Cory Doctorow

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I really want to squeeze out one more example here.

It's a really good one because it's about a nonprofit people should be supporting as well.

So there's a nonprofit called the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, hrdag.org.

It's run by some really brilliant mathematicians, statisticians.

They started off doing statistical extrapolations of war crimes for human rights tribunals, mostly in The Hague.

and talking about the aspects of war crimes that were not visible but could be statistically inferred from adjacent data.

They did a project with Innocence Project New Orleans, where they used LLMs to identify the linguistic correlates of arrest reports that produced exonerations, and they used that to analyze a lot more arrest reports than they could otherwise, and they put that at the top of a funnel where lawyers and paralegals were able to accelerate their exoneration work.

That's a new thing on this earth, right?

It's very cool.

And I'm like, OK, well, if these guys can accelerate that work with cheap hardware that today is out of reach, if they can figure out how to use open source models but make them more efficient because you've got all these skilled applied statisticians who are no longer caught up in the bubble, then I think we could see some useful things after the bubble.

That's my argument for this is fiber in the ground and not shitty monkey JPEGs.

If workers get to decide how they use their tools, they generally will be able to make some good decisions about it.

And new tools for workers who are skilled and get to decide how they use them, that's great.

Look, I met a video editor who changed the eye lines of 200 extras in a crowd scene using a deep fake.

And he was like, yeah, I was sitting there with the director.

We thought, wouldn't this scene be really interesting if they were all looking that way instead of this way?

And they were able to do it.

And I'm like, okay, that's a new tool on this earth.