Charlene and I just wrote to our assemblymember, Damon Connolly:
We have recently had to deal with CVS's "AI" agent to deal with prescription information.
What could have been a 5 minute chat with a human became a 20 minute exercise in
frustration. We'd love your work on making sure that companies aren't using "AI agents" to
frustrate customers who are locked in to a fixed number of vendors.
It's clear that the only thing "AI" is a solution for is companies that don't want to
actually help their customers do anything, and frustrate them until they stop trying to get
the services that they were trying to find.
This is particularly impactful on lower income families who are working more than 40 hours
a week, trying to raise a family, and *then* need to go through all of the additional
hassle and wasted time imposed on them by having to interact with AI.
Don't know what we can do about this, but with all of the downsides of AI, AI induced
psychoses, specific interaction patterns meant to engage human addiction, finding some
ways to regulate companies imposing AI on us would be very welcome.
The Enshittificator (YouTube video)
Via.
A hilarious and spot on attempt to drag you to Breaking Free:
In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the
Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report
shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is
possible to turn the tide. Together with more than 70 consumer groups and other actors in
Europe and the US, we are sending letter to policymakers in the EU/EEA, UK and the US.
Target's new CEO unveils his turnaround plan
Or, he could, you know, actually listen to what your former customers are telling you and decide to embrace them, rather than alienate them.
I'm spending a lot of time today reading up on Model Context Protocol and "best practices"
when using MCP (which, gotta say, is different from the MCP acronym I grew up with).
Which... this conversation on Metafilter. caviar2d2
opined:
Having developed software for 30 years, if I look back, most of the software
being developed in the US today has a negative net impact on society and people.
flabdablet
observed that writing code has not been the bottleneck:
Surely all it will take to clean those Augean stables is devising some way to
scale today's excretion rate to at least 10x.
on which Sparx riffed:
I love this!
"Observe! I have invented a hose of such intense pressure that it will clean
the Augean Stables!"
"Amazing. Those stables are disgusting. Wait - don't you think you should use water?"
"I need all the water to keep this baby cool."
"So what are you using?"
"Just some other stuff I found. The stables are full of it."
Since there's currently an orchestrated push to destroy anonymity on the Internet: Politico:
Resist ‘dangerous and socially unacceptable’ age checks for social media, scientists warn
The warning comes as countries around the world move to bar children from social media, which requires
some way of checking users’ ages to decide if they can access online services. In an open
letter, 371 security and privacy academics across 29 countries said the technologies
being rolled out are not effective and carry significant risks.
California Assembly Bill 1043: AB-1043 Age verification signals:
software applications and online services. apparently makes it illegal to configure an
operating system without confirming the user's age, similarly for Colorado Senate Bill SB 26-051:
AGE ATTESTATION ON COMPUTING DEVICES
Taylor Lorenz in The Guardian: The world wants to ban children
from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all, in response to the
toot linking to that
Alan @metaphase@toot.community asked
@taylorlorenz Who is paying for the lobbyists for this seemingly worldwide
campaign for the legislation to install identity surveillance everywhere
"for the children"?
And why, even in blue states, are the politicians always so eager to enable
tools so easily abused by authoritarian, fascist governments