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Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

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Re: Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

#201
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which one of those things he said do you consider "honest" and not PR? Both of them sound like PR to me, just aimed at different audiences

I think before he thought OpenAI was going to make him a trillionaire he was more honest about X Risk and job displacement since he didn't have the incentive to lie. Most early AI thinkers saw AI as more dangerous than nukes. > We founded Anthropic because we believe the impact of AI might be comparable to that of the industrial and scientific revolutions, but we aren’t confident it will go well. [1] [1]. https://www…

How exactly is OpenAI going to make him a trillionaire? He doesn’t own any equity. I’m sure he owns some indirectly via funds he’s an investor in, but nowhere near enough to make him a trillionaire.

So where did this idea that Altman is aiming for a financial payoff come from? He could easily have taken equity, and didn’t. Why? What part of the evil master plan is that?

Re: Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

#202
post #20

[flagged]

> Meta and Jeff Bezos being held up in a good light The message to a group of graduating artists should have been about the literature, art and public works that turned the Industrial Revolution's hyper-concentrated gains into broadly-felt benefits. (And then, after WWII and the Green Revolution, encouraged us to start reckoning with its environmental cost.) AI is potentially—and with increasing confidence day to day…

> literature, art and public works that turned the Industrial Revolution's hyper-concentrated gains into broadly-felt benefits

those all played a part to be sure, but it was workers organizing and striking en masse, bringing factories to a halt, battling with private armies or gov troops (and getting killed), and hard-fought progressive campaigns that achieved it

no one is willing to do that these days, until it gets much much worse; plus workers don't have the leverage that they did back at that time -- factories still relied on them -- sure you could ship in replacements for striking workers but that required considerable effort. the goal here is not to rely on labor at all, effectively eliminating any leverage that labor has over capital.

Re: Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

#203
post #33

There's a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults. The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, and the effects of using it are unpleasant and hard to defend on aesthetic, intellectual, or moral grounds. There are real use cases for this technology! But the idea that the generation of superficially plausible text is "the next Industrial…

> The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, and the effects of using it are unpleasant and hard to defend on aesthetic, intellectual, or moral grounds.

The AI output you are referring to mostly seems to refer to “AI slop”. It’s not hard to argue that AI slop sucks.

There is a lot that AI does that has created joy for me or people around me:

- whimsical profile pics for online profiles for me, family, and friends

- writing e-mails for community groups — good for a family member who doesn’t have the most sociable writing style

- automating data capture and organization

- automating scheduling with multiple and variable constraints

- catching obvious errors that somehow still happen (e.g., off by one errors)

- filling in gaps in analysis either due to gaps in knowledge or simply an oversight

These are sample of things that I have done or helped people do in the past week, and the results have been well-received.

Maybe I’m part of that solution that you propose, but I have used words similar to “biggest change since…” (I usually say spreadsheets, but I don’t think “Industrial Revolution” is wrong).

Fwiw, I don’t think the result will be dystopian the way most people seem to think that it will. I firmly believe that meat space interactions will gain much more traction, and that will change the way we live and work.

Re: Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media isn’t always about consuming content . It’s also about getting jolts of momentary joy and reward. You get those in two ways: seeing cool things, and participating in cool things. Especially cool things before they go viral. Clicking like on a post that isn’t viral yet , and gambling to yourself whether it will go viral, has the same dopamine flux when it pays off as winning at the slots. Even my reward-d…

By stopping integer counts do you mean not collecting upvotes and downvotes at all or just not displaying them? If it is the later, I think it can be an interesting experiment, although I doubt it matters that much because you can still gauge the "engagement" based on how your posts rank. But there is absolutely no way HN could work if posts and submissions stop being sorted based on their votes. Community moderation…

Is moderation truly accomplished via votes, though, as opposed to flagging?

You say "spam", but unpopular comments are rarely promotional. They lack any one unifying quality. They might be naive, and/or they might be difficult.

Re: Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

#205
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. It seems the parent comment is saying AI proliferation could make cost of goods drop orders of magnitude and you say it's detached from reality because people don't want goods, they want housing food and gas? Housing food and gas are goods... Or did you mean something completely different?

Did you try reading their second paragraph? The one where they claim we already have an abundance of said goods?

[deleted]

Re: Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

#206
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people who rely on it are not cool. That's the only statement that's true. Admiting to AI use is unfashionable in the western world at this time. But how much would you like to bet that 90% of those students who were booing also used AI to do their homework for them quite often? So your take away would be "the AI stole their education". No, they were dishonest and the AI helped them cheat themselves out of lear…

> But how much would you like to bet that 90% of those students who were booing also used AI to do their homework for them quite often? So your take away would be "the AI stole their education". No, they were dishonest and the AI helped them cheat themselves out of learning. This is like saying a smoker can't criticize the tobacco industry. It's entirely possible to recognize that AI in school is a huge problem while…

Smokers can criticize. But they also have to face the cancer that will personally affect them. And hopefully take accountability for it.

