Yeah it’s pretty much a guarantee that when you hear an oligarch saying regulations cause stagnation or stifle innovation, they’re referring to protections that are meant to keep people from being exploited.

They will then claim that U.S. values are “baked in” to their bullshit and that’s why you don’t need regulations… These are also the people that are destroying the U.S. and have openly stated they are trying to destroy democracy

For example, Kratsios, the man who argues against regulations for technology, was tasked with using cutting edge technology to prevent COVID from spreading as well as for keeping COVID misinformation from being shared on social media.

We know that he failed to do both.

Best case scenario, he has never known what the fuck he was doing, millions died under his watch, and this is a very clear example of why nobody should be listening to him.

Worst case scenario, his team of tech bros who were supposed to be keeping disinformation from spreading, either created (or intentionally allowed it to be spread) the online misinformation that plagued the U.S. regarding masks, because he felt the lives at risk were less important than the facial recognition data he was collecting, and the Clearview big government contracts he was attempting to sell to multiple agencies on behalf of Peter Thiel.

Best case or worst case scenario, the bottom line is that nobody should be listening to these people! They’re either incompetent morons or competent villains, or most likely a little bit of both. They are very dangerous, and they should not hold any government authority. The death rattle of democracy in the U.S. should be a warning to other countries about the danger of allowing private businesses to gradually infiltrate and eventually consume the government.

The entire purpose of a government even existing is to protect society from men exactly like this.

Don’t blame you

The shit they’ve already gotten away with is fucking insane. I cannot believe nobody has ever called them out for COVID masking bullshit

Clearview Offers To Help Out With COVID-19 Contact Tracing

He’s Trump’s official science advisor now, but Idk why people leave his very impressive stint as Trump’s default science advisor with no science experience off of his resume these days…

Sign of the times I guess

Trump’s de facto science adviser is 31 and has no science training

More than a year into his presidency, Donald Trump still hasn’t appointed a top science adviser. So who, then, is the top-ranking science official in the White House?

“The job falls to Michael Kratsios,” ClimateWire’s Scott Waldman writes. As the top-ranking official in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kratsios is now the de facto top science adviser in the White House.

Kratsios is a 31-year-old with a political science degree and a focus on Hellenic (a.k.a. Greek) studies from Princeton who cut his professional teeth in Silicon Valley, according to Waldman. These are not exactly the qualifications you’d want for the person the president is supposed to turn to for advice on dealing with a disease outbreak, or an environmental disaster (though Archimedes’ principle does come in handy in explaining sea level rise).

As long as you’re ok with helping the U.S. destroy democracy and speed up the establishment of an authoritarian global surveillance state (privately owned of course) for your real boss and the people that pay money to listen to him rant about the antichrist, what he’s saying isn’t unreasonable.

He’s always believed that a country’s values are baked into technology. That’s why nobody needs regulations.

However, if you think that collecting data to improve facial recognition tech didn’t really justify intentionally spreading misinformation about masking during COVID, then you might not be interested in slurping the kool aid he’s so generously threatening offering.

“I will continue to point out to my tech minister counterparts the ways they can create a regulatory environment to allow AI to thrive,”

I would like to continue to point out to his tech minister counterparts that Kratsios was responsible for preventing the spread of online disinformation in the U.S. during the earliest days of COVID.

Shout out to the broligarchs who stepped in by early March to use cutting “edge technology” to keep COVID disinformation from spreading across social media:

March 2020: White House seeks assistance from tech companies in fight against coronavirus

In a phone call, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios implored the companies to help out with an “all-hands-on-deck effort” to fight the new coronavirus. “The White House’s top priority is ensuring the safety and health of the American people amid the COVID-19 outbreak,” Kratsios said in a statement. “Cutting edge technology companies and major online platforms will play a critical role in this all-hands-on-deck effort.” According to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, top tech trade groups and companies participated in the call, including Apple, Cisco, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, the Consumer Technology Association, the Information Technology Industry Council and others. The meeting revolved around how the tech industry can better coordinate with the government to get out authoritative facts about the coronavirus while cracking down on the spread of bunk cures and conspiracy theories spreading online.

Remember how we didn’t know for the longest time if we all should be bothering with masks? Crazy how so many people died because of that little “misunderstanding.” I’m pretty sure the U.S. was like the only country where it was even really debated…

Federal officials initially discouraged the general public from wearing masks for protecting themselves from COVID-19. In early April, federal officials reversed their guidance, saying that the general public should wear masks to lessen transmission by themselves, particularly from asymptomatic carriers. Public health experts such as Larry Gostin stated that federal officials should have recommended mask-wearing sooner;others noted that US government guidance lagged significantly behind mask recommendations in East Asian countries and likely exacerbated the scale of the pandemic in the United States.

