Albert Biketi

@basicappleguy.com Apple, why isn’t just a part of my MacBook that can charge my watch and my phone at rest. Safety? Do it for people who forget cables. Did you forget your historical disdain for cables? Thanks, happy customer.

That’s a new question I don’t know how to answer. Making things feel easy and intuitive is an incredibly difficult thing. I’m amazed at the people who do it.

This is from San Francisco as I prepare to board after a productive week of learning. So much help from friends along the way. Learning from customers is everything, communicating that understanding and revealing potential misunderstandings is delicate, even when specs are clear. Why?

Chris, you’re a well compensated person. Please be honest with people that AI is going to radically change their job prospects and the transition is inevitable. Otherwise you’re doing people no favors in the long run. Musk is just the guy telling us the tsunami is coming and we have to fix our home.

People really don’t grasp the meaning of the words “software is eating everything” until they see what a new form of tech (AI) can do to a much older form of tech (government). Musk is the messenger of a very difficult truth, first seen with the Twitter layoffs. DOGE recommends, Trump decides.

And the way that will show up in the real world is unemployment, slow growth, inflation and unrest that drives extreme consensus against AI. People should be focused on how AI can be explained to ordinary people instead of elite arguments rooted in the failure of language mode. Honesty.

It appears to be progress but is an illusion when you add back the future energy costs of transitioning to a post-AI economy. Energy will be a huge growth bottleneck without nuclear in the mix. Can we trust that science has improved safety enough?

Making such fast AI transitions will be incredibly hard in the current and next generation without better ways of getting consensus on tradeoffs. There will be answers people don’t want to hear or trust for a long time. This isn’t new, it’s just like before. Are we getting ready or complaining?

Back to Elon, we figure out that in hindsight the FAA had a model of insisting on human control for something AI can do 1000x better and planes don’t need central coordination by attentive humans to fly safely. We’re in the Museum of Antiquated technology (use of spectrum section). That is an ATC.

As a life ending possibility for all humans for the significant moment it was. If Trump gets everything else wrong and gets that right, humanity will thank him and it’s something we we should root for even if he’s amygdala central in your brain right now. 😆

Let me explain the insanity of Elon Musk loathing from my perspective, which doesn’t have to make sense to you, but it does to me. It’s the year 4025, Trump Day, a holiday added in the year 2240 after almost another quarter century of debate. On Trump Day, dna humans mark the end of nuclear war …

It’s actually a position that can typically only be held tight by those insulated from the direct impacts of these issues. It’s the 2020s version of the 1980s and why as distasteful as some people find him, Elon Musk presciently has some fundamental points on free speech exactly right.

…often reflect and reinforce existing power structures rather than serving vulnerable and at risk people. This kind of elitism manifests in assuming that avoiding certain topics entirely is more ethical than studying them analytically to reduce harms. And you know what?

There’s a form of privileged moral absolutism in many AI ethics frameworks, particularly bad from Google, that end up perpetuating harm rather than preventing it. By refusing to engage with certain realities in the world because they’re deemed too problematic or unsavory, these frameworks …

I have found consistently that models are terrible at handling questions on a variety of urgent topics where AI could do a lot of good, quickly. It’s a sad and disappointing. Just actually another way elitism presents itself.

Here’s something for AI ethics to confront because it’s a form of elitism that is embedded very deeply in false morality.

Instead what is going to happen is people will fight like hell against ventilation on every procedural ground they can. Progress will be 10% of what it could be with honesty, because brutal honesty makes people very uncomfortable in society.

For example lack of money to update databases isn’t a well defined problem, is it data entry, correctness, routing, etc? When challenges are ventilated with hardcore first principles thinking, there will be both a lot of discomfort and positive opportunity for government reform. Honesty required.

Hiring “enough/more” people to do a specific piece of knowledge work implies that the solution specifications in the complexity analyzed outputs “more humans working on the problem” as a solution. That’s going to be an increasingly tenable question in the AI age. That’s what requires honesty.

This is where honesty from Democrats will count, if they focus on it not being perfect, it’s Obamacare 2.0, Dem opponent version vs working to be part of the good long term solution. So far, the signs aren’t there that there’s any capacity for trust for greater good. Missing opportunity is costly.

Vilified and underfunded can’t be fixed by software, but efficiency can to some extent, are people truly realistic about what can abstracted or will they spend their energy fighting it. That’s the question for the next 4 years.

This is a completely scary thought for a lot of people and it’s understandable why it would drive so much anxiety. Income determines standard of living. Jobs = financial security.

For example, what’s the impact of adding software to everything the government does in big ways, so you can get a passport within 2 days of applying for one. That’s separate from what to do with jobs. We want everything in the government to work efficiently, & if roles are lost, cushion the landing.

I will note separately, that when BlueSky adds a BETA! 😆 Trending feature, every user should ask, what’s in the algorithm, and think about that every day. Otherwise all the old problems, will repea..

Animal Farm. If you don’t pay for BlueSky’s servers, you may not think about it. Someone does!

If you’re open to it, with no intention to offend, we should talk about a couple of different ways to think about this that can reframe things so the arguments can evolve from yelling to talking. Biden’s farewell address, warning of oligarchy, misdiagnoses the moment in an effort to protect legacy.

1. New Technology, Old human problems (fear, greed, power,..
2. Innovation Outpacing Oversight
3. Patchwork “Tooling the Problem” Mentality without a systemic roadmap
4. Regulatory Pushback followed by regulatory capture (just look at perverse outcomes from GDPR..)
5. Trust vs. Risk Balance

This is déjà vu because AI’s current trajectory mirrors what happened with cybersecurity—exponential change leading to risks that require scalable oversight, but with solutions always playing catch-up. If we don’t learn from past experiences, we repeat mistakes with a bigger kaboom scale.

Exactly, AI is an ocean that has been discovered that interferes, promising great riches in return. No amount of activism or regulation can wish away the ocean. We need scalable oversight tooling that uses AI as creatively and quickly as the problems it brings.

The people who seem to know this best are the privacy lawyers contentiously updating privacy and security terms in ways ordinary consumers will never understand in TOS, immunizing themselves from future legal action right below our noses. Language is source code, written in many interactive contexts

Valid concerns, but scalable solutions require faster innovation. FFT-based harmonics auditing for real-time transcription is underexplored but promising. Some of the real challenges are surprising. Privacy, licensing laws & data-sharing restrictions can stifle the R&D needed to drive AI alignment.

Some of the identical prompt tests I regularly do across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and Llama reveal fascinating differences. I’m sad to say the results from Gemini are almost always a revelation of particular ways of thinking that are, let’s just say, distinct in particular ways.