What are the hurdles from any of the EU governments from:
1. Choosing the best open source options for the various MS replacements
2. Fund an office who's job would be to provide software support, continue development, and make customizations for various departments. They continue to host this as open source.
3. Expanding adoption of the new tools to more gov departments over time. Continue to expand software office accordingly.
4. Eventually, they will have a solution entirely within their control. The costs will initially be higher likely, but way less over time.
If this progresses, then other governments can also adopt those same tools and also provide funding to the software office so that the software is continuously updated for things like security, big fixes, etc. all remains gov sponsored open source.
Yeah, but its the kind of joke that reveals a truth about the way Altman views the world and his place in it. Taken completely alone, sure its just a flippant statement. But taken with everything else about Altman and it reads different. Its joking-not-joking.
The issue is who is making the decision on where energy resources are spent - on people or machines. And it turns out efficiency or even humanity play a very small role in that decision matrix. Control, on the other hand, is important. Rich and powerful people tend to want to control things, and machines are better at that than people.
This is the conspiratorial mindset. It's not much better than the mindset of people who seek power.
It's wrong, because it assumes that everything is about control.
For example, if I told you that a certain rich and powerful person was spending resources on sending vaccines to poor countries, you might think that was because they wanted to control things. If I said that someone sent books and teachers to a poor country, you might say they were trying to control people.
There's no way to have the conversation, in a conspiratorial mindset, about whether it's better or worse for humans or AI to do this stuff - because no matter what, the conspiratorial mindset will conclude that it's only about power for the humans involved, and always assume the worst. AND YET - there are things people can do which might be for their own self-gratification, but are definitely NOT as bad as some other things they could do. They hold back from doing the worst things.
That's why, I know this lens of looking at the world seems like it's the only smart way to understand things, but looking at the whole world through that lens prevents you from making the important distinction between OK, BAD and REALLY FUCKING BAD.
If you told me an individual powerful person did a good thing, then I could believe it. But I'm speaking about the characteristics of groups of people and a very long history of human civilization teaches us that, as a group (individual exceptions exist both in people and in actions), that the rich and powerful do things primarily for the purpose of increasing their own power, wealth, status, and control. No conspiracy is required. Its just people in a position to gain power use that power to get more power. The people who do that the most and are the best at it are disproportionately the ones with the most power. So, as a group, the rich and powerful are much more likely to do things in self serving interest (even at the cost of wider spread harm and suffering) than a random group a people. The proportion of sociopaths in CEOs is many times that of the regular population.
Not to sound incredibly pessimistic, but I spend a lot of time in bars, and I can tell you that most of the people I meet who haven't got two cents to rub together are as capable if not more so of being dishonest, greedy and malicious as anyone with a billion dollars. A random group of people in your opinion contains less sociopaths than a group of people who powered their way or lucked into some money... I guess you're the optimist. I don't think the CEOs are any worse or better than the rest, and I think you kinda nailed it about individuals. We're all individuals. Faced with individual situations, some of us refuse to do harm, some try to do good, some of the time. That's all. That's what I mean by there being no conspiratorial way to frame the world. It's just chaos and a bunch of assholes making bad decisions, occasionally doing something alright.
I find it amusing that you are denigrating people as "conspiratorial" in year 2026 when the we are all finding out about how there really was a global elite child rape cabal operating in plain sight :)
Leave that self comforting lie in yesteryear. The world is only getting weirder.
The trickle-down economy dictates that data centers get first access to electricity and fresh water (and any other resource it needs). People get whatever is leftover and like it. This is america.
Most scientists want to do good science. They get intrinsic meaning and satisfaction in doing so. But with any large group of people there will be a few bad faith actors that will manipulate any exploit in the system for their own personal benefit. The problem here is that 'the system' of academic appointments, and even more importantly, funding sources, are built around this publishing metric. This forces even the good faith scientists to behave poorly because it was a requisite to even being able to exist as a working researcher.
> Protest is popularly considered a spontaneous, organic outpouring of popular sentiment
It is sometime this, but it is also popularly known as an organized struggle against an oppressive power. Examples being, Ghandi's independence movement in India, the suffrage movements for the right of women to vote, and the civil rights movements in the 60s. These were all highly organized, premeditated and engineered to achieve specific objectives.
> increasingly protest is being used by hostile forces
Here you'd have to define 'hostile forces', because it sounds like you are defining it as 'anyone who disagrees with the current power structure', which would be all protesters because that what protests are.
The thing is that the university admin are not going to apply this in good faith. We know this because the current conservative movement is a steady stream of bad faith actions. From deportations, to free speech, to corruption, to weaponizing the DOJ, to DOGE, etc. etc.
This policy WILL be used to censor anything even a tiny bit to the left of hard right and will NEVER be used to censor anything on the right side of hard right.
If this progresses, then other governments can also adopt those same tools and also provide funding to the software office so that the software is continuously updated for things like security, big fixes, etc. all remains gov sponsored open source.
Am I crazy?
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