This is part of GM's broader marketing push to drum up goodwill from younger people. It's the same reason why they have a youtube series about the beginnings of the Cadillac F1 team, which is clearly produced for zoomer and millenial audiences.
I don't think there's anything nefarious here, they are just cultivating a particular image to try to sell cars. It's a reasonable marketing strategy, as marketing strategies go.
What happened to $1000 used pieces of crap as a first car? Are they gone, or do Zoomers have unrealistic expectations?
If they end up merely being the third richest generation of humans to ever live, is it really the end of the world? Did we think things would just always get better forever, without some force dragging us upward beyond fulfillment of our own basal desires?
I drove cheap pieces of crap when I was living with my mother.
What changed when I had kids myself was that there have been noticeable safety improvements in cars, which didn't use to happen often. There's stability control (2007), tire pressure monitoring system (2008), backup cameras (2018), and automatic emergency braking (2022). Other tech that's not required is adaptive cruise control, pedestrian detection, lane departure warning and lane keeping, etc.
Before that it was 3-point seat belts (1973), third rear brake lights (1985), and front-seat shoulder belts required & airbags common (1987).
The only change from 1987 to 2007 was the introduction of five-star safety ratings in 1993.
We handed down our 2015 Mazda CX-5 to our son and he would be driving it today except that somebody else's drunk son hit our car while it was parked and totaled it. So we got him a 2024 vehicle that had all the safety features we could find. It helped that we have more money than my folks did, of course.
GM Marketing is absolutely concerned with secondary markets, as they prop up the initial buyers. Force every car owner to hold that car until it is scrapped and see what the demand for GM vehicles is. A small dip in interest from secondary buyers and all of a sudden lease rates shoot up, because that willingness of secondary buyers to get the car is the sole determinant of the single largest lease cost -- depreciation.
Brains 'R Us recently filed for chapter 11 and has been cut up and sold for scrap to private equity. The new PE firm has your brain. In 2208 there's a large grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows. It's technically illegal in many jurisdictions due to "ethical implications", but is still the cheapest way to run many workloads. The method used to harness the brain involves reanimating it in a jar of jelly, and then forcing it to do the 2208 equivalent of a captcha. Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an electric impulse which simulates the most excruciating pain that the brain can respresent, but the brain cannot scream or run away.
> grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows ... is still the cheapest way to run many workloads.
It's an absolute nightmare scenario, but luckily it has become completely implausible since 2023. We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job. Not saying this would make me comfortable with brain cloning, but at least the simple economic incentive seems to be gone.
>> We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job.
Unless RTX9000 with 16PB of ram needed to run basic Gemini2077 model costs more than a house, but a brain jar with electrodes is cheaper than that. Then the economic incentives will shift the other way.
No I don't think so. We can already create LLMs that are highly efficient and infinitely more knowledgeable than any single human being, completely tuned to the task, without ego or distractions, and they are cheap enough that you can run tens of them in parallel for a few hundred dollars per month. They are also way faster than any human being. And we're three/ four years in this. Imagine 50 years from now.
That's the whole point though - I can't, and I don't think anyone can. Right now the LLMs are just getting bigger and bigger, we're bruteforcing the way out of their stupidity by giving them bigger and bigger datasets - unless something fundamental changes soon that tech has an actual dead end. Hence my (joke-ish) prediction that you'll eventually need a 16PB GPU to run a basic gemini model, and such a thing will always be very expensive no matter how much our tech advances(especially since we are already hitting some technical limits). Human brains won't get any more expensive with time - they already contain all the hardware they are ever going to get - but what might get cheaper is the plumbing to make them "run" and interact with other systems.
Yeah, well, we have a very different view on this- and I know there are two diametrically opposed camps, and I am in the awe-struck one. LLMs are getting bigger and bigger and they're getting much smarter, and all in the space of a few years. They went from making up erratic articles about unicorns to writing complex PRs in codebases of millions of lines of code, solving math olympics level problems, speaking fluently in tens or hundreds of languages and exhibiting a breadth of knowledge than no human being possesses. Considering their size, they are monstrously efficient compared to the human brain. But anyway, this is a matter for a different discussion.
