Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

musings.martyn.berlin

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 339 posts

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

#171

Post by the13 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #81
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.

Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.

there's no hope for you in your future with that fine attitude.

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

#172

Post by simonreiff »

To the author:

You are so consumed, with absolute certainty, of the permanent and eternal correctness of your moral position, that you literally say you would rather throw away personal connections to human beings than be triggered by the presence of ideas or things.

Please reconsider. I'm not even going to try to persuade you that you're wrong about AI because it isn't even relevant. The truth is that if you carry out your plan, you will just end up being an incredibly hurtful person towards a lot of folks who probably have no idea why you are abandoning them and now feel isolated, hurt, and confused.

Also, ask yourself how sure you are, that you're going to be right for all time, about AI, which is a brand-new technology. Maybe you know yourself. Your views seem incredibly rigid and perhaps you really will never change your mind no matter what AI becomes. But if you ever have changed your mind about anything ever, again, please consider whether the harmful course of action you are describing is worth the extraordinary harm you seem eager to effectuate on everyone who disagrees.

Honestly I don't know why I bothered typing out of any of this. I doubt the author cares. I just wish people like this author would consider that their words and actions do actual harm to real people. And, by the way, zero harm to the progress of AI. Just hurtful and dumb.

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

#173

Post by bluefirebrand »

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #129
nocman wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Name any tech job and I will tell you how it exploits the average people through economies of scale

I cut my teeth in tech building a regional classifieds website for a local newspaper

Tell me all about how it was worse than the print classifieds that already existed

I'm very curious to hear your take

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

#174

Post by skrebbel »

bawolff wrote: post #133
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.

> 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. If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult. Like imagine if someone said, i believe murder is wrong but i dont want to force that on others. Or, i dont really like slavery but that's just me and others should be slave owners if they feel…

> If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult.

Yes, and that’s my point. Most vegans truly believe that meat equals murder. Yet the vast majority of them will go out for dinner with people they truly deeply believe are (indirect) murderers. This is indeed very difficult for them.

Locking yourself out of society isn’t likely to help achieve any sort of moral progress.

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

#175

Post by skeledrew »

SoftTalker wrote: post #81
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.

Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.

Can't exactly have a post-scarcity economy with the current dominant economic system in place. As long as a few are allowed to "own" the means of production and gate access to it, there will always be scarcity.

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

#176

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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…

Surely you jest. How often have we seen tech types say "learn to code", suggesting that people whose careers are disrupted just retrain into a different career, telling businesses to adapt or die (pre-LLM), or make condescending analogies about buggy whip makers on HN and /. before it? Quite a lot over the past 20 years.

Software ate the world and the techbros were very blatantly unsympathetic about those affected by their industry and careers being upended. Don't think that anyone forgot about that now that we're the ones in the crosshairs.

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

#177

Post by kentm »

binary132 wrote: post #97
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…

People are never ever ever allowed to realize maybe sometimes bad things are bad once the chickens come home to roost. An antisocial belief they held fifteen years ago needs to define them forever, because people are just machines for receiving guilt and wrath, they can’t learn anything from suffering personally, or if they can here’s why it’s bad anyway. Also engineers building stuff to spec are exactly the same thi…

I don’t think they’re trying to imply that at all. But arguing that it’s bad without a mea culpa comes across as inauthentic.

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

#178

Post by skeledrew »

ryandrake wrote: post #123
SoftTalker wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.

An optimist can hope AI and robotics brings us into a post-scarcity world and that society responds with utopia rather than just disposing of the 99% of people who become economically irrelevant. History has a pessimistic vibe though.

A pessimist would preempt the disposal of that 99% by ensuring the 1% doesn't monopolize AI and robotics. By whatever means necessary.

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

#179

Post by krapp »

Tubelord wrote: post #127
SoftTalker wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.

Maybe we need some kind of worldwide negative event first. In Star Trek lore, World War 3 starts this year (2026). Like with World War 2, perhaps it’s needed to calibrate the zeitgeist to a spot where a prosperous era can follow /shrug

A Star-Trek style "post-scarcity" economy can't exist in the real world. It depends on an impossible paradigmatic shift in basic human nature across the entire species (people just "evolve" beyond their base vices and desires such that they're willing to work purely for the sake of voluntarism and the betterment of humanity, there is no racism, no sexism, no struggles for power. *) and technology that violates basic physics (replicators, warp drives, transporters, etc.)

I'm sorry but anyone who looks at Star Trek as a serious model for anything is at best naive. It's a space fantasy show whose Luxury Space Communism is little more than set dressing because it's a capitalist enterprise (pun intended come at me petaQs) made by capitalists for capitalist ends.

Likewise, expecting LLMs to serve anti-capitalist ends (eliminating the need for jobs among anyone but the capitalist class) when they are entirely controlled by capitalists is naive.

* according to the canon set by Gene Roddenberry. What actually plays out in the franchise is different, because human conflict makes for better entertainment.

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

#180

Post by w29UiIm2Xz »

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…

No technology will have me "excited" if the prospect is lower/no compensation and poorer working conditions. I concur on the nuance -- I use it as a tool at work. I see value in it. I see business value in it displacing me, even if that's not the maximally correct position because some higher up did some numeric calculations. The first prompt I got a decent reply to was a thrill. Then the thinking of the second-order effects kicked in.
Post reply on HN