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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#21

Post by krupan »

matusp wrote: post #16
ahartmetz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on the technology. Different technologies redistribute power differently. LLMs are very "centralizing" indeed. It is hardly feasible to train your own LLM as a private person or even a small company - at best you can download a pre-trained one, which at least nobody can silently change or take away from you.

That's why we have state. There are many technologies that we, as a society, decided to control in various ways. You can't just build a nuclear weapon for example. There is no particular reason why we let tech bros control many aspects of our lives, apart from legal inertia. LLMs can be "trivially" decentralized by expanding the concept intellectual property to also cover algorithmic processing. It's just about how w…

Nobody had to legislate Free software into existence in order to protect us. Wise people saw the need and did something of their own accord. We are still free to do this!

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#22

Post by idle_zealot »

bachmeier wrote: post #12

> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force. > Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make…

> that's a dumb metric whether or not you're using it to evaluate employees

Only if you assume in good faith that the point is to evaluate employees for productivity on some stated goal for the company or role. If you try to view the metric from other possible positions, the one I think fits best is the promotion of token consumption by all means. This is useful for signaling to the broader market that AI is profitable and merits more investment, and may be part of a deal between them and whoever they're buying tokens from. It makes more sense to me that Meta would be more interested in leveraging its control over people to manipulate the state of the world, market, and general sentiment than having them work on stable, well-established and market-dominant software services that really only need to be kept chugging along. Isn't mass-manipulation their whole business? Why wouldn't they use their employees and internal structure to contribute?

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#23

Post by krupan »

thih9 wrote: post #14
ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

One attempt was open source. Or perhaps libre software? I guess it is not a success since only one of these looks mainstream.

Free/Open Source software is very mainstream now I'm not sure what you mean, but maybe we are taking too much of it for granted?

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#24

Post by bamboozled »

thih9 wrote: post #14
ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

One attempt was open source. Or perhaps libre software? I guess it is not a success since only one of these looks mainstream.

Open source is still around ? It would be vastly improving your life even though you can’t see it.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#26

Post by rglover »

idle_zealot wrote: post #15
krackers wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate must depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society must be highly organized and decisions have to be made that affect very large numbers…

I don't know what you're quoting, but I wish it were the case that something affecting a million people granted each affected individual about a one-millionth share in the decision. I don't think that would always yield good outcomes, but at least it would be democratic. Structures that enable that are what we should be building.

In some circles, he goes by Uncle Ted.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#28

Post by jmyeet »

ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

Thing is, technology (particularly automation) could make life better but it not doing that is a choice. Think about it. We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all. We don't do that because we have a system that simply makes a handful of people even wealthier. We will likely see the first trillionaire minted in our lifetimes. That is an unimaginable and unjustifiable amount of money for one person to have.

So you're not really complaining about technology making things worse. You're complaining about wealth inequality, which is a direct result of the mode of production and the organization of the economy.

Internet access should, at this point, be basically free. The best Internet in the country is municipal broadband. It's better and it's cheaper. It's owned by the town, city or county that it's in, which means it's owned by citizens of that municpality.

Instead what we have in most of the country are national ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum and AT&T and the prices are sky high. They are only sky high so somebody far away can continue to extract profit from something that's already built and not that expensive to build.

You will get lied to by people saying national ISPs have an economy of scale. Well, if that were true, why is municipal broadband so (relatively) better and cheaper? Why would there be state laws that make municipal broadband illegal? Why would national ISPs lobby for such laws?

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#29

Post by stephc_int13 »

I believe that any kind of partial automation is going to make the job more soul-crushing.

Ford style assembly lines made the work of the factory workers more miserable. Partially automated cashier did the same thing.

I don't think there is any point in trying to resist automation, as the efficiency benefits are too important.

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