SteveGoob

It sounds like, for the purposes of this post, you and many other people would not be in the “People who use AI” category:

All their responses are generated, no conscience there, just AI.

I have coworkers who are effectively meat proxies. I think the term NPC applies well to how interacting with these folks feels, since it does feel like I’m not talking to a real human, but a computer trying to appear human.

Is OPs net too wide? Probably, yeah. But the sentiment is real, the frustration is real, and contextualizing those interactions as with NPCs resonates.

Have your fun with using AI, but there’s no need to yum our yuck.

Drew has posted a response in defense of these allegations.

Having read it as well the “report” on him you linked, I personally find the report lacks credibility. I take much more stock in Drew’s accounting of things, including his mature ownership of the bad decisions he’s made in the past.

As for the Stallman Report: it’s not a smear piece in my view. It’s a whistleblow that outlines an argument why RMS is unfit to lead the FSF with accompanying evidence. You may disagree with some of it, but it’s hardly malicious; I can sympathize with anyone who wishes to see better from the leaders of the major social movements of our day.

And as for why Drew initially denied his involvement, I found his response reasonable:

Myself and the other authors asserted our moral rights to publish anonymously, motivated by our wish to reduce our exposure to the exact sort of harassment I’ve been subjected to over the years.

No. It would be vastly preferable if this were nipped in the bud. Need I remind you how many people died in WWII, not to mention the human cost of fascism elsewhere?

While I do agree with the general trend that many of these populist fascists are incomponent at leading, it’s better to not roll those dice in the first place. We should never accept it as inevitable.

Maybe cause its a separate issue? Look, yes it is costly to extract the resources for a battery, but once we have it, we have it for good. Batteries are incredibly recyclable at this point (90%+ recoverable, conservatively), and a new battery can be almost entirely created using previous batteries.

This is in comparison to fossil fuels, which you get to burn exactly once, after which point you have to go extract more. The environmental costs of extracting oil (not even burning it) are well documented.

Where a ICE car requires ongoing environmental devastation, an electric one does not inherently require it. As more of the materials for batteries enters circulation, there’s less need to go extract more, and as grids transition from fossil fuels to renewables the climate impact of charging can be lessened as well.

Of course this isn’t to say that an electric car is the climate endgame. More walkable places, better public transit, better regulation of corporate polluters, etc. are the real meat and potatoes. But saying that EVs are just as bad as ICE cars is just not true.

I don’t refute that. I agree that far too many humans are far too comfortable with unsafe following distances.That’s not the claim you made though:

Traffic is solely due to human error

And as I said, it’s just simply not true. Congestion happens because car traffic does not scale or recover from disturbances efficiently. Human behavior exacerbates this, sure, but cars are just fundamentally bad at moving people when a road is at capacity. Chalking traffic it up to “human error” alone misses the forest for the trees.

This is simply not true on its face.

Unlike the thought expirement you’re running in your head, the real world does not have the luxury of avoiding the possibilities of sudden mechanical failure, a soccer ball being kicked into the road, or unsecured debris falling out of the bed of a truck. These are privately owned and maintained vehicles after all, under many more engineering constraints and usage pressures than just achieving maximum reliablilty in all conditions.

These things require some degree of margin for error. In general, any car should be able to fully stop before entering the space currently occupied by the car in front of it in order to account for unexpected disturbances. However, as car speeds increase, so do the tolerances required to maintain that safe margin, exponentially in fact.

Removing the human from the driver seat doesn’t mean we get to start running bumper to bumper at 70mph; at best it means that cars can get away with slightly smaller follow distances than humans need to account for their comparably slow reaction times.

If you instead believe that we should exert enough control over self driving cars such that we could actually realistically prevent catastrophe while running high speed bumper to bumper traffic, then I have great news for you! We already have that, and it’s called a train.