Yeah they got the "will take out jobs part" just not the "will take our jobs and be worse at it and companies will still prefer it".
I was around in the 80s when we were losing all the manufacturing jobs, mostly to outsourcing but they blamed automation, and they said "don't worry there will be lots of good paying jobs in the new service economy!". Guess what they outsourced those too and now they'll automate them.
The current stuff is smoke and mirrors and not intelligent in any meaningful sense, but that doesn't mean it isn't dangerous. It doesn't have to be robots with guns to screw over people. Just imagine trying to get PharmaGPT to let you refill your meds, or having to deal with BankGPT trying to figure out why it transfered your rent payment twice. And companies are sure as hell thinking about using this stuff to get rid of human decisionmakers.
Well that sounds like socialism! /s
I happen to be one of those Americans that think despite their many flaws, the authors of the Constitution had some fundamentally good ideas. And we used the Constitution as intended to expand individual rights after the Civil War with the 14th Amendment. Shamefully we never got around to the Equal Rights Amendment to include women.
What most Americans don't realize is that the vast majority of what we consider foundational principles are not actually in the Constitution but are instead case law, and how recent much of that is. It wasn't until 15 years after the Civil War that there was a Supreme Court case which established the idea that corporations are persons under the law and deserving of many of the rights granted under the Constitution using (or mis-using in my opinion) that same 14th Amendment.
Why does that matter? Because it gave corporations an "equal" seat at the table when it comes to disputes. The problem, as you point out, is that our civil dispute resolution system DOES depend on the resources of the "person" and corporations will ALWAYS have more resources. Lots and lots of cases have given corporations more rights and the result is the corportacracy we have now. In other words we went fundamentally the wrong direction diluting the power of the individual. And because corporations have such disproportionate influence on the laws and administrative procedures, we diluted the power of government to represent the people. This has been going on for ~120 years but it kicked into high gear in the 80s (Reagan era).
I'm glad that you guys are still somewhat rational about this, but unfortunately the anti-democratic trend in the US is replicating in the rest of the world. I worry that future histories will compare the rise of this garbage in the US to the start of fascism in Italy in the 1930s.
Sorry, went off on a tangent deep in the comments, but I spend too much time thinking and worrying.
Disclaimer that I have not followed this case and I'm not a lawyer.
In the US civil cases can have both compensatory and punitive damages. Compensatory is meant to "right the wrong" where you get reimbursed for financial losses, lost time, things you had to pay for as a result of the incident, etc. Punitive is meant to punish the offender if the case finds they acted with some negligence, and ultimately get them and others to change their behavior.
Take the infamous McDonald's coffee case. The woman who was injured originally only asked for McDonald's to pay for her medical treatment. She required skin grafts. The jury found that McDonald's knowing let this circumstance exist where someone was going to get a serious injury and added on punitive damages. Which the judge cut back.
No. They're not interested in playing fair or being consistent. They'll simply warp the rules to fit their outcome and declare these posters noncomplaint. You can't out-maneuver people who simply cheat.
The assholes on that side of things are a mixture of those who actually believe and want the US to be a religious state, and those who simply are using religion as a method of control. That second group is happy to see religious conflict because a) it distracts from real problems while they consolidate money and power, 2) they can use the fervor to further solidify their support form that religious base.
This is absolutely not new and has happened before in history. It's just sad to see the US going down this path.