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To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

musings.martyn.berlin

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Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#111

Post by jmyeet »

We've been through this exact same thing with crypto and particularly NFTs. Remember those? Oh sure, a shortened URL on a blockchain is worth millions. Remember that? This quote on cognitive bias is often brought out:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

So, just like with crypto, there are people inside the bubble who simply believe they're going to get rich off of whatever is happening. So instead of seeing the flaws or the exploitation, they see a system where ultimately they will benefit from it. In crypto, you saw people who missed out on Bitcoin so kept looking for the next Bitcoin in everything that came after. That's why rug pulls worked.

AI is just accelerating a trend where a few thousand people are increasingly owning everything. Automation (including AI) will just be used to further concentrate wealth. We will be minting trillionaires when the majority of the world can barely afford to live.

But there are people inside the bubble who don't see that or don't care because they think they will get rich so none of that will affect them. It's not even that intentional. A lot of people see poverty as a personal moral failure. So it's just that they view themselves as not having that moral failure.

A more realistic view is that not everyone can be Jeff Bezos. You're more likely to win the lottery than you are to end up a billionaire. Also, you're one bad day away from being unable to work. Medical event, accident, whatever. This is why we look after the most vulnerable in society because you could be one of them one day.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#112

Post by bvfthnvxxdgbnk »

beering wrote: post #93
ambicapter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.

Is it not? You can talk to it in plain English and it can do things for you and respond back in a synthesized voice. I was reading an old Asimov short story about a guy who comes across a lost robot and has to trick it into staying put, and it felt weirdly prescient. (The story is “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”)

[dead]

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#113

Post by Silagi »

nocman wrote: post #102
Silagi wrote: post #31

Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic. You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn…

> It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic. That's an awfully wide swath you are cutting there. I can't think of a single tech person that I've worked closely with in the last 20 years that I would describe as "riding the same wave o…

And you're cutting an awfully wide swath in the opposite direction; most tech gains value by exploiting or displacing people. Economies of scale don't just exist at the absolute top of the economy. The computer cut out entire classes of people from jobs they had specialized in by decreasing the education or effort required to successfully complete tasks, at the cost of massively increased infrastructure costs.

I'm all for pushing back against what AI might do, but doing it in this massively dishonest way just opens the door to obvious counters.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#114

Post by YoukaiCountry »

ambicapter wrote: post #40
derac wrote: post #24

It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a par…

Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.

If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#115

Post by bawolff »

fasterik wrote: post #73

There's nothing wrong with having a moral stance on something. It only becomes a problem when the stance is disproportionate and detached from empirical reality.

Its always detached at some level. Morality always comes down to a choice of what you think is wrong vs right. You can't reason from the way the world is to the way the world ought to be, without picking some values.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#116

Post by TaupeRanger »

The post links to a pretty silly article with checkboxes about "accepting" certain "facts" about AI, which the author says they resonated with:

> I accept the models were trained on stolen data.

"Stolen" is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.

> I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers.

Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming.

> I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models.

No, they are totally overblown, and if you actually cared about any of these environmental issues, you would realize that data centers are not even in the top 100 things to be concerned about: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

> I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company.

No, I am outsourcing boring grunt work and using my skills in more meaningful and exciting ways.

> I accept these companies don’t have a viable business model.

Yes, I accept that, and if they fail I'll use another company's models. This technology isn't going away - why as a consumer do you care if one of the providers goes out of business?

> I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the world.

I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 20-30 years ago.

> I accept that I am granting more power to the United States.

I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 80 years ago.

> I accept that all this effort could have been spent elsewhere.

It's not clear to me yet that the effort was poorly spent - who knows where AI will go, and what great things might potentially come from it?

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#117

Post by insanetake »

skrebbel wrote: post #59

This is like a vegan refusing to be around, let alone eat with, meateaters. As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others. Yes, it sucks. Yes, your impact will be smaller. But it’s a lot easier to maintain than to break off contact with a friend who dares ask ChatGPT a question.

Also, anyone who is anti-AI because of environmental reasons but still eats meat is a huge hypocrite.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#118

Post by ctrl-alt-zen »

throwawaytwice wrote: post #11

Why should I feel bad for using AI when the people telling me not to use it all use phones and computers which are the result of exploitation somewhere in Africa to mine for the resources needed to make them.

Congratulations, you just discovered moral relativism why even bother if __bad thing__ exists? Why shouldn’t I sell opiates when doctors can prescribe oxycontin and fentanyl? Throwawaytwice won’t care about hurting me and mine with their choices, why not preemptively strike throwawaytwice? Where’s the bottom?

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#119

Post by mooreds »

YoukaiCountry wrote: post #114
ambicapter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.

If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?

> We can have actual conversations with our computers,

Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them.

It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.

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