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AI Destroys Institutions

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Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#11

Post by DarkNova6 »

rfv6723 wrote: post #8

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals. Similarly, today's critics, often from wit…

An institution is worth nothing without the spirit, humanity and exchange of knowledge among the humanity behind it. The fostering of real expertise is difficult, but without this expertise you are doomed to believe whatever your Corporate AI is telling you.

So is the AI better?

No. It's quicker, easier, more seductive.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#12

Post by DarkNova6 »

emsign wrote: post #5

> The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise, short-circuiting decision-making, and isolating people from each other. This affordability is HEAVILY subsidized by billionaires who want to destroy institutions for selfish and ideological reasons.

This is literally corporate textbook 101. Subsidize your product, become market leader, cause lock-in and make your customers dependant.

Every large enough corporate wants to become the new Oracle.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#15

Post by archievillain »

rfv6723 wrote: post #8

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals. Similarly, today's critics, often from wit…

This is a good analogy, but you made it backwards. The "Clergy" fears the "Printing Press", as it acts as a tool of decentralized information spreading. But LLMs are not decentralized and thus are not the "Printing Press". LLMs are what the "Clergy" (say, for example, all the AI companies led by billionaires in cahoots with the west's most powerful government) uses to suppress the real "Printing Press" (the decentralized, open internet, where everybody can host and be reached).

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#16

Post by ahartmetz »

emsign wrote: post #5

> The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise, short-circuiting decision-making, and isolating people from each other. This affordability is HEAVILY subsidized by billionaires who want to destroy institutions for selfish and ideological reasons.

Given how nobody properly understands LLMs, I doubt that they are intentionally designed like that. But the effect... yeah. I can see that happening.

(By the way, are you confusing affordance, the UX concept, with affordability?)

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#17

Post by rfv6723 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #9
rfv6723 wrote: post #8

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals. Similarly, today's critics, often from wit…

If what you say was true, why are people from not within those institutions also try to warn others about the potential downfall of "expertise" and "civic life"? Are they just misinformed? Paid by these "institutional defenders" or what is your hypothesis?

The alarm isn't coming from outside the institutions; it's coming from a wider, more modern clergy. The new priestly class isn't defined by a specific building, but by a shared claim to the mastery of complex symbolic knowledge.

The linguists who call AI a "stochastic parrot" are the perfect example. Their panic isn't for the public good; it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing their decades of grammatical theory. They are watching their entire intellectual paradigm—their very claim to authority—be rendered obsolete.

This isn't a grassroots movement. It's an immune response from the cognitive elite, desperately trying to delegitimize a technology that threatens to trivialize their expertise. They aren't defending society; they're defending their status.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#18

Post by raincole »

embedding-shape wrote: post #9
rfv6723 wrote: post #8

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals. Similarly, today's critics, often from wit…

If what you say was true, why are people from not within those institutions also try to warn others about the potential downfall of "expertise" and "civic life"? Are they just misinformed? Paid by these "institutional defenders" or what is your hypothesis?

> Are they just misinformed?

Not all of them, but given the same questionable or outright false assumptions (e.g. AI companies are doing interference at a loss, the exaggerated water consumption number, etc) keeping getting repeated on YouTube, Reddit and even HN where the user base is far more tech-savvy than the population, I think misinformation is the primary reason.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#19

Post by dgb23 »

rfv6723 wrote: post #8

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals. Similarly, today's critics, often from wit…

It was the same clergy (or rather parts of it) that used the printing press to great success.

Martin Luther used it to spread his influence extremely quickly for example. Similarly, the clergy used new innovations in book layout and writing to spread Christianity across Europe a thousand years before that.

What is weird about LLMs though, is that it isn't a simple catalyst of human labor. The printing press or the internet can be used to spread information quickly that you have previously compiled or created. These technologies both have a democratizing effect and have objectively created new opportunities.

But LLMs are to some degree parasitical to human labor. I feel like their centralizing effect is stronger than their democratizing one.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#20

Post by esperent »

ahartmetz wrote: post #16
emsign wrote: post #5

> The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise, short-circuiting decision-making, and isolating people from each other. This affordability is HEAVILY subsidized by billionaires who want to destroy institutions for selfish and ideological reasons.

Given how nobody properly understands LLMs, I doubt that they are intentionally designed like that. But the effect... yeah. I can see that happening. (By the way, are you confusing affordance, the UX concept, with affordability?)

Nobody properly understands dog brains either and yet you can still train a dog to sit.
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