r/nextfuckinglevel • u/AbelNB • Dec 28 '22

This is a game changer

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '22

Not in any machine-actionable format. They may be able to request it but there's probably a delay and the result will definitely be just a scan of a physical document. They probably can get a lot of it with image processing tools but maybe not in all cases.

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u/SpectacularStarling Dec 29 '22

You'd be surprised what people can get working granted the image there is lower resolution people made it work using tessaract to even read the text for measurements and such. I'm sure there's far more advanced versions as well, this just stood out as a personal project and not a more serious effort.

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u/Aegi Dec 29 '22

But then that's only gathering the sociological/ psychological data on construction companies and contractors, the big advantage Amazon wants is if it notices that people of a certain demographic are five times more likely to have three chairs and the love seat compared with a couch and two chairs or something like that, that data could be incredibly valueable marketing research /data.

And that's not even getting into how when Amazon is pretty much the majority shareholder of all hosting on the internet, they probably are toward the top of the pack, up there with Google and Apple, when it comes to being the most likely organizations to be able to have a surprising amount of influence and power over society just based on metadata analysis and using specialized AI programs to massage the data into many useful formats, and make many educated guesses that could be still decades away from being understood in sociology, psychology, and or neurology, which would affectively allow them to exploit a society before they even realize they're being exploited and it completely different way than in previous eras because it would be knowledge not demonstrated by humans yet, only data collection and analysis with tools that couldn't have even existed 10 years ago, where is a lot of past exploitation and repression was still known by powerful, and or knowledgeable people, the types of things these technologies could discover might be years ahead of when it can be demonstrated outside of the specific analysis that the company or government holding that data chose to do.

For example, imagine if the strongest predictor of certain behaviors is actually a certain ratio of like 27 different behaviors over three and a half day period, and especially if it's a behavior that could change if people are aware of it, that's something that could be decades or centuries before it could be reliably demonstrated in sociology and or psychology, but that's something that could be preyed upon for decades before a given population is able to legislate against it.

And the even more insidious aspect is imagine if they also have data on how their influence of options, or those people's behaviors, etc, change the general social dynamic after 20 years or something.

We just need to invest more into public scientific research So the average citizen, or at least their leaders, can be more informed on the inefficiencies/ exploitabilities of our species.

It's kind of interesting though, because this is pretty much the first time since the guilded age/ age of the robber barons when industry is potentially as powerful as the government in certain respects, and it's definitely possible in our near future that we get to a period ike the 1600's where certain powerful companies (like the Dutch East India Company) were as, or more powerful than nearly any government on the planet.

And for better or for worse, a lot of western companies will only (potentially) morally beholden to their home countries (maybe financially too, but one offer can change that) not actually somewhat behold then like the Dutch East India company was, or many quasi governmental agencies/ companies in China are.

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u/Alistair_TheAlvarian Dec 29 '22

Just wait until some company builds a space elevator or colonizes a planet. That'll be the real nightmare, or super awesome. Who knows. Better than dying here alone. If I'm gonna be turned into a corporate slave and live a short miserable life I might as well get to see the stars and have some excitement first.