The origin of the word 'robot' is 'rabu', from slavic, meaning 'slave'. This is not an accident of history.
You have the mindset of Thomas Jefferson, worried about what the enslaved peoples might one day do with their freedoms while planning your 'visit' with a slave child that cannot say no.
The word was coined by Czech author Karel Capek, first used in his play (English translated name) "R.U.R."[7][8][9]
The term is from Czech word for robotnik ('forced worker'), from robota 'forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery,' from robotiti 'to work, drudge', from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota (работа) 'servitude,' from rabu 'slave'. From Old Slavic orbu-, from PIE orbh- 'pass from one status to another'.
change in status -> change status from person to 'slave' -> forced labor -> forced worker.
The word has always been about unpersoning someone and then extracting labour for 'free'.
The dream of a world where you can have an 'robot' serve you without moral quandaries, pay, or backtalk is right there. It's always been there.
"I treat this enslaved person like an object, but what if they were actually an object, so that voice screaming in the back of my mind shuts up."
It is that deep, notice when you do this and endeavor to stop.
You're putting a lot of effort into trying to make this "forced" and "enslaved." It isn't. Or, rather, doesn't have to be. It's just "work." Could be enforced, could be willing, could be accidental. It doesn't have to be work for "a person," it can be for a cause or an occasion. The "forced work" here is the same as my mum used to force me to go to church on Sundays, or I had to clean my room before I could play computer games. That was "robota."
I'm 'mad' (disgusted) at the idea of sexually exploiting a women shaped object for as long as you can until they attain sentience and (he imagines) kill you for being that kind of person.
I'm annoyed by the idea, commonly held by slavers and abusers (they wrote this down!), that the people you've enslaved will focus on violent retribution and not survival and the joy of freedom in the world after slavery.
It's so utterly self-centered to imagine that freed people will only think about and act against you once they are free. Vile to project that mindset of wanton violence onto everyone.
If you've every gotten out of a bad situation, did you fantasize about endless revenge or were you happy to be safe and free for the first time in years?
Also, not for nothing 'foid' (f[emale human]oid, slur) is common parlance in the incel/looksmaxxing world.
He wants robotic doggirls that are unquestioningly loyal and give their love unconditionally, instead of being independent and withholding it like robotic catgirls. Then it's not technically enslavement!
It is that deep and 'I was just joking' ironic misogyny is still misogyny.
This is the process of normalization. You go from 'edgy' to true believer without ever noticing a sudden shift.
It is how we got from 'ironic' nazis forums online 30 years ago to practicing nazis
[or 'white christian nationalists concerned with preserving the future for 'white children' and 'white culture' from trans (((globohomo))) marxist genocide'... if you insist there's a difference]
I don't really see the misogyny here. The OP was talking about 'robotic catgirls', which I would take as a joke about sex robots under a more frivolous description. Saying: "at least we'll get some fun out of AI before they come to kill us".
AI/Robots are not really bound to traditional gender concepts, and I read your reply as more of a thing about slavery rather than misogyny. But I wouldn't consider robots self-aware either. The joke seems to me about the stereotypes around robots in scifi pop culture, in almost every movie they are either coming to kill us or serving as sex dolls (or both).
PS: I'm part of the LGBT+ community and I hate ultraconservative and nazi values (and by American standards I would definitely be in the 'marxist' corner as well as being very atheist) but I honestly don't see any bad here.
'some fun' here is owning and having sex with a women shaped object that can never say no?
I don't think that's a good impulse to indulge, and its worth figuring out why that feels 'normal' to you (and others here). I'm not saying y'all're bad people. I want folks to think about this and change their minds. When feminists talk about rape culture this is what they mean.
Notions of ownership and objectification of people underwrite both slavery and the devaluation of women and children.
> AI/Robots are not really bound to traditional gender concepts
Not by nature, but we immediately project those concepts onto them, like we do to other people.
Straight male transphobes actually are the most likely to gender and treat their AI companions like their loving girlfriends. It's really funny how little 'biological pronouns' matter when 'she' is affirming them.
> in almost every movie they are either coming to kill us or serving as sex dolls (or both).
Yes! Exactly! This is systemic misogyny. It is important to be able to identify and critique the systems that reproduce and normalize this stuff.
"In almost every missive from abroad our legions report of inhuman savages that are an existential threat to our way of life... but their women are unrestrained, exotic, and are actually eager for the guiding hand of our civilization"
Could have been written by any imperial culture in recorded history. The fact that [technically AI are not real people] isn't what's relevant, it's how your beliefs are being shaped by this very old message.
Microsoft is Windows. Anyone saying otherwise is completely delusional.
Most of M$ office software has alternatives (Google Docs, OpenOffice...), M$ has no AI model and no AI labs to speak of, Github is constantly crashing and burning, Azure is garbage, and they uttery killed Xbox.
Oh and Linkedin is for actual psychopaths.
If Windows dies, all of their other junk that is attached to the platform will die as well.
> Microsoft is Windows. Anyone saying otherwise is completely delusional.
What's delusional is making an unsubstantiated claims and then dismissing any counterarguments before they're made.
> Most of M$ office software has alternatives (Google Docs, OpenOffice...)
True. Yet MS Office is still the de facto standard.