Re: Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

#207
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't care about music, as most don't care about art in general. People like entertainment though. What you are describing is more akin to a form of hollow entertainment through the medium of music, a lot of pop music can also fall into that category (no, not all, there is also a lot of artistry is many pop artists/songs). If AI-generated music triggers emotions on you then keep consuming it but knowing t…

Music has served various roles throughout history. The whole notion of music being "art" and "invoking feelings" has not always been consistently true across the entirety of its history of various cultures. Painting, drawing, sculpting, and other visual arts have had a similar history as well. We can take examples of some pieces from famous composers like much of Haydn's works, some pieces from Handel, Bach, Mozart,…

You invoke gatekeeping and the no-true-scotsman fallacy. Fair enough. I might add "Dylan goes electric" to the pile of examples.

However, look at this other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48099547

There, patterns of electrical signals are said to be good, and not bad, but at the same time "morality" gets dismissed. But ideas of good and bad are morality!

Note that moral ideas don't have to be correct. "I should burgle a house" is a moral idea, an idea in the domain of morality. 1920s disapproval of the seductive decadent jungle rhythms of jazz was moral (I guess we say "moralistic" to indicate that we don't agree). The opposite attitude, praising jazz, is also moral. Treating Dylan as a traitor for going electric was moral, and attending the metal love-in that was Ozzy's farewell concert was also moral.

Then, a couple of posts up the thread from you, there's an imagined scene of people "vibing" to music at a party where everything is AI made. This sounds disgusting, somewhere between vaping and using a vibrator, and so I think I have to grudgingly give it my full approval. These imaginary young people are enjoying the vibe that they have vaguely selected. Maybe they had some input about the genre, maybe implicitly. They're choosing not to turn it off, anyway, because they like it, they think the vibe is good.

You imply that everybody saying "It's not real music" is wrong. OK, kind of, but they're not completely wrong. It doesn't follow that just because of our long history of snobbery, therefore everything is real music. The snobs are doing gatekeeping, but they're also doing discernment, and participating in the kind of moral ideas that music and art is made of. It's such a pain to define art that I'm liable to be downvoted for trying: some people are certain that relativism is the way forward, and that it's a brilliant insight to throw our hands in the air and give up. You're quite right that it has to encompass lots of different things, and no one defining feature will withstand counterexamples, but it can still be defined in a vague way as a collection of optional qualities, under which we could say that an instruction manual is not really art, but arguably artistic or artfully made.

So, I'm not judging the AI music as art or not-art right now, but I'm saying that it's amenable to so being judged. Anybody claiming that it's good music is admitting the possibility that it might be bad music, and this is a moral matter, about the value of feelings, meanings, and affections. That even applies to good or bad elevator music, it's trivial background sound, but approval or disapproval of it is moral. This is not about its worth as patterns of signals, because that's reductive. Those patterns mean things, or matter to us in ways that we have preferences about, which are value judgments.

Re: Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but we might eventually reach a point in automation where a lot of prices drop to the point where it's virtually free, food could be included, It took two world wars till we had an aberrational period where the middle class actually had lives which were good. UBI can’t happen because governments globally don't have the money to pay for it. Its good to hope, but the details aren’t in favor.

Well if AI keeps cannibalizing jobs, governments will HAVE to find a way to make UBI works. If they do not there will be deadly riots as people lose their livelihoods. There will simply have to be a solution, whether or not it’s deemed “impossible.”

I believe the solution is fairly simple: military robots to keep the masses in check.

Just look at how utterly evil and despicable the rich and powerful have been acting over the last years. Do you really think that people who are investing in shock collars to prepare for societal breakdown scenarios would give the non-rich masses a single red dime?

Re: Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

#209
Number of industrial revolutions: generously, two (though the distinction between the first and second Industrial Revolution is more or less only of interest to historians).

Number of things called the next industrial revolution: roughly five billion.

(The offending speaker appears to work for a private equity firm that does mostly property stuff, so probably not a leading authority on what is the next Industrial Revolution.)

Re: Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

#210
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> comes out of the same mindset that has turned a neat technology into a banal hellscape for consumers and employees I'm going to say up front that I'm not as familiar with this period of history as I should be, but -- would it be totally unfair to say the same of the "Industrial Revolution"? I'm not gonna say they're equivalent by any means, but my understanding is the "Industrial Revolution" was hellish for many pe…

> the mistake is the framing that "the revolution" or "the next big thing" is always a good thing? They are good things. If you were an adult, male aristocrat, yes, your untouched meadows and streams got tainted. If you were a woman you stopped dying in childbirth. If you think of infants as people, they stopped massively dying. The Industrial Revolution was good. But it also required erecting the modern administrati…

That's primarily the second industrial revolution (~1870-1914). The _first_ (~1750-1840) was... not so great, and note the gap. If your analogy is the industrial revolution, then "well, it's a bit shit now, but it'll all work out fine in 150 years" isn't _great_ messaging, really.
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