The rise and fall of robots.txt: As unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Technology@beehaw.org – 168 points –
The rise and fall of robots.txt
theverge.com
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I’m not so worried about these technologies landing in the hands of adversaries that I think we should abandon our values or beliefs Just In Case

What beliefs and values would we be abandoning by fighting back against tech that is literally costing people their literal lives?

Hah I... think we're on the same side?

The original comment was justifying unregulated and unmitigated research into AI on the premise that it's so dangerous that we can't allow adversaries to have the tech unless we have it too.

My claim is AI is not so existentially risky that holding back its development in our part of the world will somehow put us at risk if an adversarial nation charges ahead.

So no, it's not harmless, but it's also not "shit this is basically like nukes" harmful either. It's just the usual, shitty SV kind of harmful: it will eliminate jobs, increase wealth inequality, destroy the livelihoods of artists, and make the internet a generally worse place to be. And it's more important for us to mitigate those harms, now, than to worry about some future nation state threat that I don't believe actually exists.

(It'll also have lots of positive impact as well, but that's not what we're talking about here)

Ah gotcha. I must have misunderstood the flow there. Yeah, definitely seems like we're mostly on the same side

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