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AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

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Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#331

Post by theamk »

rockskon wrote: post #242
tptacek wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yeah, no, definitely super easy to have been a professional software developer over the last 20 years whilst conscientiously objecting from using the Internet.

And was there this massive, aggressive effort by a tiny handful of companies to mandate software developers use the Internet? Because I seem to recall people generally willingly choosing to use it as opposed to the aggressive efforts by blue chip tech companies to force the public at large to use it.

No matter what OpenAI or Nvidia says, they cannot force the developers of some company to use AI. They simply lack power to do this directly (with a very few exceptions, like their subcontractors)

What they can do, however, is they can run heavy advertising campaign targeted at executives. And once executives are convinced, they will write AI policies, and some will force their workers to use AI.

And this has been happening all the time, the examples are too numerous.

Executives decided the shops will now use computerized registers. The cashiers had to adopt, or get fired.

Executives decided - no more typewriters. All documents must be written in Microsoft Word, stored in Sharepoint. The workers have to learn Microsoft Word and Sharepoint or get fired.

Executives decided that that engineers (not computer ones, mechanical ones) should use CAD instead of drafting machines. The amount of engineers who were "let go" because they were protractor head wizards but could not figure out the mouse was truly large.

For something closer to CS, there was version control, automated tests, git, github... In a lot of cases, people where not "willingly choosing it" - if the rest of your team started using SourceSafe, you can't keep using your favorite shared folder anymore, not if you want others to see your results.

"willingly choosing it" only works for personal projects, it is never guaranteed for hired workers.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#332

Post by YZF »

theamk wrote: post #330
YZF wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- AI smarter than any human. - AI dominated the physical world. Robots, factories, etc. - AI decides humans aren't contributing and/or wasting resources it feels should go somewhere else. I mean not unlike humans causing extinction of other species?

That "etc" in "robots, factories, etc" is doing a lot of work here. Factories, even fully robotic ones, heavily rely on humans to set up and maintain them. Moreover, the safety culture means there are tons of "disable" controls which can be triggered by any human and no machine can override. Robots look impressive, but they cannot function without the humans either. Military kill-bots are likely the worst, but machin…

Yes.

Robots can't function without humans because they're not super-intelligent. We already see quite capable humanoid robots. Those factories that rely on humans - they'll be converted to be operated by humanoid robots. By the super intelligence.

That's the hand wavy story. It's hard to dive into details in an HN comment but I'm happy to try and develop some of those details. You're saying that something much smarter than humans isn't going to be able to bridge the gap to the physical world. I'm not so sure.

EDIT: Another way to think about it is that if a god-like infinitely capable being took control of all our online digital systems including I donno Teslas, factory automation, power grid, any form of connected robot in the world, nuclear weapons launch systems, airplanes, whatnot, do they have any path to a sustainable "existence" without relying on humans. Or at least with us unable to detect and stop that. If the answer is no then we're probably safe. It's kind of hard to convince ourselves of that. Keep in mind that humans can also be manipulated to do work for this god just like spies/saboteurs e.g. are recruited online today and paid bitcoin to do some random master's bidding.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#333

Post by coldtea »

goosejuice wrote: post #269
coldtea wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, just not in anything that matters, like rent/housing, education, and healthcare. And increasingly not even for basics like food, with inflation eating away that PP. But hey, you can buy tech gadgets cheaper than in the 1990s.

I have a hard time with this perspective. It's hard to measure. The quality difference of housing and healthcare in particular has increased dramatically in the US over the years and our minimum expectations have risen quite a bit as technology has progressed. It's easier than ever to access quality education but that doesn't mean people will do it on their own accord. The cost of licensure or a diploma has certainly…

>I have a hard time with this perspective. It's hard to measure. The quality difference of housing and healthcare in particular has increased dramatically in the US over the years and our minimum expectations have risen quite a bit as technology has progressed.

People live a reality everyday, "hard to measure" or not, and that's not about the "quality difference of housing and healthcare" increasing dramatically, it's them becoming stratospherically expensive...

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#334

Post by i_love_retros »

goosejuice wrote: post #201
i_love_retros wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol I find the opposite to be cringe to be honest: people using chatgpt to write messages, emails, resumes for them, professional software developers vibe coding entire apps, talking about AGI coming from LLMs. Please. That is the cringe.

