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They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

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Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#11

Post by anon373839 »

keiferski wrote: post #5

I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so, the message coming from the tech industry has been less "technology will improve your life and help you be a better human being" and more "technology will replace you as a human being and make you obsolete." I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. S…

“Don’t be evil” disappeared in 2018. That might be around the point that big tech companies dropped all pretense of caring about their users.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#12

Post by advael »

I mean if the tech industry wanted people to like it, maybe it should treat them better?

We live in the smoking ruins of the world of our grandparents, and that is because, unambiguously, of industry and policy shaped by industry. Wages have stagnated. Cities have become places that are great if you have lots of money to spend and pretty hostile otherwise. Medicine has increasingly become a luxury, as has healthy food and a roof over your head. Meanwhile, in tech, the goodwill of the userbase has very rapidly and repeatedly been betrayed because capital wanted constant growth. News and media have been subsumed into a slog of ad-suffused "content" optimized to hook your attention. You are spied on in everything you do, supposedly to target more ads. Many new horrendous ways of abusing the labor force have been invented and then legalized by this industry

Now I hate telling people I study AI because SV people made a really interesting methodology into an apocalyptic cult whose adherents are often smugly dismissive of most recognizable human values in favor of a vague future that sounds like living in a video game made of vibes, and the main use case the optimization-obsessed finance-twiddlers that run the show can imagine is replacing workers in every domain, starting with artists. Why should they like this? Technology for technology's sake is not what most people care about, and why should they when the last ten years of "innovation" has on balance mostly been against their interests?

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#13

Post by varelse »

Sure, people hate tech. And tech clearly hates its own customers. So why hasn't something that doesn't hate its own customers disrupted tech? If anything, the enshittification is just getting worse. Prime video's random ads alone should have led to mass cancellations but it's not happening, is it? So what exactly will lead to people walking away as opposed to grumbling as things keep getting worse and worse?

Reminds me a lot of politics in the United States at this point: stuck with two disappointing parties with almost no chance of a third party really shaking things up because the one thing they can agree on is that a third party should never arise.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#14

Post by red_admiral »

lovich wrote: post #10
keiferski wrote: post #5

I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so, the message coming from the tech industry has been less "technology will improve your life and help you be a better human being" and more "technology will replace you as a human being and make you obsolete." I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. S…

Ask truckers about this with the nearly decade long plus narrative that the second self driving is mastered they will be laid off, combined simultaneously with complaints about how no one is entering the lucrative trucking industry. I’ve had non tech family and friends who are currently dealing with the result of American cutthroat capitalism and barely able to cover living expenses despite having two people working…

Having your serfs' basic needs met was very rarely a care of the ruling classes in any state form that deserves the name "serfdom". Serfs dying in a famine was just one of those things that happened. There was perhaps a brief reversal after the Black Death, when so many serfs had died there was almost a competition for the labor of the survivors.

My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that money in tech, in the end, still comes from people. Even if your business is using AI to optimise ad targeting, those ads still get paid for because the advertisers expect humans to hand over money at some point to buy products or play games or something.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#15

Post by ordu »

> the audience booed louder when the word disrupted was used as a term of praise

Yeah, it is often goes like "lets disrupt and see if we will be able to rip some benefits from the chaos after the disruption". And the fun thing that potential disrupters seem to believe that it is good for all, not only for them and only conditionally.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#16

Post by posix_monad »

lovich wrote: post #10
keiferski wrote: post #5

I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so, the message coming from the tech industry has been less "technology will improve your life and help you be a better human being" and more "technology will replace you as a human being and make you obsolete." I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. S…

Ask truckers about this with the nearly decade long plus narrative that the second self driving is mastered they will be laid off, combined simultaneously with complaints about how no one is entering the lucrative trucking industry. I’ve had non tech family and friends who are currently dealing with the result of American cutthroat capitalism and barely able to cover living expenses despite having two people working…

I assume you are a programmer. In my view, if AI can do software engineering, then I don't think any white collar job is safe.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#17

Post by sgt101 »

People are fed up with grift.

There are two types of grift - pure cynical (crypto, vr, ai influencing & fake products)

- make me a medical system that I know can never get approved

- make me a business that will never ship a thing but get daddies tax bill halved

- make me code assistants that don't actually help

and pure mean: products that are exploitative or knowingly unethical.

- make me a mental health chatbot without giving a shit that it tells people to kill themselves

- make me camera that records other people and tells me their weaknesses

- make me kill bots that will stop protestors from saying stuff my boss doesn't want to hear

I think that people are really sick of grifters. I know I am.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#18

Post by abirch »

keiferski wrote: post #5

I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so, the message coming from the tech industry has been less "technology will improve your life and help you be a better human being" and more "technology will replace you as a human being and make you obsolete." I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. S…

Scott Handelman said something like you're either building Ironman or Ultron

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#19

Post by akira2501 »

advael wrote: post #12

I mean if the tech industry wanted people to like it, maybe it should treat them better? We live in the smoking ruins of the world of our grandparents, and that is because, unambiguously, of industry and policy shaped by industry. Wages have stagnated. Cities have become places that are great if you have lots of money to spend and pretty hostile otherwise. Medicine has increasingly become a luxury, as has healthy foo…

> and that is because, unambiguously

Monopoly empires driven by tax revenues.

> new horrendous ways of abusing the labor force

It's a labor market. Monopolization destroys this too. Judges never include this market in their rulings.

> and why should they when the last ten years of "innovation" has on balance mostly been against their interests?

What innovation? The last ten years have been incredibly stagnant. GPT itself is the product of "what if we just throw stupid resources at this old algorithm?"

The desire for AI, is to me, a supply and demand problem, and represents a state of extreme artificial inefficiency in the system. Perhaps that's what AI should really stand for.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#20

Post by fragmede »

lovich wrote: post #10
keiferski wrote: post #5

I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so, the message coming from the tech industry has been less "technology will improve your life and help you be a better human being" and more "technology will replace you as a human being and make you obsolete." I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. S…

Ask truckers about this with the nearly decade long plus narrative that the second self driving is mastered they will be laid off, combined simultaneously with complaints about how no one is entering the lucrative trucking industry. I’ve had non tech family and friends who are currently dealing with the result of American cutthroat capitalism and barely able to cover living expenses despite having two people working…

What’s different from the Middle Ages is that raw food is cheap. A prepper can get a couple years of food for like $10k. It’s not going to be lavish eating, but it’s better than starving. So if you’re smart and you lose your job and are in the pre-singularity, but have some savings, you can stock up a few years worth of food, and ride things out. If you blow it all on DoorDash, that’s on you.

Where to live, now that’s another problem. Buy an RV and head out to the desert? The food won’t fit into the RV though so, uh, I dunno.

Uh, anyway, point is, go watch Mad Max.

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