It is what it is. Unless it threatens you. Then it's bad And then you prefer a narrative explaining why it's bad. And then you you propagate that narrative. And then that narrative infects the hive.
Shunning AI is the human choice
201–210 of 572 posts
Re: Shunning AI is the human choice
#202Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need to in order to survive is probably in the low single digits. Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against hum…
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.
I might disagree with it, unexpectedly, even though I'm very lazy and anti-work and would have agreed with it ten years ago. This isn't some they took our jobs stance, either.
Thing is, you have this mythical beast, the "dark factory". This exists mainly as way to humiliate the west by suggesting that China is way more developed. One reason that it's unlikely to be substantially real is because of the failure of robotics to really replicate adaptable, self-repairing, sensitive, sensible humans in an industrial context. But two of those adjectives are technical, while the other two, adaptable and sensible, are to do with knowledge and creativity.
I mean that it's an ugly fact that human creativity (thinking on your feet), and morality even (knowing what to do), is useful and necessary in the context of the most boring shitwork. Even on an assembly line, if you're expected to do some QA and accept ad-hoc instructions for different products. I don't want us to be diminished by having to do the shitwork, but I don't think AI can make it go away.
Oh come on, why a downvote? I put some thought into this and all I get is a binary nah.
Re: Shunning AI is the human choice
#203Re: Shunning AI is the human choice
#204To me AI is a really strange technology. When it works it works very well, but at the same time it can't be trusted because of hallucinations. I still get hallucinations just as I did 2 years ago. Nothing has changed. Some part of me feels like it should be shut down for that alone so that it doesn't spread misinformation all over the place. I also think most of what AI generates is slop and nowhere near the quality…
It is called 'jagged intelligence'. A lot progress was made in the last 2 years. Most notably reasoning models, tools use, harness progress. It takes time to build the skill to make those models useful, but they do provide a lot of value.
Re: Shunning AI is the human choice
#205Every waves of automation are naturally creating resistance, as they tend to make the lives of a large number of people miserable during the transition. Nothing new here. What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation. I am not sure why or if this is a new pattern.
> What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation.
Why would that surprise you? They aren't stupid. They can see that people are trying to position AI as a way to replace them.
Re: Shunning AI is the human choice
#206Such fantastic writing. I particularly love the last passage - not only it is reminiscent of how great op-eds used to close, but also for it's clear and un-ambigious call to action - you have the agency and no, you don't have to "deal with it", i.e. deal with lazy morons pasting you LLM-generated walls of text for discussion.
Re: Shunning AI is the human choice
#207The 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.
It's numerous. CEO's lying, ceo-ceo marketing - fire your employees and use AI, environmental impact, social impact, memory/chip shortages, theft of information which has placed a massive burden on site operators assaulted by scraper traffic. I'm sure I'm missing a few but the negatives are real but so long as people get to feel like 10x engineers, it's fine.
Personally, I find AI technology itself super interesting. Plenty of great use cases. However, The current crop of lying thieving assholes running the show make it repulsive.
Re: Shunning AI is the human choice
#208Political and economic ramification aside, if we truly create ASI, that severely reduces the value of humanity. We essentially give birth to our enslavers and eventually humanity will be second class on this planet. How is that something to look forward to?
Re: Shunning AI is the human choice
#209Re: Shunning AI is the human choice
#210Earlier 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).
What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.
Why would it?
It's a technology, not an artifical belief system to just disappear because people got tired of it.
Hype might go away, along with some of today's usages, but the fact that we know about the technology means it will stay in one fo or another.