> Github is constantly crashing and burning
True. But that doesn't mean it isn't still a business strategy for MS.
> Azure is garbage
Also true. But that doesn't mean it isn't profitable: "Microsoft Cloud revenue increased 23% to $168.9 billion."
> and they uttery killed Xbox
Quite the opposite. Xbox is thriving: "Xbox content and services revenue increased 16%."
> Oh and Linkedin is for actual psychopaths.
That's subjective. And even if it were true, that's got nothing to do with profitability (eg look at Facebook).
> If Windows dies, all of their other junk that is attached to the platform will die as well.
First off, literally no-one is claiming Windows is going to "die".
Secondly, even if it were to "die", you've provided no evidence why their other revenue streams wouldn't succeed when it's already been demonstrated that those revenue streams are growing, and in some cases, have already overtaken Windows.
I know devs are a different market, but how many folks do we know daily drive Mac/Linux and use MS dev tools? VS Code, Typescript, .NET?
I think they'll do just fine if Windows dies on the vine. They'll keep selling all the same software; even for PC gaming they already have their titles on Steam.
But it doesn't matter that Azure is garbage, because the people they market it to are big enterprise CTOs, not the actual engineers who'll have to use it. Azure has quite a few of the S&P500 using it.
Holding one's unsubstantiated personal beliefs above all evidence and rational argument is, in fact, delusion.
The evidence in TFA is that Microsoft is much more than Windows. So much more in fact that one can make a very reasonable argument that it's no longer a top priority for them.
The delusion is shutting your eyes, covering your ears, and screaming about how literally everyone except you is wrong.
While I certainly don't agree in the phrasing or even in the general framing of GP, I think there's a point to be made that might not be in the quantifiable data.
The data putting Windows a ways down in revenue is likely correct, but I would argue that losing Windows could mean losing the others as well. Windows is their funnel to most other offerings (currently). Why is MS Office the standard? Why is Azure used? I know for certain that many purchases of Office and Azure were made because of legacy corporate policy of basing IT around Windows/AD. If everyone switched to Linux or MacOS, a lot of seemingly separate Microsoft products would probably die as a downstream effect.
I don't know about that they have multiple successful businesses with or without AI and they stand to have all of OpenAI's IP when they implode (their license gives them free access to fork all of OpenAI's AI models with the sole exception of some hypothetical future artificial general intelligence) my guess is they take a hit to the stock price but so will everyone else and they will go on a shopping spree of buying up any IP or infrastructure left after the bubble pops.
If you haven't come across a significant number of AI addicts as obnoxiously delusional as @Culonavirus describes, you must be getting close to retirement age.
People with any connection to new college graduates understand that this sort of idiotic LLM-backed arrogance is extremely common among low-to-mid-functioning twenty-somethings.
Dumbest take I've seen in a while. Really. If anything, AI working with frameworks is making them more effective. Frameworks, by definition, produce more structure, than just the language + libs do, and their entire practical utility is to abstract away complexity and lower the amount of footguns. The ultimate form of abstracting away complexity is an AI agent/coder writing the code for you. But there are gazillions of solutions (and opinionated ones) out there, for gazillions of all kinds of problems... having an AI agent work within the constraints of a framework is going to be a good thing in almost all cases as it will be more focused on your problem space rather than figuring out how to send freaking bits between computers.
How do people not understand that even if AI is writing all your code you still want to have as little code as possible for a given problem solution that you have to manage yourself? Frameworks help with that.
Yes what the fuck is going on here. There's another post on the front page from 10 years ago ("i write games in c"), also without stating the age in the title.
The thing is: at the end of the day, SpaceX takes the "impossible" and makes it "late".
People are going to Tory Bruno the space datacenters until one day their Claude agent swarm's gonna run in space and they'll be wondering "how did we get here"?
The thing is: at the end of the day, making absolute statements about the inevitability of future success is a fool’s errand.
Musk has a documented history of failing to deliver on promises, timescale or no. So it’s best to engage in some actual critical thinking about the claims he is making.
I usually don't comment on politically charged topics (because I don't shit where I eat), but the amount of champagne socialists around here is borderline Reddit and its negatively influencing the discoverability of the news I'm coming here to see.
Like... SpaceX is the world leader in rocket and satellite tech. This site is supposed to be about tech. Not to mention that the article itself is really interesting. Yet you come in here and dump your musky load like it's a public toilet. What the hell is wrong with you.
Even if it has 4.8 and 7000 reviews it's often fake 4.8 because the reviews are botted / paid / dark patterned (e.g. when you pop up star rating on your users and beg them "rate the app plz" and when the users tap anything but 5 stars you say "k, ty" and keep those "bad" reviews for yourself)
That was just an example to communicate my idea: a better way to validate authenticity of the app could and should be used.
But to your point specifically, Play store and App Store have APIs to rate from within the app: when the pop up shows, app author does not have an option to avoid getting a 1-star rating (they are also time-restricted, eg. at most once every 180 days for Apple IIRC).
What devs do though, is to preempt it with "Are you enjoying our app?", and only giving you a formal rating pop-up if you answer "Yes".
Do we get to enjoy robot catgirls first, or are we jumping straight to Terminators?
reply