How so? In Sweden we have digital ID and it's great! Super practical and I struggle to think of how it would be used to spy on citizens, given that it has the same legal protections as banks have regarding your account transactions etc.

Like sure you could in theory see every document I've ever signed if you have a warrant for BankID servers, but you could probably glean most of that if you had a warrant for the banks servers anyway, so it's not really a new capability.

The article misses the most important factor: the customers have no way of knowing they would be getting a better product or extra 25 millimeters of leg room if they paid 3% more. The higher prices could just as well be for completely unrelated reasons (greed, inefficiency, ...). No one is going around measuring and documenting every single difference between products and services, and, even if someone did, almost no one has time to do such thorough research for every purchase. It is increasingly difficult to find objective information about any commercial product. Any attempt at providing impartial information gets drowned in an ocean of marketing content, sponsored reviews, astroturfing, and brand tribalism.

Consequence of the above is that marketing and anecdotal evidence are much more influential factors in purchase decisions than quality of the product. Using marketing campaigns to brainwash people is significantly easier (and cheaper) than improving a product enough for them to notice – especially if the product already has a zombie customer base that chooses a familiar brand out of habit rather than merit. We have built a world where money is valued over value, and making better products is often a terrible business strategy.

META managed to spend a lot of money into AI to achieve inferior results. Something must change for sure, and you don't want an LLM skeptic at home, in my opinion, especially since the problem is not what LeCun is saying right now (LLMs are not the straight path to AGI), but the fact it used to say for some time that LLMs were just statistical models, stochastic parrots (and this is a precise statement, something most people do not understand. It means two things: no understanding of the prompt whatsoever in the activation states, and no internal representation of the idea/sentence the model is going to express either), which is an incredibly weak statement that high level AI scientists refused since the start just because of functional behaviors. Then he slowly changed the point of view. But this shit show and the friction he created inside META is not something to forget.