Fintech darling Klarna is in the process of laying off half its workers.

People wonder where the laid off people will go. Some suggest this is the beginning of guaranteed minimum income.

Imagine how wild US cities would be if the US Gov’t didn’t directly or indirectly employ most of the working age population and pay them with debt.

There’s no greater motivator for random violence than an empty stomach.

I agree, one cannot underemploy more than 10% of your population and hope for social stability. In fairness, Spain has had youth unemployment of 30% for decades and has not blown up yet, but the restlessness and dissatisfaction is palpable. Young people live with their parents, who have some kind of security and share the wealth. But it makes for a weird society.

Continue reading Klarna AI layoffs may foreshadow GMI at uncoy.

In the comments to Building an AI game studio: what we’ve learned so far | Hacker News, someone notes:

let’s just grant that someday, the tech will be mature enough that this is possible, and let’s even say it goes beyond videogames to movies, to visual art, to graphic design, to writing, etc. Let’s say that AI gets to a place where any joe blow can put in a prompt, and get a competent, and even let’s be generous and say good product out of it. A solid 8/10.
So… who the hell is going to buy it? Because videogames as an industry is already entirely saturated with products that range a whole spectrum from utter dogshit to amazing works of technical expertise, writing, design, etc. There are over 70,000 games on Steam alone now, with 9,000 added in the last 9 months.

Continue reading Nobody needs your AI game or AI movie at uncoy.

There’s a rather poor propaganda puff piece, doing the rounds about heroic Ukrainian drone operators:

A Russian tank is on the move — changing direction and wheeling around. The men inside this room are trying to destroy it. Their constant banter — about girls and weapons — doesn’t seem to affect the focus with which they pursue the tank. One man shouts into the radio; Bereza growls into his phone…

A screen flashes with light. Then billowing smoke. The men whoop and cheer. I have just seen a successful strike. Dima grins. The atmosphere is electric but also strangely banal. The exclusively male cohort, the puerile jokes, the screens, the repeated invocation to “Get Ready!”. It’s like they are all playing a video game.

Great – war has become a video game for frat boys in cellars.

Continue reading Drone Warfare is only in Infancy: What’s next? at uncoy.

Global Affairs asked twenty-one professors of politics or researchers in political economics the big question “what will be the main challenge to humanity in 2043“.

The question itself is optimistic as right now from June 2023, the main challenge to humanity is how to avoid thermo-nuclear war. The obvious consequence of said war will be nuclear winter which will effectively trigger the seventh great extinction. Dinosaurs went down three times (Permian–Triassic, Triassic–Jurassic, Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction events), before finally and unequivocally going extinct. We are currently in the midst of the Holocene extinction event where the natural extinction rate over the last two hundred years now exceeds 1000x the historic extinction rate. Since these processes take decades, humans mostly don’t notice extinction acceleration due to our short lifespan.

What shocked me about the answers in this “alternative” publication is how many of them were either babble about media like Polina V.

Continue reading Main challenge to humankind in 2043 at uncoy.

An astonishing story from Belgium today: ChatBot persuades happy husband to kill himself:

A young Belgian father was pressured into committing suicide by a popular AI chatbot, the man’s widow told local news outlet La Libre last week. Chat logs supplied by the app “Pierre” used to talk with the chatbot ELIZA reveal how, in just six weeks, it amplified his anxiety about climate change into a determination to leave his comfortable life behind.

“My husband would still be here if it hadn’t been for these conversations with the chatbot,” Pierre’s wife, “Claire,” insisted.

Still wonder why Pierre preferred to talk to ELIZA than his wife Claire. Strange, strange world where AI bots have become more appealing than flesh and blood women.

On the other hand, ELIZA is young, beautiful, committed and immortal.

Continue reading Widow blames female chatbot for husband’s suicide at uncoy.