131–140 of 566 posts
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
I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…
I've run into a similar thing where I'll be cc'd on support tickets with one of our customer support agents and they'll then reply to me with what is clearly an ai summary of the single email from the customer that I can already read. I do think they're trying to be helpful, but it's hard to not feel like they think I'm a child or an idiot. Back in the day we agreed that Googling something for someone was rude (letme…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cho…
I mean, I don't see what the rush is. It's like Silicon Valley overdosed on Adderall. You can have the same tech, just in 5 human generations. I don't see why you have to have it now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 unj…
>We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all. How would your country function, if all medical staff, construction, rail, sewage, police and firefighters suddenly worked half as long or not at all, starting tomorrow? Because my home country tried this whole "if we seize the means of production from the wealthy elites, we won't have to work as hard anymore" ~8…
Medical professionals have better diagnostics, health records, MRIs and other imaging equipment and so on. The medical profession is pretty much a perfect example of my point, actually. Do we train more doctors (per-capita) or just expect existing doctors to work more hours? There are a whole bunch of vested interests in constraining doctor supply.
Likewise, resident physicians are incredibly profitable for hospitals because they create a lot of value and cost nothing. You see this where various parties are trying to increase emergency medicine residencies from 3 to 4 years.
Hospitals hate fully-qualified attending physicians because they can't artificially suppress their salaries. It's why we've gotten things like Nurse Practioners, Physician's Assistants, CRNAs, etc. It's also why, for example, you see a case like in Oregon where private equity is trying to destroy physician organization. I'm of course talking about Peace Health and ApolloMD, a case in Oregon recently.
We also make medical people spend a bunch of time dealing with insurance BS, for literally no reason.
This isn't just a BS "corporate job" thing.
I fear it's only a matter of time until someone with nothing to lose does more than throw a molotov as Sama's house.
working class is replaceable. So is the "executive" class. Only the billionaire/epstein class will prevail in this hyper capitalistic society.
I am not a big fan of unions, but we need some form of union as soon as possible.
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
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
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 cho…
One such perspective is Tools for Conviviality, a 1973 book by Ivan Illich.
Your ultimatum is imaginatively anemic.
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
> until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all Here's the problem: you can't. First, people have disagreements, often very fundamental ones, over what "benefits us all". There's no way to resolve many such disagreements short of brute force. Second, "enforce"--note the last five letters of that word--means some people are given the power to do things to other people that, if anyone e…
It is not possible to "enforce" a "value system". True.
But we can have a value system we share that benefits us all. We can work together to improve our welfare as a whole.
> Ultimately the only defense we have is to not give other people such power.
That is untrue. We must have webs of trust, and within those webs there are power hierarchies. The trick is that those hierarchies must not be arbitrary nor permanent.
This is a problem that has been wrestled with, and solved, several times in human history. Any human structure is vulnerable to outside attack, and most (all?) vulnerable to internal decay, but they can be established and are worth establishing.
An example I can think of are the Republican Militias as described by George Orwell in Road to Catalonia, and activist groups I have been involved with here in Aotearoa.
Nothing lasts for ever - that does not mean we cannot work together for good things.
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In one group I was involved on we used to have monthly meetings, by phone, of the organising committee. We had thirty members (all activists running hot with their own opinions), made decisions by consensus. I was on that committee for five years and we went over our allotted two ours twice: Once by ninety minutes (that was a day!) and the other time by five minutes. Nobody ever felt unheard - that mattered to us.
It is possible, people have been doing it forever, the good things we make are vulnerable but we should still aspire to and achieve them
> 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…