and ask yourself: "does it make sense to go after smartphone manufacturers and sellers to stop cyber bullying? Is it fair to hurt the eCommerce, gaming, telephone, etc... Unrelated companies because ad companies are driving kids to despair?" To me the answer is "no", because I don't think it's fair to impact other digital companies relying on smartphones for business because a few of them are problematic. I also don't think it's fair to punish sport shooters, hunters, etc... By impacting their rights to (legal) gun ownership just because sellers want to protect their bottom lines.
Something needs to change, but I don't believe it's smartphones. We need to make it illegal to base a business model on the suffering of others.
Not an expert on this but I've both seen it and done it: fear of punishment for asking for help/admitting weakness was why I did it.
I've had a boss that used our team as his scapegoat to cover his ass whenever he fucked up. When I was fresh out of college at my first real job said boss fucked up his budgeting and blamed us for being unproductive. I offered to work extra to get us back on track and while I was successful... The fact that the project went way over budget and that only 3 people on a 16 person team was at 100% utilization made it to senior management (who was responsible for assigning out work? The boss). Guess who got thrown under the bus for it? It was eventually sorted out but that was the most miserable week of my career at the time wondering if I was seriously about to be fired for sacrificing my time to help on a project that wasn't even mine. Ever since that I made it a point to get between "bosses" and my teammates to try and prevent anyone else from going through the hell I went through until I finally left that job.
Flash forward some years, a colleague missed a key deadline and I wasn't as aggressive about offering assistance as I really should have been. When leadership came knocking I had to fight the urge to defend myself and openly admitted my mistake, because although it wasn't my task to do the work it WAS my responsibility to see it through and I was the one accountable for it. My logic was "just as it felt shitty to get blamed for something I didn't do, I refuse to let someone else take the fall in my place. Give me liberty or give me death." It stung and it stung hard. I got absolutely no reward for the honesty and got reprimanded anyway- lost half my bonus, skipped over for senior even though I had the same responsibilities as the seniors, and didn't get a merit raise that year or the year after- but I felt good for sticking to my beliefs even when the only outcome was punishment. It was even more amplified when that same coworker went on to become an analyst and later a product owner years after the incident, showing growth and confidence that may not have been realized had I thrown them under the bus like my boss did to me all those years ago.
I think this is 100% a leadership problem. If the guys at the top are too afraid to take their whooping like a man how can they expect the grunts to do it? If leadership won't formally implement a "no stupid questions" policy what do they think their staff is going to do when they NEED to ask a "stupid question?"
Nobody needs to lie to cover their asses if their asses aren't at risk just for being human, but (on the US, at least) many walk on eggshells to avoid being the goose/gray duck in a sea of ducks/not-gray ducks.
That does make sense but try to look at it this way: if YOU got burned for asking for help before would YOU individually forget that experience and ask for help again?
It's really easy to think about it from one perspective- even if that perspective makes logical sense to is- but how you perceive it and how another does are going to be different. Absent formal policy explicitly stating that "being wrong is okay" someone that's been slapped once for this is likely not going to put themselves in position to get slapped that way again.
I don't know the guy so you very well could be right about him, but from my experience people that do stuff like this tend to do it for fear of punishment, much like how a child will lie to their parents face about something the parent clearly saw them do
Yes, I agree, but he's bringing that from prior experience, not our company.
We do have explicit policy of "no stupid questions" and asking for help is ok.
He's getting things wrong from not asking help when he needs it. He explained that he doesn't want to look dumb, but I pointed out that everyone, even the big brains of the company,.ask simple questions. He doesn't want to be like that
>Yes, I agree, but he's bringing that from prior experience, not our company...
That's exactly what I'm saying! I don't think he's guarded because of you guys but I do think he's guarded. It's gonna take effort to get that guard down- especially if he's been formally punished for asking for help before (again not saying you guys have done this to him- just that it's possible it happened to him at some prior point in his life, like childhood or a previous job). I see this less as a "hey man, not asking for help is hurting us" and more of "what can I do to support you better?"
Especially if he spent 2 weeks on an urgent issue- was everyone else so swamped that they couldn't coach homeboy? Was this not actually an urgent issue? I would ask the team "how did we even get here? How did we let this task slip so far without progress? What can we change today to prevent this from happening again?" Note that I'm explicitly calling out the entire team, because at the end of the day a teammate struggling and not getting help is a whole team issue even if said teammate never asked for help.
Personally I think this can be solved with coaching for the whole team ideally but at the very least, have homeboy job shadow/pair program with a mentor for a while. If you guys aren't Agile I'd see about adopting those principles- 2 weeks of silent churn on a 2-day issue feels like a much bigger problem to me than someone not asking for help when they need it- either that wasn't a 2-day issue (just because YOU could do it in 2 days doesn't mean EVERYONE could) or it was a classic case of "calling something urgent to get people to act on it but not treating it like it's actually urgent." Not a knock to you guys at all- "storming" is a healthy part of team-building! As you all develop more as a team problems like these will be a thing of the past.
EDIT: the first job was a hellhole. The second job I delegated something I probably shouldn't have- that was my mistake 100%. The second job was very well led for the most part
This stings because I lost a few close friends to suicide and gun violence last year. It's really sad that we can't/won't do anything to stymie the trend
I really don't like thinking about that same problem, but with AI thrown in the mix. And I'm not even factoring in malicious intent yet.
I may not buy in to the "Horizon Zero Dawn incoming" mentality yet but I do know there's great potential for great harm if we don't get ethics in place before AI really takes off.