cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/62810203

Marc Andreessen is predicting that at least one job is safe from the rise of AI: his own.

Marc Andreessen says that VCs may escape the rising tide of AI automation. On a recent podcast, he said the relationship-driven art of venture capital may make it one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing when other jobs are automated.

And it was just another day in Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right. That same week in Chatham House, Lonsdale and the Democratic billionaire Mark Cuban sparred over affirmative action, and Cuban and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro discussed questions of culture and work ethic.

This constellation of rolling elite political conversations revolve primarily around the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and a circle of Silicon Valley figures.

cross-posted from: https://awful.systems/post/4147895

Recent years have seen the emergence of a second and arguably more powerful “Armageddon Lobby.” It resides in epicenters of power like Silicon Valley and embraces a “secular” vision of humanity’s grand future — though it shares many similarities with traditional religion, including a belief in “God” and the promise of immortality through cryonics. The renowned media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls this vision “The Mindset,”

Advocates of The Mindset claim that the world as we know it will soon expire. In its ashes, a new era dominated by digital lifeforms — that is, artificial intelligences — will emerge. These beings will stand to us as “gods,” though by merging our brains with AI or “uploading” our minds to computers, we may become gods ourselves: Homo deus — the “human god” — as Yuval Noah Harari puts it. “The most devout holders of The Mindset,” Rushkoff writes in reference to Mark Zuckerberg’s failed “metaverse” project,

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21217025

More on the Xai crimes in Memphis:

White-supremacy-born broligarch installs 35 unpermitted gas turbines and immediately becomes the city's single biggest NOx polluter and possibly biggest emitter of the carcinogen formaldehyde... in a black-majority neighbourhood that already has a life expectancy 12 years below the average of its very own county and cancer rates 4x the national average.

But fret not! Surely the environmental justice unit of the EPA will surely put a stop to this outrage. What? It was just disbanded? By who? The very same white-supremacy-born broligarch who installed... (continue ad nauseam revolutionem)

New data reveals the hidden network of African workers powering AI, as they push for transparency from the global companies that employ them indirectly.

The broligarchy use subcontractors and sub-subcontractors to exploit workers in Africa with a veneer of deniability and to enrich... themselves, naturally. Violating workers' rights and data privacy along the way.

• https://restofworld.org/2025/big-tech-ai-labor-supply-chain-african-workers/

Cross-posted from "Seth Rogen’s Trump Jokes Are Edited Out of Awards Broadcast | Mr. Rogen said President Trump had “single-handedly destroyed all of American science.”" by @silence7@slrpnk.net in !nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz

Tech oligarchs (Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki) create a science prize, fund the inauguration of an anti-science president who appoints a fellow tech bro to gut govt funding of science, and then cut the part where someone points out the irony... "for time reasons"... from a YouTube video.

Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin all in attendance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Prize

Cross-posted from "What 𝘚𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘰𝘯 𝘝𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺 Knew About Tech-Bro Paternalism" by @paywall@rss.ponder.cat in !theatlantic@rss.ponder.cat

Last fall, the consumer-electronics company LG announced new branding for the artificial intelligence powering many of its home appliances. Out: the “smart home.” In: “Affectionate Intelligence.” This “empathetic and caring” AI, as LG describes it, is here to serve. It might switch off your appliances and dim your lights at bedtime. It might, like its sisters Alexa and Siri, select a soundtrack to soothe you to sleep. The technology awaits your summons and then, unquestioningly, answers. It will make subservience environmental. It will surround you with care—and ask for nothing in return.

Affectionate AI, trading the paternalism of typical techspeak for a softer—or, to put it bl

Cross-posted from "This is what resistance to the digital coup looks like" by @cm0002@lemmy.world in !fediverse@lemmy.world

Sunday morning I came across a blog post by Jared White bestowing praise on journalist Carole Cadwalladr’s TED Talk: “This is what a digital coup looks like.”

Cadwalladr’s presentation was phenomenal, filled with brilliant, incendiary quotes against the Broligarchy (in her words: tech bros + oligarchy = broligarchy). I would recommend everybody watch it.

It's filled with memorable, superb quotes about the broligarchy. A must see, to be shared widely. But then I looked up Cadwalladr's online activity. She uses Bluesky for social and Substack for publishing. This is impossibly incongruous after her incendiary TED talk. Honestly, it made me sad. One place is owned by crypto bros, the other is funded by A16Z {Andreessen Horowitz}...

Elon Musk has joined forced with Republican power broker Peter Thiel on a bid to help build Donald Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” missile defence shield.

Mr Musk’s SpaceX is partnering with Mr Thiel’s Silicon Valley data company Palantir Technologies and US drone builder Anduril Industries on a joint proposal for the project.

It would involve SpaceX supplying up to 1,000 orbiters that would provide an early warning of a missile or nuclear launch against the US.

A separate fleet of 200 attack satellites armed with missiles or lasers, probably from another manufacturer, would then shoot down the enemy warheads.

