Yes. The institution in question is human society. We generally grant the permission to make rational decisions over our lives to other humans who know better that we do or are more skilled than we are.
Sometimes, yes, those humans turn out to have been deceitful or dishonest, but there are mechanisms in place for when that happens.
And yes, sometimes those mechanisms are wilfully avoided by the deceitful. Politicians and rich people are especially good at this.
Guess who's pushing "AI"? The thing that has no contract with human society and cannot be held accountable. And neither will the people pushing it.
This is why we should have as little to do with it - at least as it is in its current form - as possible.
This is true. But then I'm not using the latest version while I still have an active session, and that can lead to weird behaviour or errors after the fact.
Case in point, I once received an Xorg update that I allowed to install, but didn't restart the computer properly until much, much later.
By then I'd forgotten about the update, so when I restarted and started having graphics problems, I was mystified.
I've also forgotten how that all panned out, but in the same situation I'd roll back to a previous Timeshift snapshot and work the system forward again until I find the culprit or things are stable, so I assume that's what I did back then.
Tangential advice: Many people use YouTube (and formerly Twitch until they nixed it) as a place to store videos. As in the only copy of a video is hosted there.
If your videos are precious to you (or you think they're going to be), make arrangements for them to be at least stored elsewhere, if not hosted. That's not going to be cheap what with hardware prices going through the roof, personally or third-party, but it is necessary because no host is both trustworthy and permanent.
Actually not even self-storage is as trustworthy and permanent as we'd like, but it's still better than any alternative for data retention.
Also, donate to your chosen Fediverse host(s) if you can.
In such places, beware of the person returning their own trolley / cart and offering to take your coin in return for theirs. Because eventually you'll get one who has used a coin-sized token and they've just conned you out of actual money.
But even so, were it not the case there was some kind of coin / token deposit system, would you return your cart? I know I would.
For me, it's about reducing the amount of time the "update available" icon shows up in the system tray, because its very presence bothers me. Maybe there's something cool and new. Maybe it fixes a severe security problem. If it's for programs I'm not using right now, then the update can be applied right now. Otherwise it's going to have to wait until I'm done. And bother me.
Yes, I could turn updates off and never see it, but that seems like a bad plan in the long run.
Fake AGI is like fake banknotes. Some of them are really good approximations. Nigh indistinguishable. A lot of people will be fooled by it but eventually it will be discovered to be a fake and people will get hurt in some way or another.
And it won't be the people who are pushing for "AGI".
I wouldn't turn up to most job interviews with rainbow hair, oversize sunglasses and clown shoes. And if I dressed sensibly, I probably wouldn't bring my teddy bear as a mascot if I expected to be taken seriously.
Emojis are in that sort of territory.
Know your audience. And if you don't, or are trying to present to as wide an audience as possible, default to the safety of plain prose.
It's not necessarily about "the government", well it is, because governments often contain, or may come to contain, bad people, but they shouldn't be the only concern.
It's about not making it easy for bad people to interfere in your business, even if what you're doing is all legitimate and above board; and not making it easy for bad people to harm you or those close to you either.
Mobile telephone numbers aren't strictly a secret, especially those on monthly contracts. Names and numbers are linked in a provider's database somewhere. But for an untrusted third party to know that information? It's bad enough when someone who needs to know it sells it on to a telemarketing database. Imagine what would happen if any old crank got a hold of that.
Likewise we all have real names, home addresses (for the lucky majority anyway), etc. There are people who know these things. Perhaps even people we'd rather didn't, but it would be incredibly stupid to leave that information in plaintext for anyone else to find, especially if it can be linked to our online activity.
You might be the most fair and balanced Internet user in the world, but if your name and address is public, any crank who takes exception to you anyway will be at your door shouting and raving before you know it.
If we have to give it over, presumably to a trusted individual or organisation, we need a method where it can't be intercepted. So it's either a slip of paper at a clandestine meeting place or you need encryption to send it over the Internet.
There's plenty of other personal information that I haven't mentioned here where similar rules will apply.
Seems to me that would make the true ethical choice to be to buy it from the second-hand shop and then burn it, robbing anyone else any chance of advertising that fashion.
Mild disagree. Most spreadsheets are Turing complete, especially if they have one or more built in programming languages and have been for decades at this point, yet new "must have" features seem to get added to Excel with every release. Or that was the case until the recent "Office is no longer Office" debacle anyway.
And programming languages themselves keep updating and changing.
As I've said before, once Linus is gone, we might well end up with splits at the kernel level rather than at the distro level. And we would be wise to avoid any one organisation's stock kernel, even if there are some very large organisations providing a lot of code for the kernel at present.
I can see a future where, say, GNOME, start producing their own kernels to support their vision of the Linux desktop from the ground up.
And it's all but certain that Canonical and Red Hat would be very interested in things going their (respective) way(s) when the time comes.
Around £100.
The small print: That includes delivery charges and all other household and hygiene supplies that can be bought at a UK supermarket.