I wonder why masking ever became so debatable on social media, and only in the U.S. when these guys were trying to keep disinformation from being spread? Oh well, when a billionaire decides to bother trying to help you, I guess the least you can do is show how grateful your are and say thank you, so I guess thank you for your services broligarchs 🫡

Even if you couldn’t stop the mask debate from spiraling out of control, it’s not like y’all intentionally didn’t want people masking up right? Like what incentive could tech bros (including Peter Thiel’s protege, Michael Kratsios) have possibly had in March of 2020 to try and discourage people from masking?

•March 2020: Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich •March 2020: What is Clearview AI and why is it raising so many privacy red flags? •May 2025: The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI

When the Department of Defense scheduled a meeting in January 2020 for Clearview to pitch its services, the invite included Johnson. The following month, Ton-That sent his friend a proposal to compensate Johnson in Clearview stock for advisory services he provided to the company “with respect to developing, marketing and selling its technology.” In July 2020, Johnson helped Schwartz draft a letter for Rep. Matt Gaetz—a personal friend of Johnson’s—to send to top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, lobbying them to use Clearview to smoke out spies among the “400,000 Chinese nationals who enter the U.S. every year as foreign students.”

By the end of Trump’s first presidential term, Clearview had secured funding from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, one of Elon Musk’s earliest business partners, and signed up hundreds of law enforcement clients around the country.

July 2020: Peter Thiel’s New Man In The Defense Department

The Pentagon’s new 33-year-old head of research and engineering lacks a basic science degree but brings deep connections to Donald Trump and controversial Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Too bad their plan to fight online disinformation about masking failed, I guess…

Exactly, AI could be a very helpful and powerful tool with the potential to do some really good things, but it’s still a tool not a replacement for an education and common sense. We’re all being intentionally dumbed down by dumb people who have been handed way too much power because nepotism. They’ve accomplished so much destruction (success?) by just acting overly confident, and pretending they knew what they were doing. It’s only recently that people have started saying out loud what I think many of us were probably silently screaming in our heads, but waiting on somebody else to be the first one to say: “For the love of God, just put it down and back away.”

Calculators are useful tools, but imagine how fucking dumb the world would be if we all just collectively agreed nobody needs to learn math anymore because we have calculators that do that.

GPS navigation is a useful tool, but it doesn’t mean you should blindly follow the instructions it gives when it tells you to turn into a brick wall or a body of water.

I’m not sure if it’s a recent liability thing in medicine, or maybe because my insurance requires I go to a giant monopoly to remain in network, but it seems like over the last year, most doctors have had it hammered into their heads that AI should be the first and only step they take when diagnosing a patient. Not that it should be a tool to augment human capabilities, not that it’s what you turn to for help when you can’t figure out what’s going on, or even what you consult to double check your own conclusions.

The old saying is “treat the patient not the symptoms” but it feels like suddenly it’s become policy to treat every patient like a checklist of symptoms in a diagnosis box.

That literally only makes sense for a computer making a diagnosis based on the sum of check marks in each box reaching a predetermined cut off value. That could be a useful way to prescreen people or streamline treatment for simple things like diagnosing a cold/flu, but when a patient has persistent symptoms, but only checks one or two symptoms in a lot of random boxes that don’t tally up to meet any predetermined cut off value for a single diagnosis, wtf does the computer do at that point? What is the next step for this patient who is begging for help only to be told, sorry, that doesn’t check off enough symptoms in any one box for me to be able to diagnose you.

🤷‍♀️ is also literally the answer when the doctor is unable (or maybe not allowed due to policy) to think critically and evaluate the information available in the context of the patient vs a predetermined diagnostic screener somebody else created.

Anytime I hear “we can just fill it in with AI” I feel like we’re closer and closer to Idiocracy becoming a reality, but it feels especially close when it comes to medicine. It’s like somebody saw this scene and didn’t get that it was supposed to be a joke, not something we aspire to:

Oz said there are no OB-GYNs in most Alabama counties, “so they’re doing something pretty cool. They’re actually having robots do ultrasounds on these pregnant moms.”

“No, Dr. Oz. It is not ‘cool’ that we don’t have OBGYN’s in many rural counties in America. It is an international embarrassment,” Sanders wrote in a post on the social platform X. “In the richest country on earth, we need more doctors, nurses, dentists and mental health counselors, not more robots.”