While Golden Dome has attracted interest from more than 180 companies, the three companies have already pitched the plan to top officials from the White House and the Pentagon, according to Reuters, which reported the story citing unnamed sources.

The situation is likely to fuel criticism that Mr Musk is profiting from his political role in the White House. He hol

May be a little elementary for people in this community, b ut I hope it's helpful to someone out there!

The growing debate over the future of intellectual property law in the age of AI took a wild turn in the past few days when Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and Block, and initially a leading figure at Bluesky, declared he would like to see all IP law eliminated.

“Delete all IP law,” Dorsey wrote on X on Friday (April 11).

Elon Musk, owner of X and head of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), chimed in by saying “I agree.”

...

Ed Newton-Rex, a former VP of Audio at Stability AI and now a leading campaigner for the protection of intellectual property, described Dorsey and Musk’s assertion as “tech execs declaring all-out war on creators who don’t want their life’s work pillaged for profit.”

Pushback also came from Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, patent specialist and lawyer who served as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate in the 2024 election.

“Actual IP professional here – NO,” she wrote in response to Dorsey

The big American tech firms known as the “Silicon Six” have been accused of paying almost $278bn (£211bn) less corporate income tax in the past decade compared with the statutory rate for US companies making the same profits.

Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft generated $11tn of revenue and $2.5tn of profits over the past 10 years.

Yet they paid an average 18.8% in combined national and federal corporation taxes, compared with an average 29.7% in the US, according to the Fair Tax Foundation (FTF), which said the Silicon Six had “hardwired” tax avoidance into their business models.

Analysis by the not-for-profit organisation found that if one-off repatriation tax payments in the US connected to historical tax avoidance were excluded, the average corporate income tax contribution of the six firms fell to 16.1% over the past decade.

The companies had also inflated their stated tax payments by $82bn over the same period by including contingencies for tax th

Analysis: As a new book shows, growth and success has turned optimistic tech startups into corporate cesspits of greed, manipulation and contempt

In the early days of Google, the phrase 'don't be evil' was both its motto and part of its Code of Corporate Conduct. By 2018, that phrase was history and so was the sentiment that that inspired it in many peoples' eyes.

For many tech giants, growth and success has seemed to morph what were once benevolent and optimistic startups into cesspits of greed, manipulation and contempt. Descriptions of the inner workings of companies like Google, Facebook (now Meta), and Twitter (now X) portray dystopian hellscapes in which employees are treated like disposable cogs in an ever-grinding machine and competitors are squeezed out of the market by means fair and foul. It is a world where corporate leaders tell us that the biggest failing of civilization is that we have empathy for one another.

In Careless People, a new exposé of corporate lif

Cross-posted from "A Strange Stain in the Sky: How Silicon Valley Is Preparing A Coup Against Democracy" by @crossdl@leminal.space in !technology@lemmy.world

The first, and also the most futuristic techno-utopian one, is the colonisation of Mars. Elon Musk founded Space X in 2002 (Peter Thiel was the first outside investor) with the idea of re-founding humanity. It’s all there: the call to save humanity by turning it into a multi-planetary species, the desire to start from scratch without the legal constraints of Earth, and the will to break with the established order. As you can read, half-hidden, on the terms and conditions page of the Starlink service owned by Space X:

The parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.

“Our economy should be judged on how well it cares for working people, rather than the number of billionaires it produces daily,” stated the leader of an economic justice organization.

Amid warnings from economists that President Donald Trump’s trade war could increase living costs for millions of American families and potentially trigger a recession, the economic justice group Patriotic Millionaires introduced a “bold, surprisingly straightforward economic strategy” on Monday. This plan aims to curb the growing power of the oligarchy and “permanently stabilize the economic lives of working people.”

The strategy, named America 250: The Money Agenda, was presented during an “expert town hall” event called “How to Beat the Broligarchs” and comprises four critical pieces of legislation:

• The Cost of Living Tax Cut Act, which exempts federal taxes up to the median living cost for a single adult without children—$41,600 annually—shifting the tax burden from the working class to

Cross-posted from "Elon Musk’s xAI allegedly uses 'illegal' generators to power Colossus supercomputer facility" by @cm0002@lemmy.world in !technology@lemmy.world

Elon Musk’s X stands to benefit financially if the government pulls an £800m tax on US tech firms as part of an economic deal with Donald Trump, as a prominent tax campaigner indicated the social media platform qualifies for the levy.

Dan Neidle, the head of the non-profit organisation Tax Policy Associates, said the social media platform was eligible for the digital services tax, which is on the block in negotiations between the US and the UK.

“Technically it’s fairly clear X should pay the DST,” he said.

Ministers have been discussing dropping the DST as part of negotiations with the US in exchange for the Trump administration granting the UK a carve-out from tariffs which would otherwise be levied on 2 April.

The technology secretary, Peter Kyle, said on Monday that “nothing was off the table” when it comes to the tax, which was first imposed by the Conservatives in 2020 to stop international technology companies avoiding tax by hiding their profits offshore.

...