It occurred to me recently that AI's degradation of the human factor via way of increased pressure on the remaining ranks of humans might actually be far more damaging than the AI's output itself.
Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#32I love the quote in there from Boz that basically says "no you can't opt out fuck off"
People focus a lot on how Zuckerberg is a deranged sociopath, but I think Bosworth should get the same criticism if not worse. The good face he put on while fucking over the world is utterly disgusting.
I got to a point where I just wish ill fate to these people, because there is really no other process by which they can be slowed down or stopped.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#33As 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
Let's go there: this is what the Unabomber was on about, and there has long been an effort to stop people noticing this.
Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory.
In practice we have no choice but to aim for the unknown and hope. Can't lie and say I can see what the way through all this is though.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#34As 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
Technology is simply a technique to leverage and extend human desire. It's a tool. It's in the hands of those who control and use it.
You shouldn't blame technology. You should blame the maniacs that have latched on to it as a way of extending their power. You should blame the government for their failures of regulation. You should blame the media for failing to cover this obvious problem.
The people who want to subjugate you are the problem.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#35Meta has been banning it's core users for months now, above 20 million users are now banned, they are on death spiral after that Metaverse fiasco.
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/nbc-5-responds/meta-users-contin...
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#36Earlier 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…
The State are the people and the people want tech billionaires because they want the same chance at being that (tech) m/billionaire.
Temporarily embarrassed millionaires; I cannot get around that issue toward collective action, toward myself contributing to an answer. I'm stuck. I can't unsee its truth =/. The individual will choose enrichment. We all will.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#37> 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 profitab…
Having worked in big tech, I can almost guarantee you you’re overthinking this.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#38As 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
> 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.
True during the mainframe. Not true during the PC age. Perhaps true again during frontier model / data center ago. Maybe not true again when hostable open weights models become efficient and good enough.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#39As 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
> 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 is not a good-only or evil-only thing. You have use cases that are beneficial and you have use cases that is not benefical. The technology in by itself isn't what makes things worse. Even many thousand years ago, humans used weapons to bash in other humans. Remember the Ötzi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Body he was killed by arrows, most logically from someone else shooting at him (at around 3230 BC). Nuclear energy is used as weapon or source for generation of energy (or rather, transformation of energy). And so on and so forth.
IMO the biggest question has less to do about technology, but distribution of wealth and possibilities. I think oligarchs need to be impossible; right now they are causing a ton of problems. Technology also creates problems, I agree on that, but I would not subscribe to a "technology makes everything worse". That does not seem to be a realistic assessment.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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