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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

#141

Post by marcosdumay »

lazide wrote: post #69
nerdsniper wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid, “AI” was quake 2 bots, starcraft pathfinding algorithms, and chessbot personalities. I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.

Branding. LLM’s (as a term!) are too specific for the ‘conquer the world’ narratives the VCs want to justify the high valuations. Machine Learning sounds too technical. AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him . FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the op…

I really like the idea of AI being the brand of whatever we are hyping so much that will inevitably fail spectacularly and turn the entire society against it for a couple of decades.

The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working towards.

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

#142

Post by 34asg »

johnwheeler wrote: post #56

> don't want to hang out with him any more because he'll have his phone with him and it's automatic for him now. This post sounds like selfishness/self-preservation masquerading as concern for humanity and the environment. You can be anti-AI all you want. You're wasting your breath and energy. I don't know if the quality of my life has gone up because I have these tools that help me build things in exchange for less…

Get in line and join the Hitler Youth! You have no say in the matter! Lead, follow or GTFO!

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

#143

Post by wiseowise »

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.

You shouldn't. You should feel bad when they'll kick you out on the street, because Claude "does better job than lower value human capital".

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

#144

Post by peteforde »

tanvach wrote: post #104
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…

This is like saying cancer is perfectly normal.

Is cancer not normal?

40-45% of people will get cancer in their lives.

It's estimated that 25-30% of people, globally, enjoy hip-hop.

Cancer is 50% more common than hip-hop.

Is hip-hop normal?

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

#145

Post by michaelt »

thewebguyd wrote: post #87
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…

> you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now. Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying…

> Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob.

Are you having these conversations about politics in person? Or are these conversations happening on Twitter/Reddit/HN/whatever?

In my experience, online forums don't really work for political discussion for a bunch of reasons.

If you change to getting your fix of politics from long-form articles and radio-style scripted podcasts by professional journalists, you'll probably find there's a lot more room for nuance.

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

#146

Post by wiseowise »

Kuyawa wrote: post #126

What's wrong about a beautiful banner done beautifully with AI? What's wrong with a new app done in 5 mins by a coding agent? What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter? A couple of days ago I started having watery eyes and suddenly 'pink eye' was a term in DeepSeek with all the answers, viral, bacterial and fungal which I didn't know. According to symptoms it wa…

Almost got me there, if it wasn't for

> What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter?

Very subtle.

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

#147

Post by helterskelter »

skeledrew wrote: post #86
helterskelter wrote: post #20

This is becoming a mainstream position for a number of reasons but I think the unifying concern across many demographics is the concern about the effects on power it will have. Nobody wants an omnipresent big brother in anybody's hands, and people are waking up to the fact that the infrastructure is already there without any real safeguards, all that's really needed is cheap intelligence to handle all the data.

I'd say this is a huge reason to actually push for more AI, especially open models. I agree that there are serious environmental, etc concerns BUT there will be an even larger problem in the future when this tech becomes incorporated into pretty much everything if there are only a couple providers with a -poly on the really good models. This thing is here to stay and will only get qualitatively better, and the way to…

I don't know if more models will offer a meaningful counter to those in power, who will have not only more resources, but also the military, law enforcement and effectively the law itself.

Probably the most we can hope to do at this point is to dismantle the surveillance architecture. "Starve the beast" so to speak.

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

#148

Post by wiseowise »

estetlinus wrote: post #51

> the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state. Sure, it’s noisier and increasingly full of AI-generated slop, but are we already at the “everything was better in the old days” stage? As for the destruction of career paths, technological change has been doing that for centuries. Digitization alone transformed…

> The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state.

Sure it did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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

#149

Post by enraged_camel »

macintux wrote: post #41
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…

Some of us have loathed Uber, Airbnb & Meta. Are we allowed to be negative about AI?

It's not a matter of being "allowed" per se. What the parent is saying that people need to do a better job being internally consistent in their beliefs and moral stances. If you are one such person, great! But my impression is that most people aren't.

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

#150

Post by Silagi »

dd8601fn wrote: post #98
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…

There are about ten billion relevant and reasonable ways to differentiate and choose priorities in all of that. Suggesting that nobody is entitled to opinions on one category sounds kinda silly.

I'm specifically saying "I'm entitled to displace people with automation built on previous work, but automation that affects me shouldn't be allowed" is a particularly hypocritical take.

The implications of AI aren't as novel as tech circles would like to believe. The same trends in employment and automation have been happening across industries for decades in slightly different forms. This is just the first time it might actually affect the people doing the work, instead of being conveniently separated from their inner circle.

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