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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

#221

Post by Silagi »

dmpk2k wrote: post #80
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…

It's weird for physicists to complain about nuclear weapons. They did it. Own it.

Most do, in my experience? I worked at Argonne for a while, and they absolutely treated their profession with deadly seriousness. I didn't meet anyone who took the stance of "Move fast and break things". Most spent too many late nights rechecking their work to make sure it was correct. Even when being wrong would be entirely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

I get what you're saying, that not everyone who is in tech contributed, which is fair to an extent, see my other comments.

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

#222

Post by newaccountman2 »

scoofy wrote: post #219
newaccountman2 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. This paragraph from the post could have just been written about the internet and all of the tech and companies it has enabled since ~1999: > People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the…

Automobiles, steam trains, even electricity or the printing press… There has always been a compelling argument for ludditism, the protection of people in that moment (as if that moment would last forever). And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety…

> And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions.

Agreed.

I don't think it's the out-of-work "skilled artisans" who are to blame though, esp in the US.

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

#223

Post by fasterik »

newaccountman2 wrote: post #151
beering wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on how you define intelligence. There's a straightforward functional definition: if a system can solve a range of problems that require complex reasoning and it meets objective standards of success across multiple disciplines, then that system is intelligent.

Search algorithms used to be considered a part of AI research. The whole point of the field, from the Turing test onward, has been that mimicry is in some sense all you need. Maybe there's a coherent philosophical position where intelligence is defined as some intrinsic property possessed by conscious agents, but I find it remarkably hard to come up with a precise definition along those lines.

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

#225

Post by Silagi »

tedmiston wrote: post #220
Silagi wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More specifically, someone actively building on top of Amazon decrying the exploitation of workers and the environment is demonstrably hypocritical. And "engineers building things to spec" are not the same as those giving the orders, but they should take a measure of responsibility for the things they build. I think most people generally agree about the culpability of those following orders when people are harmed. I'…

"Anyone who uses is hypocritical" is a pretty insane take, even for HN. All technologies have benefits and costs — choosing and using a technology does not imply the nonexistence of tradeoffs. One can give sufficient consideration to the downsides, and then determine that the upsides outweigh them. It's not rocket science.

Sure, but those people who "considered the downsides" shouldn't then moralize about the exploitation of workers; they're contributing to it. It's explicitly hypocritical. They're explicitly deciding the exploitation is worth the upsides for their or their company's benefit.

I'm not excluding myself from this. Just chafing against this grandstanding by people actively contributing to the same problems, and especially annoyed by the people saying we should pause development because it's going to affect people's jobs. This isn't new.

Edit: I'd also like to point out that "Public cloud computing" doesn't really capture what I said; the OP of the article is specifically building on Amazon, which has a well documented history of worker exploitation. Even building on Azure or Google cloud would be more defensible in the context of the article they wrote.

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

#226

Post by thunky »

arvid-lind wrote: post #207
mplanchard wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? Not sure if you like to work on your own cars, but would you also feel like you're accumulating negative karma for associating with the automotive and fossil fuel industries? We're not responsible for the world that is here right now, but we have to figure out how to operate within it. The idea that "we earned this" like we're all at fault for the state of things seems pretty far off. Not trying to say you're…

I don't think your analogy fits. Tech is directly responsible for automation, which impacts jobs. Tech workers didn't cry moral outrage then. But mow that tech may automate their job, suddenly it's evil.

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

#227

Post by cm2012 »

bawolff wrote: post #218
skrebbel wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult. Yes, and that’s my point. Most vegans truly believe that meat equals murder. Yet the vast majority of them will go out for dinner with people they truly deeply believe are (indirect) murderers. This is indeed very difficult for them. Locking yourself out of society isn’t likely to help achieve any sort of moral progress.

> Locking yourself out of society isn’t likely to help achieve any sort of moral progress. On the contrary, i think most moral progress (albeit also many social ills) has been wrought through social pressure.

A minority cannot socially pressure a majority, it will just backfire

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

#228

Post by marcosdumay »

joquarky wrote: post #204
marcosdumay wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tow…

As an aside: why have we allowed marketing people to take over?

The marketing people didn't take over. Some self-aggrandizing self-destroying billionaires did.

I'm not sure why we allowed it, but they have been working on it for more than 50 years. My best guess is that they just kept insisting on it until people lost attention for an instant, and then did it again, and again.

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

#229

Post by cm2012 »

insanetake wrote: post #117
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.

Also, anyone who is anti-AI because of environmental reasons but still eats meat is a huge hypocrite.

Same should be said of anyone who ever does international travel

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

#230

Post by SoftTalker »

krapp wrote: post #179
Tubelord wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we need some kind of worldwide negative event first. In Star Trek lore, World War 3 starts this year (2026). Like with World War 2, perhaps it’s needed to calibrate the zeitgeist to a spot where a prosperous era can follow /shrug

A Star-Trek style "post-scarcity" economy can't exist in the real world. It depends on an impossible paradigmatic shift in basic human nature across the entire species (people just "evolve" beyond their base vices and desires such that they're willing to work purely for the sake of voluntarism and the betterment of humanity, there is no racism, no sexism, no struggles for power. *) and technology that violates basic…

Of course. I was just responding to the parent who was sad that AI isn't turning out to be "the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago." But that was always fantasy sci/fi anyway.
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