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Do we just want slaves?

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Re: Do we just want slaves?

#21

Post by atonse »

singingtoday wrote: post #11
skippyfish wrote: post #6

The thesis of the article is spot on. The title is weird - I don't know what's the point of bringing such an emotionally charged term into it. Unless your point is that LLMs are sentient creatures capable of suffering, but I don't think that's what the author is trying to say. I agree with the author that almost everyone wants to use AI to do the things they have no interest in and don't want to pay someone else to d…

Is the ai hate a global or western thing? A friend of mine in Japan says people don't hate it there. Maybe she's just in a bubble?

I still can't quite tell if the AI hate is being amplified by the media (like datacenter, water use, etc) to just find a boogeyman to sell ads/engagement. That's my theory because we just see constant waves of attempts to find one. Until the water stuff was mostly debunked, that dominated for a while. Then it's datacenters and electricity prices... That's starting to get debunked a bit (not as much of a slam dunk as the water-use nonsense was), so then you'll start to see something else.

Because in reality, I'm seeing a mix in my group of friends with younger kids. They are, at a macro-level nervous-curiosity about the unknown (future of jobs, their kids' job market future, is this going to make us all dumber, etc), but are also trying the various tools and benefitting from them and acknowledging that too.

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#22

Post by edflsafoiewq »

michaelt wrote: post #8

If you think of the washing machine and the dishwasher, I'd say humans are broadly OK with automating away some types of work they don't want to do. Few people, though, would say my washing machine is a slave.

People swear up and down these things are real intelligences and not stochastic parrots until the ethical questions come out and then they're just fancy washing machines.

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#23

Post by burnto »

What a weird title.

Parchment is a writing surface made of animal stuff. It lets people not have to remember certain things. They can write those things on the parchment.

Paper also lets people write things on it so they don’t have to remember them. Paper is cheaper than parchment. And it isn’t made from animals.

Do we just want parchment?

No. We want paper.

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#24

Post by vintermann »

js8 wrote: post #12

The problem is the idea of the job. The idea that you're worthy of existence only if some other person certifies you're worthy of existence, based on how much they have been certified themselves. Of course this converges to a system, where this certification is the most sought thing. And if you look who can certify in the real world and why, it's not a fair picture. These eigenpeople SEOed the capitalist form of page…

It wasn't just some leftist thinkers, it was most people through history. Working for wages was something slaves did, free men supported themselves with what they could grow or sell, and people routinely preferred what seems to us fairly miserable self-sufficiency over paid servitude.

You don't have to go far into history to find examples, this is stuff you find in regular genealogy.

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#25

Post by accidentallfact »

skippyfish wrote: post #6

The thesis of the article is spot on. The title is weird - I don't know what's the point of bringing such an emotionally charged term into it. Unless your point is that LLMs are sentient creatures capable of suffering, but I don't think that's what the author is trying to say. I agree with the author that almost everyone wants to use AI to do the things they have no interest in and don't want to pay someone else to d…

I think we are at the same stage as when 3D graphics began taking over. It was used everywhere, while it was clearly inferior to 2D graphics of the time.

The same problem is with AI today - it's clearly subpar to a competent human. It's just cheaper so it gets used instead, but that will probably change as AI improves.

Anyway, it seems to me that many people don't look for slaves in AI, but for their master, and primarily use AI to tell them what to do.

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#27

Post by FromTheFirstIn »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #22
michaelt wrote: post #8

If you think of the washing machine and the dishwasher, I'd say humans are broadly OK with automating away some types of work they don't want to do. Few people, though, would say my washing machine is a slave.

People swear up and down these things are real intelligences and not stochastic parrots until the ethical questions come out and then they're just fancy washing machines.

If it makes you feel better, most people don’t think they’re real intelligences

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#28

Post by cyberax »

There are people who want slaves/servants and who delight in forcing other people do their bidding.

Anyone who worked in a service industry knows this. But fortunately most people are not like that.

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#29

Post by faangguyindia »

skippyfish wrote: post #6

The thesis of the article is spot on. The title is weird - I don't know what's the point of bringing such an emotionally charged term into it. Unless your point is that LLMs are sentient creatures capable of suffering, but I don't think that's what the author is trying to say. I agree with the author that almost everyone wants to use AI to do the things they have no interest in and don't want to pay someone else to d…

Another thing is that people are optimizing code and algorithms with the help of AI. Many of those AI agents and providers train on the traces, so all the optimizations you came up with in benchmarks will end up in training sets.

At some point in the future, someone can pose a similar problem to an AI one that you spent months, weeks, or days optimizing with the help of AI and they'll end up with the same solution as your final result in less than 10 minutes.

So you need to figure out whether you want to solve the problem today or let others solve it and simply query LLM, let's say, 6-12 months later.

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#30

Post by ragebol »

We just want work done we don't want to do ourselves.

Whether it's slaves, animals or dumb to smart machines and anything in between, that is an 'implementation detail'.

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