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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

aphyr.com

251–260 of 830 posts

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#251
One of the "lies" that concerns me is AI-generated music and its deterioration of the personal connection between musician and listener. As MCA from the Beastie Boys said, "If you can feel what I feel then it's a musical masterpiece." The listener feels a connection to the musician (and other people) with sad songs because everyone has felt sad, or with love songs because everyone has fallen in love, and so on. The listener can still get a feeling from AI-gen'ed music, but is it the same? What is the connection? Or, has that "connection" between musician and listener always been bullshit? That is, has it always been just about music triggering your brain to make you feel a certain way, and the source of that feeling really isn't what people care about - just give me a feeling?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#252
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have this misconception that first it was one way, and then , and they'll wake up and suddenly it is another. It's a slow creep. 10 years ago there were 5 of us on a team each responsible for something specific. Now I can do all of that. Teams and companies will downsize. How do you see AI creating more jobs? (I need some hope right now lol).

A few hundred years ago it took a team of 5 plus draft animals plough a field. Now one guy with a tractor can do it. Some teams and companies will downsize. New companies will appear doing things that we can't even imagine yet.

Are SWEs the farmers of the draft animals in this analogy?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#253

I fear that outside of cataclysmic global warfare or some sort of butlerian jihad (which amounts to the same) this genie is not going back into the bottle. This tech is 100% aligned with the goals of the 0.001% that own and control it, and almost all of the negatives cited by Kyle and likeminded (such as myself) are in fact positives for them in context of massive population reduction to eliminate "useless eaters" an…

> to eliminate "useless eaters" It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1]. Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people. It's just an automation tool, and just like all automation tools before it it will create more jobs than destroy. All the CEOs' talks about labor replaceme…

> It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1].

And early cars were expensive, dangerous, highly unreliable, uncomfortable, belched foul exhaust, and required knowledge of how to drive AND maintain them. We are far, far from that scenario these days.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.

The positive effects were immediate, and measurable. The negative effects are delayed, and hard to quantify without all the advancement in climate research since then. If everyone in 1920 knew a 100 years from now there would be climate crisis to reckon with, perhaps a few things would have changed along the way. Today we have a much better understanding of the world, so we have the means to think down the line of wh…

Nah. We have no means of predicting the long-term effects of LLMs. Major new technologies have always caused effects that were completely unpredictable during the early phases. Any claim that a much better understanding of the world allows for thinking through the effects is pure hubris.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#255
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few hundred years ago it took a team of 5 plus draft animals plough a field. Now one guy with a tractor can do it. Some teams and companies will downsize. New companies will appear doing things that we can't even imagine yet.

> New companies will appear doing things that we can't even imagine yet. I read this take a lot but I don't buy it. This isn't guaranteed by any means. And even if it does happen, isn't it just as likely that AI is deployed into those companies too and they don't actually result in any job growth?

[flagged]

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#256
We should consider how we came to be so powerless. The cringe "people gave their lives for that flag" line is actually true, and we're trading it away for what? Not having to get out of our gaming chairs?

The reason you can't beat index funds is the people who build the market built a system that benefits them and them alone; the index fund is the pitchfork dividend (what you pay to avoid getting pitchforked). The reason you can't get your congressperson on the line is (mostly) they built a system where the only way to influence them is to enrich them; voting is the pitchfork dividend.

The way to build a society that runs on reality is to build it by whatever means possible, then defend it by any means necessary. The only societies that matter are the ones that survive.

I want to build it. I don't wanna build a fuckin crypto app, a stupid ass agent harness, or yet another insipid analytics platform. I want to build a society that furthers the liberation of humankind from the vicissitudes of nature, the predation of tyranny and the corruption of greed. I believe it is possible, and I want to prove it out.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#257
post #248

I fear that outside of cataclysmic global warfare or some sort of butlerian jihad (which amounts to the same) this genie is not going back into the bottle. This tech is 100% aligned with the goals of the 0.001% that own and control it, and almost all of the negatives cited by Kyle and likeminded (such as myself) are in fact positives for them in context of massive population reduction to eliminate "useless eaters" an…

The article skips the potential upsides of an AI future - like curing diseases, abundance, merge type immortality. I'm keen myself with nothing to do with the goals of the 0.001% really. I think the future generations will like the above and look back on now like we look back at medieval dentistary.

Those upsides are currently just a fantasy and ignore the very real current downsides. They also do not in any way rely on AI to become a reality.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#258

I don’t think this is the right take. To take the car analogy: it matters how we use the car. The car in itself can be used to save time and energy that would otherwise be used to walk to places. That extra time and energy can be used well, or poorly. - It can be squandered by having a longer commute that defeats the point - Alternatively, it can be wasted by sitting on a couch consuming Netflix or TikTok - Alternati…

OK but the car DID have the effects that Kyle described. The fact that you have to imagine a world where people collectively made some other "wiser" decision about how to use cars perfectly demonstrates that those decision's don't happen. In some cases it's because because other choices seemed rational, some times because people are irrational, and some times because of the prisoner-dilemma like situation where multiple people making the rational individual choice results in an irrational choice for all of society.

Kyle' recommendation to stop/slow using AI is phrased as another individual choice, but given that lesson I think it's appropriate to interpret it as a collective choice - collective through regulation, collective resistance etc.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#259
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're free to take a vacation or quit working if you want to. Go ahead. As for bank runs, no one cares. The big banks no longer need retail customer deposits as a source of capital for fractional reserve lending. Modern bank funding mechanisms are more sophisticated than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Ban... In which the FDIC took unprecedented action, drawing down the DIF to backstop depositors beyond the insured $250k and offering a credit facility to other banks, in order to prevent "contagion" - a panic, a bank run - which was presumed to be likely after the 3rd largest bank collapse in US history. A bank almost no one outside of California had heard of…

You really missed the point. SVB was undone by their own failure to manage interest rate risk, and then by the actions of corporate depositors. Retail banking customers had little to do with it. Corporations certainly aren't going to participate in some sort of pointless consumer protest.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#260

I fear that outside of cataclysmic global warfare or some sort of butlerian jihad (which amounts to the same) this genie is not going back into the bottle. This tech is 100% aligned with the goals of the 0.001% that own and control it, and almost all of the negatives cited by Kyle and likeminded (such as myself) are in fact positives for them in context of massive population reduction to eliminate "useless eaters" an…

> to eliminate "useless eaters" It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1]. Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people. It's just an automation tool, and just like all automation tools before it it will create more jobs than destroy. All the CEOs' talks about labor replaceme…

> It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1]. Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people.

I don't think the comment you're replying to is saying that an evil AI bot will kill people. They are saying something along the lines of: mass job loss doesn't bother the AI companies because in the AI-powered future they envision, population reduction is a positive side effect.

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