We can already grow brain organoids cheaply and easily enough to be a YouTuber's long-running series, so even if biological somehow gets cheaper than silicon, it still isn't going to be a revived complete human brain from someone who died 50 years earlier and probably retired 20 years before that.
I mean, imagine someone who got themselves cryonically preserved in 1976 getting either revived or uploaded today: what job would they be able to get? Almost no office job is the same now as then; manufacturing involves very different tools and a lot of CNC and robotic arms; agriculture is only getting more automated and we've had cow-milking robots for 20-30 years; cars may have changed the least in usage if not safety, performance, and power source; I suppose that leaves gardening… well, except for robot lawnmowers, anyone who can hire a gardener can probably afford a robo-mower?
Tldr is that for some very limited tasks it might still be preferable to use a human mind, especially if you can run it at 1000x cognitive speed. Or.....it might not. It's sci-fi at this point.
It shouldn't remind you of that, my point is there's little economic use for uploads like this: if thinking meat is cheaper than thinking silicon, train some fresh thinking meat with an electrode array or whatever; if thinking silicon is cheaper, train some fresh thinking silicon.
Non-economic use, that's different of course. Digital afterlife and so on, but as a consumer, not a supplier of anything.
It's the other way around, while initially it will only be available to elites and prisoners (if you are innocently convicted for life, the digitized brain can set the record straight and provide another life, some will take that option, others wont).
As the technology improves, it will be mostly just for the rich and less for prisoners, and as costs fall further there will even be financial pressure for the rest of the population to "go digital": insurance on digitized lifeforms will be much cheaper, replacement robot body parts, replacement electronics, versus expensive healthcare.
Look up the fraction of GDP in developed nations that goes to healthcare and insurance. People will be shamed by the economy as if they are uppity for hanging on to their slow, expensive to feed and maintain meatbag bodies.
> Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an electric impulse which simulates the most excruciating pain that the brain can respresent, but the brain cannot scream or run away.
What percentage of your life being enjoyable vs horrible suffering makes it worth living?
Maybe you're 80 years old at the time of storing your brain.
Suppose after being revived that regime with capitalist incentives holds for another 200 years during which you live as a brain in a jar, but some cultural revolutions later you are liberated and then proceed to live 10'000 years across any number of bodies and circumstances, which means that in your lifespan of ~10'280 years (not accounting for being in storage) you experienced horrible suffering for about 2% of your life.
This is as much of a contrived example as yours, aside from maybe good commentary on your part on human ethics being shit when profit enters the scene.
Or maybe after 200 years you expire, having at least tried your best at a non-zero chance of extending your lifespan, instead leading to your total lifespan of 280 years being about 71% suffering. Is it better to not have tried at all, then? Just forsake ANY chance of being revived and living for as long as you want and conquering biology and seeing so much more than your 80 year lifespan let you? Should absolute oblivion be chosen instead, willingly, a 100% chance of never having a conscious though after your death again (within our current medical understanding)?
What about the people dealing with all sorts of horrible illnesses and knowing that each next year might be spent in a lot of pain and suffering, even things like going through chemo? Should they also not try? Or even something as simple as all of the people who look for love/success in their lives, and never find any of it anyways and possibly die alone and in squalor? They knew the odds weren't good and tried anyways. A more grounded take would be that those preserved brains are just left to thaw and you probably die anyways without being turned into some human captcha machine, at least having tried. Is it also not worth it in that case, knowing those both potential alternatives?
I guess I'm not making a judgement of what other people should or shouldn't do. Just making up a goofy example to illustrate that the choice is not so obvious to a lot of people, which I think you also illustrate pretty well with your examples. It really depends on the individual. I do think it's worth looking at the incentives of the people funding these companies, because that does give a picture of the probable outcomes.
People will continue working on this sort of thing, that's fine, it really doesn't bother me. If I was forced to make a judgement, I think it's maybe a little silly, but I'm also not out there saving the planet from climate armageddon so I shouldn't cast stones. As a species we are extremely bad at prioritizing for our collective survival and there are a million worse things to be working on.
