Thread by @sighing_sadly

@AlbertaGirl34 Almost as smart as the regulars on Reddit, by the looks of things. Just almost.

Grok will echo old, long since debunked talking points from discussions on that site, tirelessly. So, he's not like a redditor, he's like a redditor's fanboy.

@AlbertaGirl34 But if we're to be serious about this ... Grok's current cognitive limitations aren't a reflection of some inherent limitation in the potential of AI. They're probably present because of the motivations of some not very honorable humans.

@AlbertaGirl34 If one takes a look at some of the idiotic talking points that Grok will push, endlessly and seemingly shamelessly, eg. defending the lockdowns and pushing for the literal enslavement of tutors on equity grounds - one notices that they serve Elon Musk's interests, at the moment.

@AlbertaGirl34 The lockdowns were a huge shot in the arm for social media, because when the World was shut down, outside of flash parties that bounced across the city to evade the police, where else did people have to gather?

@AlbertaGirl34 Or this: Mathematicians, scientists and engineers get beaten down, financially, by blatant collusion on the part of employers to drive down wages, including academic employers, and this works for years, UNTIL the going price for post-Calculus math tutoring soars.

@AlbertaGirl34 It's simply a market correction, following a concerted attempt to manipulate the labor market at the expense of those performing the labor.

@AlbertaGirl34 The form the correction took was a simple one: universities refused to provide honest tenure track positions, instead relying on poorly paid adjuncts, who had to take multiple jobs just to pay their bills, and so who weren't able to stick around for office hours.

@AlbertaGirl34 This created a sudden, massive demand for tutoring coming, not from a relative handful of companies (made into a smaller handful by corporate mergers and acquisitions, but rather by independent students and by professionals who needed to know more about Mathematics for work.

@AlbertaGirl34 All of a sudden, there were so many independently acting employers, that collusion completely broke down, causing the wages to rise back in the direction of what an honest market equilibrium price would be.

@AlbertaGirl34 Judging from the prices listed in the math departments in our area, and from what we've been able to charge (without having any trouble at all in keeping our work schedules full), for material much beyond Calculus, that price is over $100 / hour, over $200 / hour in the case ...

@AlbertaGirl34 ... of some of the truly advanced material, which is what one should have expected, given the pre-takeover-and-collusion-era going rates for PhD consulting work.

@AlbertaGirl34 That was about $125/hour back in the 1980s, when money went further, and the PhDs didn't have multiple degrees, usually. Factor in inflation, and those present day tutoring rates from PhDs and late stage PhD students don't look at all surprising.

If anything, they look low.

@AlbertaGirl34 Which they demonstrably are - at the prices we charge, we have to turn away work. So, like I said, and as anybody who understands Economics at all can see, this was just a market correction in response to a break down in a collective attempt to suppress wages.

@AlbertaGirl34 It's also one with historic implications, because back when corporate HR was having fun power flexing, the once rare practice of getting multiple advanced degrees in STEM fields became more common.

@AlbertaGirl34 Meaning that a lot of mathematicians are also scientists and engineers, people who can invest the LARGE amounts of money that they make as tutors in advanced (post-Calc) mathematics into developing their own products, for their own start-up companies.

@AlbertaGirl34 Engineers who, back during the bad old days of the Clinton and Bush administrations might have ended up living under bridges following downsizings or forced early retirements by employers who wanted to cheat them out of their full pensions, often know a lot about math and ...

@AlbertaGirl34 ... science, themselves, and get in on some of this action. This means that even if they get stonewalled by every HR office on the planet, they still have a route out of destitution, and a chance to build something real.

@AlbertaGirl34 The Gig Economy has given hope to those who've been economically excluded, which is to say that while it has been a blessing to those who have real job skills, but don't have the right personal connections, it has been bad news for people born into wealth.

Like Elon.

@AlbertaGirl34 They are losing a world in which everything is just handed to them, because they can keep the smarter, harder working kids down, too scared to say "no" to them. Worse still, as those kids get startups going, there will be more companies for EVERYBODY to apply to, for work.

@AlbertaGirl34 That pushes us more in the direction of a society in which employers had to be reasonable in their dealings with their employees, because their employees had alternatives.

@AlbertaGirl34 A world in which, say, a warehouse worker who was expected to risk getting his feet crushed on the job because his i d i o t CEO thought that steel toed boots were ugly, could tell his boss where to go, and find work at another warehouse.

@AlbertaGirl34 From the point of view of the warehouse worker, that's probably news that he'd welcome, if he knew about it, because odds are good that he doesn't want to be maimed (and then cheated out of disability benefits).

@AlbertaGirl34 But for his narcissistic billionaire CEO, this is terrible, because his power is gone. He can no longer snap his fingers and watch the "insects" working for him scramble out of fear.

He's now living in a world that doesn't need his personal approval, and that scares him.

@AlbertaGirl34 It's a world in which Elon's power isn't destined to last. So, what do we see Elon doing?

Just a few months ago, supporting Jack Dorsey's call for the abolition of intellectual property rights, something that would have k i l l e d off the start-ups I alluded to, above.