Let's say an NGO has done the work to formally specify a software product that would improve outcomes or people reached by I dunno 30%. They send out RFPs to a number of consultancies who provide a quote and guaranteed delivery meeting their specifications by the desired date. Only one fits in the budget, and by quite a margin. It's a consultancy that openly "vibe codes". Should they hire them? Yes the specification…

Is the product anything more than a crud app? If so, no they should not hire them.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#335

Post by gwern »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #199
gwern wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Two blog articles and two preprints of fake academic articles [0] were able to convince CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity AI of the existence of a fake disease, against all majority consensus Wrong. There are no 'majority consensus' against 'bixonimania' because they made it up , that was the point. It's unsurprisingly easy to get LLMs to repeat the only source on a term never before seen. This usually works;…

The LLMs didn't only talk about the disease when prompted by the neologism. They also brought it up when asked about the symptoms. From the article: > OpenAI’s ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms amounted to bixonimania. Some of those responses were prompted by asking about bixonimania, and others were in response to questions about hyperpigmentation on the eyelids from blue-light exposure. And yes, sure…

"hyperpigmentation on the eyelids from blue-light exposure" is a super specific query almost definitionally 'bixonimania' which probably brought up the 'bixonimania' poison at the time (the search hits for that query right now in Google are weak and poorly relevant so it would not be hard to outrank them or at least get into the top 50 or so where a retrieval LLM would see them and would followup), and so still an instance of what I mean.

> Either way, that is a feature of the scientific process and is not a given to any online information.

Which does not distinguish it in any way from human errors like a crank or activist etc.

And I don't know, how did we handle false information before on niche topics no one cared about and which were unimportant? It's just noise. The worldwide corpus has always been full of extremely incorrect, mislabeled, corrupted, distorted, information on niche topics of no importance. But it's generally not important.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#336

Post by vrganj »

pocksuppet wrote: post #218
Groxx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly, is the exact thing you hate. I don't think it's all that complex tbh. The freeing from labor, both in the past and now, has been achieved largely by firing people, abandoning them to starve while power concentrates in the already-powerful. This is the exact same thing the Luddites were taking issue with. Because they partly succeeded, w…

We have labor laws today because people kept killing their bosses until the bosses agreed to some sort of compromise. Sadly, such a thing is happening again today, like with the toilet paper warehouse fire.

Why "sadly"? It worked last time?

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#337

Post by ofjcihen »

tptacek wrote: post #9

I'm glad this person found community, but I think they've been a bit starstruck by concentrated interest. At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it. There are those people about smart phones, the Internet itself, even television. Meanwhile: the ability to poison models, if it can be made to work reliably, is a genuinely interesting CS ques…

> At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it.

On the one hand I agree with you but on the other sometimes I wonder just how insulated we are in the tech community and especially in sites like this.

At some point in the last few months I realized that my friend group is basically a bubble of people making mid 6 figures that all work in tech and while I wouldn’t call it “anti-ai sentiment” even some of them are extremely conservative in their praise.

With that being the case you have to wonder what the average person is feeling about it.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#338

Post by [deleted] »

rockskon wrote: post #324
tomhow wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't fulminate or post snarky comments on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. If an argument has merit, it can be presented thoughtfully and persuasively, rather than belligerently. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How am I supposed to respond to someone who directly contradicts their own argument immediately after making it? "I'm not shaming! Not embracing AI is comparable to people who didn't embrace smart phones or the Internet though". This is a regurgitation of a marketing slogan frequented by OpenAI and similar organizations for the past four years. "AI is the future. If you don't embrace it you will be left behind". It's…

[deleted]

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#339

Post by BeetleB »

xpe wrote: post #315
BeetleB wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is tragic is that LLMs are learning how to use the word "cringe" improperly. If we're going to have AI overlords, it'd be great if they spoke with proper grammar.

> If we're going to have AI overlords, it'd be great if they spoke with proper grammar. People like blurring the lines and lots of people want AIs to bang out keystrokes in an order that is roughly human-like, so here we are. (Personally, I would love if Claude said "honestly" or "real" or "landed" less. Or pretty much never! I've tried banning the words. I've tried providing a list of alternatives, and I'm enjoying…

All those links are cringe.

And Less Wrong is, well, only for a certain crowd :-)

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#340

Post by tptacek »

ofjcihen wrote: post #337
tptacek wrote: post #9

I'm glad this person found community, but I think they've been a bit starstruck by concentrated interest. At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it. There are those people about smart phones, the Internet itself, even television. Meanwhile: the ability to poison models, if it can be made to work reliably, is a genuinely interesting CS ques…

> At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it. On the one hand I agree with you but on the other sometimes I wonder just how insulated we are in the tech community and especially in sites like this. At some point in the last few months I realized that my friend group is basically a bubble of people making mid 6 figures that all work in tech…

This came up on a thread last week. I participate in a couple communities like this, and then my other major community is local politics (a seriously effective way to meet all your neighbors) --- I'm a housing activist. The local politics forums I'm on are populated almost entirely by people who don't work in technology. I see way more fascination with AI there than I do any anti-AI sentiment.

Tech hosts a particularly virulent and ideological strain of anti-AI activism; I think because the disruption it threatens for our jobs is much less abstract than it is for everybody else.

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