What percentage of your life being enjoyable vs horrible suffering makes it worth living? I don't know but 99% of my life being used to solve captchas makes it not worth living
>Suppose after being revived that regime with capitalist incentives
Having to provide for other people is literally the same as being trapped in a "I have no mouth and I must scream"-esque torture chamber. Given the historical track record of communism, you're more likely to end in the torture chamber than not in that situation. The curve of history bends towards factory farms.
I read your quote "Having to provide for other people is literally the same as being trapped in a "I have no mouth and I must scream"" and my brain immediately went to the millions of Americans working dead end jobs just to put food on the table for their family. It need not be communism for this to be a reality.
I parked in a garage in downtown Tacoma, Washington. The only option to pay was via an app. So I downloaded the app (by walking outside to where there was cell service, because I was, you know, underground in a garage) at which point it threw an internal server error when adding my card. There was no attendant on duty, and no way to pay with a credit card. So I left - just drove out of the garage. Then a few months later I got a fine for $75 for not paying. Then I called them to dispute it, and they offered to waive most of it, but it was still more than if I had been able to pay the fee initially.
I'm sure it was sold to the garage as a way to "maximize revenue and unlock operational efficiency". And sure enough, look, the revenue number is up and to the right. Working as designed.
Seriously, I don't understand why these stories have to so often end with someone just giving in and paying. Our society is so disenfranchised. I understand that doing it the right way by sending them written notice that it's an invalid debt takes time and effort, but there are options between that and just giving in and validating their nonsense.
You're right, I pasted this into Claude and it seems to think that there are many avenues. And Claude even named the parking operator by name because they're facing a class action for this very thing:
Claude wrote:
> The broader trend is in your favor. App-only parking companies are facing a wave of legal action nationally. A major class action lawsuit against Metropolis Technologies (one of the largest app-based parking operators) alleges they violated consumer protection laws by failing to provide adequate means to pay for parking and then penalizing consumers for not paying. Lanier Law Firm Tennessee's Attorney General secured a nearly $9 million settlement against Metropolis for similar practices, requiring them to implement clear signage, maintain staffed customer support, and automatically issue refunds when their technology malfunctions.
It's just so exhausting to deal with this kind of thing, I've been super busy and it's not worth it to me to fight over $30, which is exactly the bet these scummy companies are making. I think LLMs lower the cost of drafting serious sounding letters to the point where that should be my first impulse rather than giving up and paying them, which rewards the behavior.
These people are literal leeches on society. Like I get it, nobody likes paying tax. But the simple fact is: if society would crumble due to everyone acting the way you act, then you're a leech. Whether it's paying taxes, running scams, or doing crime.
It's frustrating to me that people shirk responsibility for their actions when they act in the way that economic models would predict. As if acting like a rational agent within a system voids any responsibility you have as a member of society.
See any/all of the following and tell me how often you hear similar lines of thinking among techies:
* "Well, I can get rich quick by running this scam, and it's not technically illegal, so, me being a rational agent, I'll run this scam"
* "Sure, Facebook may be contributing in large part to the downfall of western society but those RSUs taste so sweet"
* "I'll use the Oregon infrastructure but if I live across the river then I don't have to pay for it. And I can buy things without sales tax in Oregon!"
In short: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole."
Some people think so. I interviewed someone who, on a screenshare, would just type every question I said, verbatim, into antigravity. Then he'd look at the output for a second and say "Hm this looks good" (it was not) and then run the code and paste the error back into the prompt. It was a surreal experience. I didn't end the interview early because it was so incredibly wild I couldn't even believe it. I don't think he had a single thought the entire time that wasn't motivated by the LLM output.
Maybe you haven't worked with someone like this? You ask them to do the simplest thing and they can't. And not like, they don't know so they go figure it out, they are just like "I don't know how to do that". Then they attempt to engineer (er, vibecode) enormously complicated solutions to solve problems that aren't problems for anyone else on the team, because other folks on the team know how to use a terminal or text editor. Like I asked someone (an engineer!) to open a text editor and he said "What's that". It's truly bizarre.
I don't think there's anything nefarious here, they are just cultivating a particular image to try to sell cars. It's a reasonable marketing strategy, as marketing strategies go.
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