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Shunning AI is the human choice

thehandbasket.co

171–180 of 572 posts

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#171
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a normative argument in the parent that's reasonable to engage and rebut, but there's also a positive component that's less easy to take issue with. It really isn't going anywhere, no matter what world you want to live in. People were upset about databases in the 1980s (some still are).

Upset with what aspect(s) of databases? The technical implementation? Or the global surveillance and manipulation state they create? That latter seems to have aged quite well.

Sweden had from 1973-1998 a law that made it illegal to have a computer database of personal information without getting approval from the government (in 1982 it was opened up so that approval was only needed for "sensitive" information).

Looking back getting rid of that may have been a mistake.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#172

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

Plenty of these comments that wash their hands of being pro- or anti-. They are just about the Inevitabilism. It is just here.

Whatever happened to rational critique for or against something? No, humbug—what do you expect from this forum full of technologists (and misc.)? It’s technology; fruitless to critique, impossible to stop, resistance is futile.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#173
> These grads, according to Schmidt, have no agency, which was confirmed by this comment a few minutes later: “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on, Graduates, the rocket ship is here.”

Schmidt, by all means, is welcome to board the Good Ship Bubble-pop, but I think a lot of these grads are happy to instead watch from the viewing stand and wave goodbye.

I think his notion that AI is fait accompli is one of the (many) things being rejected.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#174

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

This is defeatist. If you can’t fight them, then don’t play their game. Joining them just continues the terrible state of things. By not using llms nothing has changed in my life over the past 5 years. I don’t have any disadvantages either. Can you name any disadvantages to an average individual not using AI products hocked by the rich?

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#175
post #53
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife is a former journalist and was beginning her career when the web began to take off. All the old editors and reporters in her industry blew off the Internet, blogs, and web publishing in general. They thought no one will ever quit buying papers, it was a staple of modern life! She tried to clue them in but hit a brick wall ever time. I feel like history is repeating. I use AI regularly, where it works it works…

50, lawyer, and it has completely revolutionized my workflow. Just shake my head at the denialism.

Do we really need lawyers? They're very expensive compared to LLMs.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#176

The hate around AI is entirely earned by the CEOs of the companies pushing the frontier models and integrating them into social media. Spending time and compute on generative audio and video was incredibly short-sighted. I think it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI and now they're stuck with models that are as good as they're going to be due to poisoning, and very exp…

I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#177
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI as a tech is fine. But disliking it and the social/economic effects around it is fine too, people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations. To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.

There's a normative argument in the parent that's reasonable to engage and rebut, but there's also a positive component that's less easy to take issue with. It really isn't going anywhere, no matter what world you want to live in. People were upset about databases in the 1980s (some still are).

Crypto bros said the same thing about NFT’s and ICO’s and whatever other nonsense they were pushing. And to some extent, they were right, I guess, in that these things still exist. But they’re practically irrelevant.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#178
Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a bland diet that did fully meet nutritional requirements; it meant social hierarchies of kings and priests. But societies that did not adopt agriculture were outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that did.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think many people disagree with this. The main problem is that labour has been what allows regular people to have negociating power with those who own most of the capital. People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.

Democracy is what allows regular people to have negotiating power vs the rich, and the majority of these battles are actually won through legislation, not union negotiation. I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just v…

> Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things.

Education and media are controlled by the rich, and those heavily influence how people vote.

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