Excellent post, Graham with many important points to ponder. I do agree that allowing companies to purchase or swallow other companies makes no economic sense, just another instance of the stupidity of unregulated capitalism.
Allowing a few individuals to control the wealth of entire nations is also detrimental to the community as a whole.
Yesterday, I replied to a post on LinkedIn, in which a translator, who has engaged to proofread what a machine had translated, made us laugh a bit at what the machine had come up with in French for some culinary expressions in Dutch: clearly, AI can't cook. But, so I replied, one should not underestimate the power of language - a mere glance at the claptrap that gets trotted out in adverts in evidence enough. As I once read in the book "The Bluffer's Guide to Whisky" - "Whisky is always described as 'pure'. What do they think we think they put in it: industrial effluent?"
The Oxford English Dictionary describes itself as "descriptive, not prescriptive", which more or less means "people use language as they will - we just describe what they do." But what "they" do is now being contributed to by AI. That is one way in which perceptions are subtly being changed. When a man confronts you with a gun and demands your purse, clearly that's robbery. But when, over time, attitudes get changes by subtle suggestions and small increments, nobody perceives that as a robbery, because there is sudden dispossession, or wrenching away of property. AI is now part of the language corpus that surrounds us and which the OED "describes" but does not "prescribe".
I stand by my remark about the use of "legal person" and "private individual". I learned the distinction well when working for a corporate leviathan - a bank. But, in 1980, when I was studying law, the definition of legal person was exactly as I describe it here: anyone who owns rights and owes obligations. The insistence over the years (and you can find erudite dictionaries that explain the shift, supposedly in order to achieve "clarity") in distinguishing legal persons and private individual has now blurred the fact that the distinction is there for one purpose if no other - to allow LPs to be treated royally and private individuals with derision, and get the PIs to servilely touch their forelocks at LPs, and humbly recognise their innate inferiority in terms of legal status.
It's akin to how oil companies got town planning and mobility choices tramlined in the 50s and 60s by inventing words like "jaywalker" (pedestrians are dangerous, not cars), freeway (cars give you freedom) and service station (not just gas and a hamburger, but where you're treated like a queen).
Excellent post, Graham with many important points to ponder. I do agree that allowing companies to purchase or swallow other companies makes no economic sense, just another instance of the stupidity of unregulated capitalism.
Allowing a few individuals to control the wealth of entire nations is also detrimental to the community as a whole.
Yesterday, I replied to a post on LinkedIn, in which a translator, who has engaged to proofread what a machine had translated, made us laugh a bit at what the machine had come up with in French for some culinary expressions in Dutch: clearly, AI can't cook. But, so I replied, one should not underestimate the power of language - a mere glance at the claptrap that gets trotted out in adverts in evidence enough. As I once read in the book "The Bluffer's Guide to Whisky" - "Whisky is always described as 'pure'. What do they think we think they put in it: industrial effluent?"
The Oxford English Dictionary describes itself as "descriptive, not prescriptive", which more or less means "people use language as they will - we just describe what they do." But what "they" do is now being contributed to by AI. That is one way in which perceptions are subtly being changed. When a man confronts you with a gun and demands your purse, clearly that's robbery. But when, over time, attitudes get changes by subtle suggestions and small increments, nobody perceives that as a robbery, because there is sudden dispossession, or wrenching away of property. AI is now part of the language corpus that surrounds us and which the OED "describes" but does not "prescribe".
I stand by my remark about the use of "legal person" and "private individual". I learned the distinction well when working for a corporate leviathan - a bank. But, in 1980, when I was studying law, the definition of legal person was exactly as I describe it here: anyone who owns rights and owes obligations. The insistence over the years (and you can find erudite dictionaries that explain the shift, supposedly in order to achieve "clarity") in distinguishing legal persons and private individual has now blurred the fact that the distinction is there for one purpose if no other - to allow LPs to be treated royally and private individuals with derision, and get the PIs to servilely touch their forelocks at LPs, and humbly recognise their innate inferiority in terms of legal status.
It's akin to how oil companies got town planning and mobility choices tramlined in the 50s and 60s by inventing words like "jaywalker" (pedestrians are dangerous, not cars), freeway (cars give you freedom) and service station (not just gas and a hamburger, but where you're treated like a queen).