November has been rough for me. Terrible international news, stress at work and almost no sunlight in Helsinki has been a lot handle.
Then I got ill but tried to get back to work too early, and it was all too much.
I've now had to block all news and social media from Thu to Sun with the great Freedom.to app (the only SaaS I pay for). It has helped, and I've for example read a lot of fiction again.
Unfortunately, it means less time on Mastodon. But I'm still here!
P.s. Hello new followers!
A fantastic and ambitious new article by Frank Martela that attempts to formulate a comprehensive theory of well-being with "having, loving, doing and being" as modes of existence.
It draws from a very wide range of existing #research in #psychology, #philosophy, #sociology, #ecology and #economics among others.
This is crucial groundwork needed to break the dominance of #GDP and instead focus on "well-being for all humanity while remaining within planetary boundaries"
@deshipu Yeah, there are similarities there, but that's still a different conversation. It's intertwined with what's considered public vs private in a way that my case isn't.
Wrt the corporation compared to a group of people:
We give limited liability to the bulk of companies, which changes completely the moral and legal ramifications of what a company does vs what a group of people do. That's why LLM by an Ltd warrants different rules than LLM by a person or group of people.
@deshipu The main issue is that as a society we need to treat people (and non-human animals) differently from gadgets and companies.
The original argument I heard seems to say that we can't make that distinction, because a certain activity in a gadget resembles a certain human activity, when that human activity is greatly simplified in a specific theoretical framework.
I don't buy it and find it wild that this very weak similarity would warrant applying the same ethical and moral criteria.
@deshipu Thanks, these are good questions.
I don't really have a clear answer on all of them. I was mostly just gauging if people find these scenarios I outlined above as different enough that they intuitively shouldn't be treated the same.
Now I'm sure you can twist a logical chain of arguments to reach this conclusion – philosophical arguments tend to have that innate property – but IMO ethical and legal evaluations should avoid ending up in absurd conclusions.
@deshipu I guess it's not so much about the seller, but that we should morally and legally treat people differently to gadgets and companies.
p.s. the point from some possible future of gadgets that have humanlike agency is moot: there is no need nor requirement to safeguard our moral evaluation of the current world based on what might happen in the future. We can cross that bridge when we get there.
I heard yesterday a good faith argument that we can't fault corporations from using copyrighted material as training data for their #AI models, because that's roughly how people learn too.
I was left wondering that shouldn't it be obvious to everyone that a trillion dollar corporation downloading the entire internet to make a gadget they then sell for profit, can and should be treated morally and legally in a different way than a person reading a book?
Is there something I'm missing here?
The injustice of #UnequalExchange is staggering:
>We find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. The wage value of this net-appropriated labour was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in Northern prices, accounting for skill level.
>While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income.