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To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
241–250 of 339 posts
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#242I clicked on the article thinking it would be about having a moral stance, when it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance
> it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance If you don't think your moral stance is the correct one - then why aren't you changing your moral stance? Why do you have one at all? It's ok to have strong opinions on morality, and it's cool to live by them, and good to talk about them. I don't happen to completely agree with the author, but I can respect a belief in one's own considered opinion, and the right…
> If you don't think your moral stance is the correct one
That's not what's asserted.
The title is "To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast"
But the reality is "To have his moral stance is to be a self-imposed outcast".
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.
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.
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Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Obviously there is no “blame” in complex systems, but over and over, folks with financial leverage tend to move immediately from a position of libertarian meritocracy to a position of regressive intervention at exactly the moment when their skill becomes automated.
A society that promotes risk, plans for failure, and facilitates starting over, all while minimizing wealth inequality is a society that can sprint headlong into every new technology in a way that everyone benefits.
The lining factor I see time and time again, is that folks see the world, philosophically, as static even though in one lifetime we start at the invention of the light bulb and end on the moon, and in the next, we start with the moon landing, and we’ve created artificial thinking with 23 years to spare.
It’s a sad state of affairs. But what do I know, I live in a city with a massive housing crisis because one group finds construction of more homes as ruining their nice static lives.
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#245To be fair, it doesn't sound like anyone is literally judging this person for his moral stance -- it sounds like he is judging others for not sharing his morals. They're not making him an outcast; he is literally casting others out of his life because they don't meet his purity standards. I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream soc…
There are adverse consequences to his stance, primarily in the form of foregone professional opportunities.
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#246It'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, p…
That is a big differentiator. I think there is a pretty valid argument that the models and data centers are net positive for society, and therefore ethical (better than the counterfactual of their absence).
I agree that there are some harms, but they are mostly self imposed. If a retirement fund gambles people's money on the wrong company, that is on them.
Most of the power conflicts are downstream of corrupt politicians and ignorant voters strangling their grid and stymieing efforts to improve production and transmission.
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
Yes, I think we have the same beliefs largely - my point is that the lens of economies of scale == exploitation is a very silly one that would naturally lead to conclusions such as "Even in the current world, there's more slaves than there have ever been."
That is absolute utter nonsense. Like beyond nonsense, much closer to fiction than a differing view of reality. But understandable through a lens that innovation and productivity gains are a means of exploitation. Modern systems and societies are not slavery. They're a default opt-in system of incentives that drive people to contribute more to society if they wish to extract more from it - and we even support a growing class of individuals who contribute far less than they extract, happily.
Unless you're talking about the literal slavery that still happens in developing nations, in which case, there are less total slaves and orders of magnitude less slaves per capita than (I think close to) the majority of written history.
From my perspective you're moralizing against technology in the same silly way people moralize for it, and a significant portion of that is well captured with this one statement: (I'm hoping) the average suffering in the world has gone down. - If you make yourself ignorant to the positive effects of technical innovation and instead view it primarily as a mechanism of exploitation that "eventually very far from now _maybe_ brings benefits", that's no different than making yourself ignorant to the negative effects and viewing it as a mechanism of great benefit to which you should enrich yourself for bringing to the masses and "maybe hurts a few people but everyone benefits so much overall it doesn't matter".
I'll make my position very clear. Technology and innovation are the driving forces of quality of life improvements and are so obviously a moral good for society and mankind. However, innovation is never perfect, so it's necessary to have competent policy makers and governance structures that can regulate away the negative externalities of new systems that innovations can spawn, as rapidly and efficiently as possible.
If you disagree that technology and innovation are inherently an extremely obvious moral good, please look up the following graphs over the last 200 years, noting the year ranges of the industrial era and information age while looking at these graphs. 1. Life expectancy 2. Infant / Child Mortality 3. Extreme Poverty 4. Literacy Rates 5. Average years of schooling 6. Food Supply / Calories Per Person / Crop Yield / Famine Deaths
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#248It'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…
I find people in person are pretty welcoming of nuanced opinions.
Online if people even smell something they don’t like… it goes bad fast.
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parts of it (e.g. water consumption per query) are overblown. But the degree of data center buildout and resource use, if exponential growth just continues a little longer, is going to end up being a big number. AI datacenters are already stretching electrical power grids and increasing peaker power plant use. Data centers right now are about 5% of electricity use in the US. AI could easily double that share.
Yes, any major manufacturing ends up as a big number. It is still usually worth doing!
It's worth doing when the -true cost of resources- is represented in their price.
If it's not, then more of the thing ends up being done than is socially optimal.
E.g. artificially cheap agricultural water -> lots of water-heavy crops being produced like alfalfa and exported for less than the cost of the water.
I think we might disagree about the degree to this is true, but I think most of us can agree that the true cost of energy is not completely included in its price.
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"?
All of their open source work, facebook marketplace, messenger connecting people, low cost distribution for small business, crises and humanitarian tooling, abuse/spam/threat detection at scale, etc.