Very niche goss in the spiritual business world: esteemed Buddhist teacher Tara Brach announced yesterday that she is launching "AvaTara" — a generative AI that has been trained on her vast catalog of teachings and can create custom meditations for the user... yikes. As you can imagine — there was lots of uproar in the spiritual / Buddhist community (including my own) which is not overwhelmingly friendly to the AI revolution. A thread I posted went so semi-viral that it inspired me to write a piece on Tara's foray into AI and how "spiritual businesses" can remain ethical under capitalism... or can they? Anyway — if you are a business person in or adjacent to the spiritual world I'd love your thoughts on the piece (linked in comments). And yeah in general I know the LinkedIn crowd is more AI-friendly than the gen-pop, so don't write me off just for that part of my take... We can agree to disagree. Equanimity, right?! | 18 comments on LinkedIn

@MaddieM4@raphus.social so I just wrote this up for unrelated reasons in another thread, but it strikes me as kinda relevant here: https://kolektiva.social/@tiotasram/117023225351134248 From a shortly different angle, as others and possibly you yourself have previously mentioned, the corporation is a class of human-hostile immortal/undead (but thankfully not quite unkillable) entity which literately wants to turn the world into paperclips (i.e., share value) because that's their prime directive, regardless of the cost in human suffering/extinction, and they're doing just that right now. Their human members who claim to be in control of them actually aren't, and are also completely disposable (just watch United Healthcare keep right on denying claims as another CEO steps up to the helm). They live as a set of bylaws, planning documents, and other corporate ephemera which guide and manage human actions, and which in aggregate give rise to things like CEO mindsets, employee obedience/complicity, etc. (Aside: simultaneously destroying all copies of their governing documents is probably a good way to destroy one, even if it is prohibitively difficult). Anybody not working on the corporate alignment problem is not at all serious about alignment.

Magnifica Humanitas, annotated with AI-ethics research

After years of layoffs, restructuring, and hard-charging management tactics, Meta's leaders are acknowledging a collapse in employee trust and morale.

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any company depending on techbros deserves to die. it’s the corporation version of #bullshitJobs. you’re not creating anything of value if you can fire most of your workers and replace them with stochastic parrots. greed made them fire literally more than a million workers because the fairy godrobot was better than all those pesky workers with salaries. fuck em. i wanna see all aislopped companies burnt to the ground.