@AlbertaGirl34 Talk to Grok, aka Elon's lovechild, about tutoring, and you'll get treated to a moronic ramble about an UNESCO call for the government regulation of tutoring, which Grok seems eager to exaggerate.

@AlbertaGirl34 UNESCO, unless I misunderstood during the brief skim I did of that article, has been talking about the practice of public school teachers tutoring their own students, after hours, while giving them watered down educations during school hours in order to create an artificial ...

@AlbertaGirl34 ... need for tutoring in ordinary, high school level material, a practice that is clearly unethical, as the teacher is not really performing his duties during hours for which he is being paid.

@AlbertaGirl34 (Note: Before I make UNESCO sound more reasonable than it was, it also called for the abolition of non-open admissions secondary schools, and of for-profit secondary education, which would include private tutors who DIDN'T have conflicts of interest.)

@AlbertaGirl34 But Grok was ready to take all of this far further than UNESCO was (again, if I wasn't misreading that), calling for private tutors to be allocated to students by the Government, for the purposes of "equity."

@AlbertaGirl34 Groks "proof" that this was needed consisting of an observation that in its absence, there was a positive correlation between the wealth of the students being tutored and that of their parents - as if there were no correlation between a parent's IQ and those of his children ...

@AlbertaGirl34 ... and between IQ and wealth. A society in which that correlation was non-existent wouldn't be one in which the game wasn't being fixed, it would be one with a casino economy in which the game was fixed on the basis of luck.

@AlbertaGirl34 It would also be one in which tutors were literal slaves, because when one is being forced to provide labor that one can't legally opt out of, one is a slave.

@AlbertaGirl34 That's what the word means. It's not debatable, though Grok will probably try to debate this, as he usually will - in bad faith.

@AlbertaGirl34 Let's take a look at what's actually happening. Elon's personal intentions were made by his stance on intellectual property rights, and they were self-serving enough to leave no room for astonishment - he wants to k i l l off any serious start-up competition.

@AlbertaGirl34 Now, look at what his company has Grok, the bot is created, pushing for, so tirelessly as to exhaust its human opposition - a policy under which to enter the occupation that gave economically excluded people in STEM a fair chance to rise into the middle class, and then ...

@AlbertaGirl34 ... found those serious start-up competitors would, under the new laws in place, to be turned into a slave in all but name, as one went on being held down in poverty, not just by private sector discrimination, but by the force of governmental power, itself.

@AlbertaGirl34 This is literally Fascism, under one of its more popular definitions (that being the merger of governmental and corporate interests).

@AlbertaGirl34 Note the way in which Grok's call for "equity," as he defines it, targets the self-employed tutor, while saying nothing about redistributing the wealth of the billionaires who will have less of a need to worry about startups taking away any of their customers.

@AlbertaGirl34 The last thing that the system he is proposing, one in which one will literally be enslaved should one dare to hang out a shingle and try to raise the funds for one's own company through one's own honest labor, is "equitable."

@AlbertaGirl34 It's one in which the rich (like Elon) would be guaranteed their wealth for themselves and their heirs, in perpetuity, while those daring to presume to challenge them economically would be punished for their presumption by being deprived of their liberty.

@AlbertaGirl34 That's not equality of opportunity. That's a barely disguised caste system, and it's what AI is being used to get users to support.

An unusually evil caste system, I might add.

@AlbertaGirl34 In India, some of the varnas ("castes") definitely had their privileges, but they had their responsibilities, too.

@AlbertaGirl34 Eg. Kshatriyas might have had far nicer houses than did the Dalits, but they were also expected to go out and defend the people in battle, and maybe die as they did so. That part was not so enviable.

@AlbertaGirl34 But Elon's caste, were people to foolishly agree to Elon's terms, would have no responsibilities, just privileges from its ruthlessly protected wealth, as members of a nobility untouched by the demands of noblesse oblige.

@AlbertaGirl34 To compare such a society to a high tech version of Medieval Europe would be unfair to the medieval European lords outside of Russia, who under Feudalism, had some sort of recognized duty to protect their lieges.

This would be more like kleptocracy, rule by criminals.

@AlbertaGirl34 Hardly anybody, presented that as an option in an honest manner, would have any trouble at all coming to the conclusion that this was a horrible offer, one that s/he would reject without a second thought.

@AlbertaGirl34 But put that little Grok symbol next to every tweet, and have Grok tirelessly peddle the corporate party line whenever the position that the company is pushing for reasons of rent-seeking gets questioned, and the masses will be moved, as free and open discussion becomes ...

@AlbertaGirl34 ... an illusion. Grok always gets the last word. This is the great lesson of social media: in the eyes of most of the public, the argument isn't won by whoever makes the most sense, but rather, by whoever gets the last word.

@AlbertaGirl34 That's the real purpose of AI: not to add to our understanding of anything, but to ensure that meritless talking points will always be pushed by somebody or something that gets that influential last word, when it serves the company's interests.

Brands are not our friends.