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

The artists were certainly making more money from the studios and record labels than they got from the authors of DeCSS, Napster, BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay, etc.

When Gillian Welch wrote "Everything is Free" in 2001, she wasn't complaining about the record companies, she was complaining about Napster.

> Q: Do you remember where you were when you wrote “Everything is Free”?

> A: I do. I remember exactly where I was and what was going on. It was when Napster was starting to decimate the traditional recording industry dynamic, the viability of making your livelihood [from] your art.

--Gillian Welch, 2018 (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/gillian-we...)

In general, this can feel like reading tea leaves. We might have some guesses, but it is tricky to get much confidence in them. Bottom line: it can be really hard to extract coherent signal from downvotes. A relatively low number given the overall topic interest can often mean noise or particular strong reactions. A relatively high number might serve as some useful feedback. This general ambiguity imo is a downside of the "up" or "down" systems that HN uses; it is part of the overall "design package". If you want more granularity, one step in the right direction is Lobsters. If you want many steps forward, requiring more community norms and background reading, you could try LessWrong. If you have other forums that you think do this well or at least differently, please let me know.

My takes on some of the comment above:

> A surprisingly high number of people are already being tricked into supporting things that clearly threaten their ability to survive in this economy, and even their ability to survive period.

I agree. Yes, I know that I'm far from a neutral judge of other people's core values, but I can say with high confidence that I've lived and worked among more US cultures than the typical tech demographics, by far. Born in Texas, worked in Colorado, San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, DC (the District itself), Northern Virginia. My industries range the for-profit, not-for-profit, tech-heavy. Other variations include idealist-heavy, good-execution, poor-execution, heavy on the dogma versus heavy on the pragmatism, pro-military, pro-patriotism, and the opposite.

I can say personally in an important sense, I fit nowhere. When I lived in Berkeley, I didn't fit the mold. When at SF startups, the culture felt shallow. I'm sort of "post culture" in a way. In DC, people seem rather blinkered. I see it, but I rarely feel like I'm truly part of any one culture. The only culture that I feel fits me is the "question everything -- but not like a conspiracy nut -- and then try to build something that matters". [1]

So, by objective standards -- counting places I've lived, different industries I've worked in, friends from different backgrounds, socioeconomic conditions, I think I'm easily in something like a weird 0.1% that actually deeply has experienced Trumpland and many variations of classic liberalism. If I didn't get out of my hometown, there is at least 20% chance I would now support Trump, if only due to tribalism and trusting of one's neighbors. So I know many Trump supporters.

All in all, I can't think of more than a handful that support him for reasons that I find even to serve their own long-term self-interest. There are special cases in a sense, like "techno-libertarians" or single-issue "pro-Israeli" voters or even smart people who feel like"f--k the democrats" who use these rationales to justify voting for Trump.

Saying I'm in the top 0.1% may sound presumptuous, I get it. But I don't like how some people water down their statements in the hope of sounding modest. See [2]. This is a kind of "false modesty" imo. I don't take any credit for my life circumstances. I was born into this position, and here I am. So I'm acting as a mirror to share this back. I've spent easily dozens of hours in one-on-one conversations on these topics, so I'm not coming at this with any particular dogma. This is my hundreds or thousands of hours of experience distilled. I really feel for Trump supporters on one level, even as their close mindedness and enable-ism wreck the economic and core principles of the US.

I welcome charitable and constructive disagreement on anything I've said. But more importantly, I ask for curious conversation.

[1]: Actually, there are some cultures I do fit into. Bayesian thinking being a key one. I admit I'm more than intellectually opposed to frequentist statistics -- it actively pisses me off in some ways. I'm pro-causality and pro-modeling. If people don't state their models, I don't take their predictions seriously. These are my strongest meta-opinions I think. People like Max Tegmark, Stuart Russell, Nate Soares, Yudkowsky -- these folks seem to think in ways that seem enlightened to me. The best "mainstream" thinkers I've seen probably are ... hmmm ... Ezra Klein, though he is more political than intellectual in my opinion.

[2]: "Against Modest Epistemology" by Eliezer Yudkowsky. November 14, 2017. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/svoD5KLKHyAKEdwPo/against-mo...

The common string between both of those advocacies is that they heavily favor huge corporations instead of the little guy.

Basically, DMCA and DRM makes you a criminal while protecting NBC and Disney and such. And AI steals your work and allows soulless mega corps to basically take your job.

Personally I'd argue AI is very likely to be worse for the average person, depending on their career.

Some people don't care or maybe don't realize. And then I think some people are just naive, and are assuming everyone else will be fucked, but they won't be. And then some other people are self-destructive, and they know it will make their life harder - but they advocate for it anyway, because they feel they deserve the suffering, and maybe hold some misguided belief that suffering is the fuel of victory.

Uh, OK, I'll take your word for that, but either way, the claim in the grandparent comment doesn't hold.

It was never about some "information wants to be free" philosophy for most people. It was about, "I want information to be free for me to access, and btw fuck big corporations." No real shift happened.