I'm urging AI literacy and also self-hosting.
These are the means of production. Probabilistic, sure. Sycophantic? Yep.
But speeding up the boring parts is where LLMs excel at.
AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
521–530 of 694 posts
Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
This distinction is good in academic circles and similar (like on here). But the public (and ordinary people who aren't people who regularly visit Hacker News -- or even know that Hacker News exists) don't care. To them, AI == inequality and inequality accelerants, because it is funded and run by the richest, most powerful people on Earth. And those very people are making everything worse for all but them, not better…
It's because the consequences of AI is so direct and obvious, and also faster, where the inequality and job losses from other tech advances are just less direct. That is, it's not hard to see why so many main streets in smaller towns have boarded up retail stores since you can now get anything in about a day (max) from Amazon. But Amazon (and other Internet giants) always played at least semi-plausible lip service th…
Does economics or political theory focus on centralization, practically speaking? Not as a normative claim. What the actual effects are like. It just feels like we're at a centralization of power of unprecedented scale, to the point where no previous theories or models could really apply (in order to make analytical progress - I mean sure feudalism is honestly becoming a scarier and scarier analogy but still, there are significant differences)
I'm pretty much only thinking about these kinds of problems at my job at this point, so this is important to me in that regard
Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you underestimate just how much we value human achievement. Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast…
So us lucky survivors can take heart in the fact that we may still be able to perform for the ultra-rich as gladiators?
A lot of the inequality is a political choice that could be changed if people vote to do so.
Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
The power and influence (and damage caused) does not scale linearly with net worth. And you don’t need to have money on hand to be able to use it to harm others, you can e.g. use it as a collateral for loans and funding to build your child crushing machine. Personally I wager society would be better if the excess wealth of billionaires was simply deleted, or burned. It would be better yet if that wealth was used in o…
Why not just force them to to build the common infrastructure and services, and in exchange they get to keep the money? e.g. Jeff Bezos has to build some subway stations in NYC or something. That way you get somebody with a proven track record of building big projects who is also motivated by money, so the common infrastructure and services is handled competently.
Ah yes. Let's trust civic engineering to a man who ran a company that had front-line workers using piss bottles to keep up with quotas. This cannot possibly end badly.
Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I really don't understand this "simping online for billionaires" hobby. Is there a signup I missed somewhere, where they pay $100 for every post one makes glazing and defending them as a class?
Well, I’m a billionaire, why would I vote against my own interests. I mean, yes, I’m currently a bit down on my luck (it’s embarrassing, to be honest), but I’m sure my net worth will move right up there with Elon’s very soon, and so it would be foolish for me to support taxes on the wealthy.
Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is only true if productivity gains tied to general well being, but instead it's being concentrated in the hands of a few.
I can't think of any period in time where it was so easy to go into business yourself and to generally have access to the same "means of production" as the biggest companies have. If you want to use LLMs, you can either use cloud resources at what I think are really reasonable per-token prices compared to the value, or to set up your own server with an open-weights model at a comparable level of quality (though gener…
The answer to that question was the US before the 1970s when manufacturing was still onshored. So many joe shmoes literally started companies in this era taking some garage creation and manufacturing it at scale at a local plant.
Now that all takes place in China. With layers of middle men who collect arbitrage between you and the Chinese manufacturers they connect to you. With tariffs. Weeks of international shipping. Enough volume of orders to justify international shipping at all. Enough production capacity ordered to even be worth while making your thing versus larger orders from around the world all being made in china.
Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wholeheartedly agree with and encourage this kind of academic distinction. However... Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use. (And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and compa…
I do think there is a good chance that, in the not-so-distant future, universal basic income will become the norm. In previous industrial revolutions, large numbers of jobs were created to offset those that were lost. But there are very few things AI cannot perform faster and cheaper. Best case scenario, we will be in a world with both high productivity and high unemployment. Governments may have no choice but to pro…
UBI, at best, will only fix one aspect of disruption. Income is not the only reason why people want to be employed.
Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
The power and influence (and damage caused) does not scale linearly with net worth. And you don’t need to have money on hand to be able to use it to harm others, you can e.g. use it as a collateral for loans and funding to build your child crushing machine. Personally I wager society would be better if the excess wealth of billionaires was simply deleted, or burned. It would be better yet if that wealth was used in o…
Why not just force them to to build the common infrastructure and services, and in exchange they get to keep the money? e.g. Jeff Bezos has to build some subway stations in NYC or something. That way you get somebody with a proven track record of building big projects who is also motivated by money, so the common infrastructure and services is handled competently.
> Why not just force them to to build the common infrastructure and services, and in exchange they get to keep the money?
Because it is undemocratic, ripe for corruption and abuse, will never work in practice (as the rich will inevitably find ways to game the system). What you are describing is basically just aristocracy, where the rich get to decide what is best for the rest of us.
Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
MIT's motto is mens et manus : mind and hand. These are, basically, the two primary attributes of human labor. They're the reason almost anyone gets hired to do anything. Our brains and our opposable thumbs are what set us ahead of the animal kingdom. The industrial revolution first attempted to replace our hands. But the labor that was displaced had places to go: into smaller-scale manual work, where mass-production…
Again, this betrays a strong hindsight bias. Nobody had any idea what was coming with the industrial revolution. There wasn't obviously other work for people. And for long periods of time nobody had an answer to that question for large percentage of the population. In hindsight, we know the answers NOW, but then they did not know what was going to happen. We also don't know what's going to happen, it could go as you…
Your comment betrays a lazy survivorship bias.
Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good luck taking away the detached single family homes, pickup trucks, SUVs, commercial flights, out of season fruits/vegetables, and imported manufactured goods. The people that expect those things are the “ small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth”, and there are quite a few of them (probably 1B+ worldwide).
Comparing those people to the richest few thousand people in the US and Europe is very disingenuous.
Yes, but in the opposite way to what you think. Do the math, there's billions of people consuming the overly cheap, massively subsidized goods and services parent listed; there's only so many billionaires and they have only so many billions, and most of it is just fake bullshit accounting paper-shuffling anyway.