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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

#231

Post by agentultra »

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…

> There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.

Ok so you’re not denying the impact on climate change. Any of the other negative impacts it has on society?

Don’t sweep them under the rug and say, “works for me though so that’s worth it, not a big deal.”

I think the maths is interesting and the research is fascinating. I like computers, programming, and theoretical computer science more perhaps than the average person. That doesn’t mean I’m happy with data centres relying on illegal methane power plants to generate their base load power requirements. I think it’s unethical… and illegal. It seems like regulators are either unable to keep up or are getting paid to not look. That’s unethical. The financial systems used to deploy these data centres are imploding in debt and should also be regulated. They’re going to poison a bunch of retirement funds and could be a major factor in the crash of US bonds. Unethical. If they can’t run a profitable business even when they are bending and cheating and causing all of this harm I don’t think there’s any reason they shouldn’t be left to crash and burn like anyone else.

I don’t have much sympathy for the position of, “yeah that stuff is bad but I like it anyway and don’t want to talk about it.”

You might find more common ground with people if you can recognize the harms it does do, acknowledge that they are bad and advocate for change.

And you might have to give up the idea that any of this technology is going to lead to the creation of science-fiction super intelligent beings. We know what the combination of attention, transformers, and RNN can do. Pretty nifty stuff… but is it worth bleeding an economy of all its resources so that you can simulate f within psi worth it? I don’t think so. Sometimes the answer is, yeah neat but who cares? I’d rather have energy for keeping my cooling on in the middle of this heat wave.

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

#232

Post by breppp »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #173
bethekidyouwant wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name any tech job and I will tell you how it exploits the average people through economies of scale

I cut my teeth in tech building a regional classifieds website for a local newspaper Tell me all about how it was worse than the print classifieds that already existed I'm very curious to hear your take

Not the original poster, but moving classifieds online lost newspapers a whole lot of money, money that previously financed quality journalism, not to mention the people in charge of maintaining the classifieds ads business.

If you are working for the newspaper, your job is a reaction to the death of the original business, and you are the automation that came in their stead

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

#233

Post by hahahacorn »

newaccountman2 wrote: post #209
hahahacorn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 am not weighing in on the fundamental issue you are debating with the other person, but clearly Facebook has provided no benefit to society lol wth It's just a parasitic, largely useless, and often actively harmful advertising machine. The only possible positive it has done is transfer a lot of money and capital to employees who often come from middle-class backgrounds.

Meta’s primary issue is an alignment problem. They’ve built the most valuable human connection network ever and then added a misaligned algorithm on it.

You’re conflating Meta’s alignment issue with its overall benefit / harm to society. There is a singular, obvious thing that you interact with everyday that is very very bad (unless like me you don’t have it). And the invisible parts of what they do that are extremely beneficial are less obvious.

To be fair say from the list Meta is closest to being a net negative, like they’re the worst of the big tech companies and the only one I would refuse to work at. So I get what you’re saying, but to say they’re largely useless signals that you don’t know what they do and how they impact society at large, other than their very evil algorithms.

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

#234

Post by SoftTalker »

w29UiIm2Xz wrote: post #193
tptacek wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ironically, the trades are now desperate for smart people who show up as scheduled and sober. Upskilling might be learning to be a plumber or electrician or carpenter.

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

#235

Post by skeledrew »

helterskelter wrote: post #147
skeledrew wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say this is a huge reason to actually push for more AI, especially open models. I agree that there are serious environmental, etc concerns BUT there will be an even larger problem in the future when this tech becomes incorporated into pretty much everything if there are only a couple providers with a -poly on the really good models. This thing is here to stay and will only get qualitatively better, and the way to…

I don't know if more models will offer a meaningful counter to those in power, who will have not only more resources, but also the military, law enforcement and effectively the law itself. Probably the most we can hope to do at this point is to dismantle the surveillance architecture. "Starve the beast" so to speak.

I don't think there's a way to "starve the beast", unless completely isolating from society is an option (which it isn't for any but a sparse few). But the data it lives on can be diluted and made more piecemeal by keeping things local first, and spreading usage across multiple jurisdictions when more than local is needed.

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

#236

Post by newaccountman2 »

hahahacorn wrote: post #233
newaccountman2 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not weighing in on the fundamental issue you are debating with the other person, but clearly Facebook has provided no benefit to society lol wth It's just a parasitic, largely useless, and often actively harmful advertising machine. The only possible positive it has done is transfer a lot of money and capital to employees who often come from middle-class backgrounds.

Meta’s primary issue is an alignment problem. They’ve built the most valuable human connection network ever and then added a misaligned algorithm on it. You’re conflating Meta’s alignment issue with its overall benefit / harm to society. There is a singular, obvious thing that you interact with everyday that is very very bad (unless like me you don’t have it). And the invisible parts of what they do that are extremel…

...so, what is this thing they do, that in your view is "extremely beneficial"?

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

#238

Post by hahahacorn »

Silagi wrote: post #198
hahahacorn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ove…

We agree for the first few sentences! I’m a huge proponent for AI displacement taxes because of the rapid pace of acceleration and a lack of confidence that our economies reabsorption mechanisms are adequate.

If your claim is that in the short term there are negatives caused by innovation, then… well yeah! There is no such thing as a free lunch, and it’s exceedingly rare to ever have pure upside in anything ever. Life is a series of trade offs and hard decisions. The Industrial Revolution literally lifted a significant portion of the population out of poverty, and also hurt children in the beginning. I’m very glad we have child labor laws that are strict and well enforced. If your claim is that the Industrial Revolution was a net negative because children died, I would like for you to pull up the chart of child mortality from before and after the Industrial Revolution and go ahead and tell me what you see.

On the other hand, I think lots of people over index on the harms caused because it’s so easy to. You’ve clearly thought at length about quantifying the harm of big tech and your work. But have you ever quantified the positive impact? You can rationalize the tradeoffs of your actions without moralizing the harms you caused.

It’s not okay for children to die in factories, but without those factories far more would’ve died from illness, hunger, etc.

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

#240

Post by Silagi »

hahahacorn wrote: post #238
Silagi wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ove…

We agree for the first few sentences! I’m a huge proponent for AI displacement taxes because of the rapid pace of acceleration and a lack of confidence that our economies reabsorption mechanisms are adequate. If your claim is that in the short term there are negatives caused by innovation, then… well yeah! There is no such thing as a free lunch, and it’s exceedingly rare to ever have pure upside in anything ever. Lif…

I think we're roughly on the same side here? I'm explicitly against moralizing about AI by people who benefit from other forms of tech exploitation, e.g. using Amazon for hosting; I'm not against the idea of AI as a whole; I think it's an inevitability.

I just believe all of us should be willing to accept our own responsibility for the state of it. I also believe it could eventually work out to be a net benefit to the species; but in the short term, it's going to hurt us badly, as most technological revolutions have. I'm saying everyone involved, directly or indirectly, should be willing to accept their fraction of responsibility for the people who are suffering in the interim, and that moralizing about it is disingenuous.

I'm pretty sure we're not disagreeing at all. Over time, most technological revolutions have benefited society. That doesn't mean they didn't exploit people, though. Even in the current world, there's more slaves than there have ever been. People are still being exploited by technology. It's just more diffuse, and (I'm hoping) the average suffering in the world has gone down.

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