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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

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Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#111

Post by lumost »

awinter-py wrote: post #101
lumost wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the question is whether those ai tools make you produce more value . Anecdotally, the ai tools have changed the workflow and allowed me to produce more tools etc. They have not necessarily changed the rate at which I produce valuable outputs (yet).

can you say more about this? what do you mean when you say 'more tools' is not the same as 'valuable outputs'

There are a thousand "nuisance" problems which matter to me and me alone. AI allows me to bang these out faster, and put nice UIs on it. When I'm making an internal tool - there really is no reason not to put a high quality UX on top. The high quality UX, or existence of a tool that only I use does not mean my value went up - just that I can do work that my boss would otherwise tell me not to do.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#113

Post by TylerE »

arkt8 wrote: post #110

I like to reduce things to absurdity to put them into perspective. The hype of AI is to sell illusion to naive people. It is like create a hammer that nails by itself... like cars that choose the path by itself. So stop thinking AI is intelligent... it is merely an advanced tool that demands skill and creativity like any other. Its output is limited to the hability of its user. The worry should be the amount of resou…

Ever heard of a nail gun?

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#114

Post by BrenBarn »

This seems pretty close to my own view, although I'm not sure the secret power grab is about land and water so much as just getting into everyone's brains. What I'd add is that it's not just a front for consolidation of resources and power, it's also a result of a preexisting consolidation of resources and power that we've ignored for too long. If we had had a healthier society 5 or 10 years ago we could have withstood this. Now, it's not so clear.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#115

Post by wyre »

mwhitfield wrote: post #57
Kiro wrote: post #53

> it’s a useful technology that is very likely overhyped to the point of catastrophe I wish more AI skeptics would take this position but no, it's imperative to claim that it's completely useless.

I've had *very* much the opposite experience. Very nearly every AI skeptic take I read has exactly this opinion, if not always so well-articulated (until the last section, which lost me). But counterarguments always attack the complete strawman of "AI is utterly useless," which very few people, at least within the confines of the tech and business commentariat, are making.

I found the last section to be the most exciting part of the article. Describing a conspiracy around AI development, not being about the AI, but the power that a few individuals will gain by building data centers that rival the size, power, and water consumption of small cities, which are will be used to gain political power.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#117

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #70
xeckr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you have AGI, you can presumably automate AI R&D, and it seems to me that the recursive self-improvement that begets ASI isn't that far away from that point.

We already have AGI - it's called humans - and frankly it's no magic bullet for AI progress. Meta just laid 600 of them off. All this talk of AGI, ASI, super-intelligence, and recursive self-improvement etc is just undefined masturbatory pipe dreams. For now it's all about LLMs and agents, and you will not see anything fundamentally new until this approach has been accepted as having reached the point of diminishing…

Humans aren't really being put to work upgrading the underlying design of their own brains, though. And 5 years is a blink of an eye. My five-year-old will barely even be turning ten years old by then.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#118

Post by elliotto »

lumost wrote: post #111
awinter-py wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you say more about this? what do you mean when you say 'more tools' is not the same as 'valuable outputs'

There are a thousand "nuisance" problems which matter to me and me alone. AI allows me to bang these out faster, and put nice UIs on it. When I'm making an internal tool - there really is no reason not to put a high quality UX on top. The high quality UX, or existence of a tool that only I use does not mean my value went up - just that I can do work that my boss would otherwise tell me not to do.

Under this definition, could any tool at all be considered to produce more value?

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#119

Post by chickensong »

apsurd wrote: post #19
njarboe wrote: post #7

Many people use AI as the source for knowledge. Even though it is often wrong or misleading, it's advice is better on average than their own judgement or the judgement of people they know. When an AI is "smarter" than 95%? of the population, even if it does not reach superintelligence, will be a very big deal.

This means to me AI is rocket fuel for our post-truth reality. Post-truth is a big deal and it was already happening pre-AI. AGI, post-scarcity, post-humanity are nerd snipes. Post-truth on the other hand is just a mundane and nasty sociologically problem that we ran head-first into and we don't know how to deal with. I don't have any answers. Seems like it'll get worse before it gets better.

How would you define post-truth? It's not like people haven't been spouting incorrect facts or total bs since forever.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#120

Post by bawolff »

highfrequency wrote: post #107

The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. What that means is that if you work in a certain context, for a while you keep seeing AI get a 0 because it is worse than the current process. Behind the scenes the underly…

> The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times.

I think you should say succesful "general purpose technologies". What you describe is what happens when things work out. Sometimes things stall at step 1, and the technology gets relegated to a foot note in the history books.

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