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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

#151

Post by newaccountman2 »

beering wrote: post #93
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.

Is it not? You can talk to it in plain English and it can do things for you and respond back in a synthesized voice. I was reading an old Asimov short story about a guy who comes across a lost robot and has to trick it into staying put, and it felt weirdly prescient. (The story is “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”)

It's not really "intelligence"

It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.

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

#152

Post by juleiie »

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…

There is no such thing as good person or evil person anywhere else other than in human society.

It’s just a brain fart to make you cooperate and evolutionary survive. You don’t need to listen to this primitive instinct. You can just choose consciously what you think is the best.

Do not share or propagate or promote this view however. Our society only works thanks to most people being slaves to these tremors.

Sometimes I get an impression that it isn’t even a freedom of choice, some must perceive themselves as "good people" as a highest imperative. Whatever that means for current century.

I like to view myself as grey person.

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

#153

Post by Deebster »

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…

Last year Wikipedia reported an 8% drop in humans traffic[1]. That's huge.

[1] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...

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

#154

Post by kentm »

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?

Sure. I think that I’d you were expressing concerns about all the leopards running around and having discussions about whether we need to do something about the leopard population, it’s perfectly reasonable to be upset when a leopard eats your face.

It’s just that the median tech worker was more often to talk about moving fast and breaking things and making glib statements about buggy whips. If you were the sort of person to just shrug and say that a few leopards were the price of advancement then you’re probably not going to get a lot of sympathy. That is, unless you connect your current faceless state to your previous stance on leopards and admit that maybe you were shortsighted (generic “you” here, not you specifically).

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

#155

Post by senordevnyc »

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.

History has the most optimistic vibe imaginable, what are you talking about?? Look at where we are as a species right now, vs century ago, a millennium ago, ten thousand years ago!

What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?

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

#156

Post by the13 »

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…

Thanks to people being glued to social media & other rage bait machines on their phones.

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

#157

Post by wiseowise »

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…

> All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same.

That's how Russia got into current situation, btw.

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

#158

Post by yallpendantools »

YoukaiCountry wrote: post #114
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.

If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?

I think it's not so much the technical scope that makes it "not the AI you read of as a child" but the societal impact. AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails. Cue the quote about AI supposedly about taking over the boring tasks so we can spend more time making art, achieving self-actualization.

The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages.

And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!

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

#159

Post by bluefirebrand »

michaelt wrote: post #145
thewebguyd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 y…

> Are you having these conversations in person?

I can't speak for the other poster but I've had the experience they described in-person, when I was living in Victoria

I rented an apartment downtown Victoria and had pretty frequent run-ins with addicts on the streets. My friends who lived and worked further out away from the downtown core had very strong opinions about it any time I had anything negative to say about the experiences

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

#160

Post by hahahacorn »

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…

Economies of scale is how society lowers the cost of meeting the demand for things people want. Uber, Airbnb, and Meta have negative externalities that have gone “unpriced” in the market because our policy makers are incompetent. But at large, they’ve net benefitted society, many more times over than they’ve hurt anyone whose job was displaced from the cycle of innovation and those individuals have found new jobs, or adapted to compete (taxis making a comeback, except they’re not fucking scumbags anymore because they don’t have a monopoly).

If you believe technology and innovation is characterized as “using economies of scale to exploit the average person” you’d necessarily come to some pretty weird positions throughout history.

Take the natural ice trade for example. Were refrigerators an evil means of exploiting and displacing the 100,000 workers who powered the natural ice trade? Or was it a better solution to the public health hazards, brutal dangerous working conditions, and high price paid by society to the Ice Monopoly?

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