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AI Destroys Institutions

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Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#21

Post by tyingq »

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?)

You can intentionally market the use cases without knowing exactly how they work, though. So it's intentional investment and use case targeting, rather than directly designing for purpose. Though, the market also drives the measures...so they iteratively get better at things you pour money into.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#22

Post by bugglebeetle »

dgb23 wrote: post #19
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 in…

Everyone who tells the story of the reformation leaves out that Martin Luther also used this new technology to widely disseminate his deranged anti-Semitic lies and conspiracies, leading to pogroms against Jews, a hundred years of war across Europe, and providing the ideological basis for the rise of Nazism.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#24

Post by terminalshort »

This is nothing but speculation written by lawyers in the format of a scientific paper to feign legitimacy. Of course those $500 an hour nitpickers are terrified of AI because it threatens the exorbitant income of their cartel protected profession.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#25

Post by energy123 »

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 criticism of the author's backgrounds rather than the content of the article.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#26

Post by wesammikhail »

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.

The institutions have been doing a fine job of destroying all their credibility and utility all on their own for far longer than this new AI hype cycle.

ZIRP, Covid, Anti-nuclear power, immigration crisis across the west, debt enslavement of future generations to buy votes, socializing losses and privatizing gains... Nancy is a better investor than Warren.

I am not defending billionaires, the vast majority of them are grifting scum. But to put this at their feet is not the right level of analysis when the institutions themselves are actively working to undermine the populace for the benefit of those that are supposed to be stewards of said institutions.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#27

Post by contrarian1234 »

Just from reading the abstract, it feels like the authors didn't even attempt at trying to be objective. It hard to take what they're saying seriously when the language is so loaded and full of judgments. The kind of language you'd expect in an Op-Ed and not a research paper

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#28

Post by raincole »

rfv6723 wrote: post #17
embedding-shape wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

It's some wild claim. Every linguist worth their salt had known that you don't need grammatical theory to reach native level. Grammar being descriptive rather than prescriptive is the mainstream idea and had been long before LLM.

If you actually ask them, I bet most linguists will say they are not even excellent English (or whichever language they studied the most) teachers.

Plus, "stochastic parrot" was coined before ChatGPT. If linguists really felt that threatened by the time when people's concerns over AI was like "sure it can beat go master but how about league of legends?" you have to admit they did have some special insights, right?

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#29

Post by __loam »

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's so ridiculous to make this argument when the people who stand to benefit the most from this technology are the massive corporations that can subsidize the compute and capital costs of this technology. Is it democratization when Google pulls something your wrote on your website then runs it through an LLM so they can serve it directly to a user? You say people see this as a threat to their status but the reality is this is a massive consolidation of the information economy of the internet in the hands of a few corporate interests.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#30

Post by wartywhoa23 »

phoe-krk wrote: post #10
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…

> a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge More like a war on the traditional, human-based knowledge, leveraged by people who believe that via coveting the world's supply of RAM, SSDs, GPUs, and what not, can achieve their own monopoly on knowledge under the pretense of liberating it. Note that running your own LLM becomes impossible if you can no longer afford the hardware to run it on.

Surely we'll all beat monopolies by running our own local LLMs, storing whole blockchains on our local storage, building our own atomic power plants, flying our own airlines and launching our own satellites via our own rocket fleets. And producing our own trillion-transistor silicon in our own fabs.

We just have to start printing our own money and buying us some pocket armies and puppet politicians first.

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