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

musings.martyn.berlin

191–200 of 339 posts

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

#191
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…

If someone who has never had any major financial benefit from tech, but loved it all the same, criticizes AI, do they get a pass?

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. And of course we continue to have the same vision now that X won't be possible for a great many years, if ever. And we also continually carefully refine the generally accepted definition of "intelligence" so that it specifically excludes wh…

> Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have.

I agree with that, but I don't think anyone is moving the goalposts as you imply later in your post.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No technology will have me "excited" if the prospect is lower/no compensation and poorer working conditions. I concur on the nuance -- I use it as a tool at work. I see value in it. I see business value in it displacing me, even if that's not the maximally correct position because some higher up did some numeric calculations. The first prompt I got a decent reply to was a thrill. Then the thinking of the second-order…

Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.

Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that. But now, it is not obvious what 'trading up' in this situation is. There was optionality: upskill and increase your compensation. Now, there may be no opportunity to upskill. And that is a meaningfully different environment.

The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living (and many of us still do so) -- we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.

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

#194

This article is representative of what's wrong in internet culture. It's fine to take a moral stance, but it's not reasonable to expect others to agree with and align with your personal morals. I've been vegetarian for over 30 years, on moral (environmental) grounds. It does put me in the minority. But I don't expect others to change their behavior. If you want to avoid AI, avoid AI. If you feel strongly enough that…

Bit confused - you and me voluntarily reading a blog post linked on HN, doesn't make the author someone who is pushing their morals on us?

I read the article, and at worst it could be called whinging, but at its lowest point it never came across as trying to push a view point on the reader. What am I missing?

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

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No technology will have me "excited" if the prospect is lower/no compensation and poorer working conditions. I concur on the nuance -- I use it as a tool at work. I see value in it. I see business value in it displacing me, even if that's not the maximally correct position because some higher up did some numeric calculations. The first prompt I got a decent reply to was a thrill. Then the thinking of the second-order…

Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.

It does feel a bit karmic, doesn’t it? I’ve never worked in a part of tech that was explicitly doing this, but I still feel as though all the current anxiety and uncertainty I myself am currently going through is in some way “earned” by my participation in this industry.

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is none, and that’s my point. Despite technological advances throughout history that made things easier to do and less scarce, over and over we keep the scarcity mindset and winner-takes-most economics around, funneling the majority of the value and benefits up to the few. At every point when some advancement could have greatly improved everyone’s lot in life, humanity chose to spread that improvement around to the masses as thinly as possible, just enough to avoid social upheaval, and shipped the rest of the value into the pockets of the richest 1%.

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

#198
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…

I vehemently disagree that meta or airbnb have done more to benefit society than not, but I'll take the overall argument; that technology, on the whole, benefits society overall.

Which is true, on the long term. But we have no reason to believe that AI will be different in that case. In the short term, technologies have absolutely been used to exploit the average person; the industrial revolution benefited us all over time, but tell that to the kids killed in early industrial manufacturing centers.

Look at how the transition to globalization went in the 80's-10's; entire sections of the US were essentially shut down because of the improvements in communication technology, and unless you're in support of the current state of the US, you'd agree we're still dealing with the consequences of that.

Even in your own case, there's an argument to be made that CFCs meant the overall damage to humanity was greater than the ice trade, just spread out over more people. The exploitation was similar, but it was less visible. Even if we've eventually reached a point where people were better off, you can't argue that the health of the average person was never exploited for the benefit of the few.

To be clear, I'm not separating myself from this; I'm fully aware that work I've done has displaced people. I'm just chafing against the moralizing around it. It feels like the people making these arguments are trying to remove themselves from responsibility while continuing to build on top of companies like Amazon, that are built on top of exploiting people that absolutely cannot advocate for themselves.

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

#199

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.

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.

Many people can't abide being something other than the center of the universe, and they get antsy when something might challenge that "unique" position.

Imagine if we had social media during the flip from geocentrism.

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

#200
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…

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.

That has to be the silliest reason to hate AI I've seen yet, next to the "don't you know how many gallons of water are being used up!!!"

Replace "AI" in that sentence with any rapidly evolving tech: social networks, smart homes, digital governments, hell - even online shopping.

The versions of any of those things a child would've read 20 years ago won't have anywhere near the complexities and unexpected downsides all those things ended up having in real life.

20 years ago, AI to (kid) me was a real life C3PO, or an npc in an open-world game that existed in that world with their own motivation and story independent of what you did. Or the stereotypical humanoid robot with consciousness like in the film "A.I.". No kid could've imagined vibe coding, running sub-agents, diffusion models, AI zombies, and all this other stuff we have today. Everything you imagined as a child is still possible, and depending on what exactly you read, is already here.

Yeah the UX is different than what anyone 20 years ago would've predicted, but how does this mean the "hate" make sense? That's not even 0.1% of the reason the typical anti-AI people are against AI.

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