Technology

I don't see how rejecting 18th century-style factories or exploitative neural networks is a bad thing. We should have the option of saying "no" to the ideas of capitalists looking for a quick buck. There was an insightful blog post that I can't find right now...

Lets not forget all the exploitation that happened in that period also. People, even children, working for endless hours for nearly no pay, losing limbs to machinery and simply getting discarded for it. Just as there is a history of technology, there is a history of it being used inequitably and even sociopathically, through greed that has no consideration for human well-being. It took a lot of fighting, often literally, to get to the point we have some dignity, and even that is being eroded.

I get your point, it's not the tech, it's the system, and while I lost all excitement for AI I don't think that genie can't be put back in the bottle. But if the whole system isn't changing, we should at least regulate the tech.

But AI will eliminate so many jobs that it will affect a lot of people, and strain the whole system even more. There isn't a "just become a programmer" solution to AI, because even intellectually-oriented jobs are now on the line for elimination. This won't create more jobs than it takes away.

Which shows why people are so fearful of this tech. Freeing people from manual labor to go to intellectual work was overall good, though in retrospect even then it came at a cost of passionate artisans. But now people might be "freed" from being artists to having to become sweatshop workers, who can't outperform machines so their only option is to undercut them. Who is being helped by this?

You could have said the same for factories in the 18th century.

Everyone who died as a result of their introduction probably would say the same, yes. If corpses could speak, anyway.

The fact that AI evangelists have the gall to call everyone who disagrees with them "luddites" is absolutely astounding to me. It's a word I see people like you throw around over and over again.

And before you heap the same nonsense on me, I use AI and have for years. But the entire discourse by "advocates" is quarter-baked, pretentious, and almost religious. It's bizarre. These are just tools, and people calling for us to think about how we use these tools as more and more ethical issues arise are not "luddites." They are not halting progress. They are asking reasonable questions about what we want to unleash on ourselves. Meanwhile nothing is stopping you or I from using LLM's and running our own local instance of ChatGPT-like systems. Or whatever else we can come up with. So what is the problem?

Imagine if we had taken an extra five minutes before embracing Facebook and all the other social media that came to define "Web2.0." Maybe things could be slightly better. Maybe we wouldn't have as big of a radicalization/silo-ing issue. But we don't know, because anyone who dares to even ask "should we do this?" in the tech world is treated like they need to be sent to a retirement home for their own safety. It's anathema, it's heresy.

So once again: What is the problem? What are those people doing to you? Why are they so threatening? Why are you so angry and insulting them?

I feel like we are just entering the new iteration of crypto bro culture. 

That seems to be the theme of the era.

Yes, it is incompatible with the status quo. That's a good thing. The status quo is unsustainable. The status quo is on course to kill us all.

The only real danger AI brings is it will let our current corrupt leaders and corrupt institutions be more efficient in their corruption. The problem there is not the AI; it's the corruption.

But there's also real danger here today.

For example, ‘Life or Death:’ AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All Over Amazon

taking the kleprocratic capitalism and kakistocracy as a given that can’t be challenged.

It's literally baked into the models themselves. AI will reinforce kleptocratic capitalism and kakistocracy as you so aptly put it because the very data it's trained on is a slice of the society it resembles. People on the internet share bad, racist opinions and the bots trained on this data do the same. When AI models are put in charge of systems because it's cheaper than putting humans in place, the systems themselves become entrenched in status-quo. The problem isn't so much the technology itself, but how the technology is being rolled out, driven by capitalistic incentives, and the consequences that brings.

snicker drewdevault is an avid critic of capitalism. thats entirely the point of this post actually.

I’m yet to find a single field where most tasks couldn’t be replaced by an AI

Critical-application development. For example, developing a program that drives a rocket or an airplane.

You can have an AI write some code. But good luck proving that the code meets all the safety criteria.

Fashion designers are being replaced by AI.
Investment capitalists are starting to argue that C-Suite company officers are costing companies too much money.
Our Ouroboros economy hungers.

Unfortunately everything AI does is kind of shitty. Sure you might have a query for which the chosen AI works well but you might as well not.

It you accept that it sometimes just doesn't work at all sure AI is your revolution. Unfortunately there are not too many use cases where this is helpful.

you have no idea who drew devault is clearly and you entirely missed the point of what he posted.

And its a hot topic so there are a lot of articles about it since it generates traffic. And the bigger and doomier the article, the more hype.

But lots of people are unhappy about AI, its not a narrative being funded by a secret cabal or something.

More balanced articles are not necessarily better though. I'd dather read two conflicting opinions that are well thought out than a mild compromise with unknown bias.

Why would ChatGPT be more “balanced,” what does “balanced” mean, and why is it better?

More balanced than what?

ChatGPT ingest lots of articles from the web and newspapers, identify patterns in the text, and generate relevant reply based on what it ingested.

I expect ChatGPT to perpetuate biases found in its training data, and don't see how it'd improve balance.

There is a name for this debating technique where you go "sure, there was nothing good about Hitler - except he cared about dogs!". Can't remember. Is it strawman?

I think we all understand that capitalism is mostly bad for humans, and really good for corporations and their owners. AI and robots will be exploited to replace people since they are massively more powerful and much cheaper.

A few things will be better I guess, but most will be worse. People already are not actually needed to work this much anymore, and as soon as they can be replaced with something cheaper and more efficient they will. That is capitalism.