Most of the folks I talk to in my age group are somewhere between anti-AI and "AI works for specific use cases". I find it is the younger folk who think it is miraculous and want to use it everywhere.
Hey, this is my niche - I wrote what was once the leading policy management system for K-12 districts in the USA. It no longer holds that position, but it originated the niche, and it really taught me how policy is created.
Talking to the school board is absolutely a key piece of that, so that was a good move, but talking to the superintendent is an even better move. Most districts delegate the policy work to the superintendent. Most superintendents consult with legal firms who specialize in educational policy. At the same time, most school boards cannot sit down and have a discussion with you about a topic - everything they do has to be in the public eye, so these little blurbs at meetings are the limit of feedback, unless you can get them to put an agenda item at a meeting to have a longer discussion (Which you may be able to do when specific policies are up for reading or votes).
The workflow of how policy really works is that the school board (while being the actual decision-maker) is the last step, not the starting point. The actual starting point is in your state legislature as they set the state-level requirements. Attorneys will keep up on that and let the superintendents know what is needed to be in compliance with changing laws. Superintendents do make their own decisions, but will consult with policy consultants and recommend policy changes to the board. The board will have the policies presented at a meeting, provide time to read them and give feedback, and then finally have a vote on them.
In terms of influence, if you really want to invoke change at the policy level, start at the bottom of that workflow. Talk to your state legislature. Talk to your superintendent. Respond at board meetings to specific policies. And sure, give general feedback at a board meeting. They all help.
(Of course, not all districts follow that model... but most do.)
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
Sure sounds like you built in an easy lever to pull to stop it. After all, even if you accept your premise that it will clone itself and run independently, that doesn't give it a clone of the models it is using. Pull the key, stop the process.
Also, remember that there was a day in the early internet when a worm took over, and to fix it the entire internet had to shut down and all wipe it from the systems at the same time. There is always a way to stop things.
Yet another take on this could be: Just don't ever do such an experiment. You wouldn't set up autonomous weapons and set them loose in a city just to see whether they hurt people. So don't do the AI equivalent of such a negligent act.
Flock collects data which is given/sold to police departments or other entities. Regardless of how you feel about law enforcement having this data, how do you feel about Flock being a middle-man who controls the flow of the data? How do you feel about knowing Flock is VC-driven and will be making decisions based on ROI, not societal benefit?
And a public officer would instead be driven by corruption, like that nice San Jose policewoman who signed off on customs forms for fentanyl shipments.
AI has no autonomous goals or personal ambition. The only way they would "take over" in any sense is if people give them a goal that drives them to that direction and give them access to freely access any system.
What needs to stop is people doing exactly that. The setup of, "Look, I gave my AI a goal and system access!" is exactly the wrong thing to do. As we've seen already with the various anecdotes of people's LLMs destroying their data.
There are a plethora of tools and systems in this world that can do great harm if used improperly. AI is now one of them. We need people to start thinking about them in that context. "This is a tool. There are helpful ways to use it and harmful ways to use it. I should take care to stay on the helpful side."
This question is asked often, and the answer is always that it depends on who your audience is. Channels that work for one person might fail for you, and vice versa. Every product solves a different problem, which means different people who seek out information from different places.
Step 1 is to understand who those people are for your product, and figure out which information sources they trust. As implied above, almost nobody trusts online ads.
Most of the folks I talk to in my age group are somewhere between anti-AI and "AI works for specific use cases". I find it is the younger folk who think it is miraculous and want to use it everywhere.
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