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This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

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Re: This is not the future

#251

Post by chaseadam17 »

mat_b wrote: post #233
chaseadam17 wrote: post #218

Agree with OP. This reminds me of fast food in the 90s. Executives rationalized selling poison as "if I don't, someone else will" and they were right until they weren't. Society develops antibodies to harmful technology but it happens generationally. We're already starting to view TikTok the way we view McDonalds. But don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Most food innovation is net positive but fast food too…

Agree and disagree. It is also possible to take a step back and look at the very large picture and see that these things actually are somewhat inevitable. We do exist in a system where "if I don't do it first, someone else will, and then they will have an advantage" is very real and very powerful. It shapes our world immensely. So, while I understand what the OP is saying, in some ways it's like looking at a river of…

We are the levees in your metaphor and we have agency. The problem is not that one founder does something before another and gains an advantage. The problem is the millions of people who buy or use the harmful thing they create - and that we all have control over. If we continue down this path we'll end up at free will vs determinism and I choose to believe the future is not inevitable.

Re: This is not the future

#252

Post by Mithriil »

voxleone wrote: post #50

The author says>> "Not being in control of course makes people endlessy frustrated, but at the same time trying to wrestle control from the parasites is an uphill battle that they expect to lose, with more frustration as a result." While this reaction is understandable, it is difficult to feel sympathy when so few people are willing to invest the time and effort required to actually understand how these systems work…

> "Mastery, even partial, is one of the few genuine avenues toward agency."

Philosophical claims have been made around this point. See, for example, "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent", an essay by John Erskine.

So many problems would be solved if a fraction of people would be more inclined to understand what's in front of them.

Re: This is not the future

#253

Post by hklgny »

herpdyderp wrote: post #190
rng-concern wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment: Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level. Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperati…

On the other hand, I prefer playing video games against AI because human skill disparity almost always ruins PvP. Though really I simply prefer co-op.

I actually think this is the same point as who you’re responding to. If the human vs ai factor didn’t matter, you wouldn’t care if it was the human or ai on your co-op. The differences are subtle but meaningful and will always play a role in how we choose experiences

Re: This is not the future

#254

Post by delichon »

ben_w wrote: post #93
Juliate wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were this inevitable, would AI be pushed down our throats, against our will, against our own laws, even, so hard?

The industrial revolution was pushed down the throats of a lot of people who were sufficiently upset by the developments that they invented communism, universal suffrage*, modern* policing, health and safety laws, trade unions, recognisably modern* state pensions, the motor car (because otherwise we'd be knee-deep in horse manure), zoning laws, passports, and industrial-scale sewage pumping. I do wonder who the AI er…

> I do wonder who the AI era's version of Marx will be

Serena Butler.

Re: This is not the future

#255

Post by s08148692 »

The irony of naming this post "This is not the future" and leaving no room for the possibility that this is actually probably the future.

Whole post just reads as someone disgruntled at the state of the world and reeling that they aren't getting their way. Theres a toxic air of intellectual and moral superiority in that blog

Re: This is not the future

#256

Post by BoppreH »

Hot take, but I blame 90% of these problems on the internet's overreliance on funding from advertisement. It all flows from there:

1. To display ads is to sacrifice user experience. This is a slippery slope and both developers and users get used to it, which affects even ad-free services. Things like "yes/maybe later" become normal.

2. Ads are only displayed when the user visits the service directly. Therefore we cannot have open APIs, federation, alternative clients, or user customization.

3. The advertisement infrastructure is expensive. This has to be paid with more ads. Like the rocket equation, this eventually plateaus, but by then the software is bloated and cannot be funded traditionally anymore, so any dips are fatal. Constant churn.

4. Well targeted ads are marginally more profitable, therefore all user information is valuable. Cue an entire era of tracking, privacy violations, and psychological manipulation.

5. Advertiser don't want to be associated with anything remotely controversial, so the circle of acceptable content shrinks every year. The fringes become worse and worse.

6. The system only works with a very large number of users. It becomes socially expected to participate, and at the same time, no customer support is provided when things go wrong.

I'm fairly sure ads are our generation's asbestos or leaded gasoline, and would be disappointed if they are not largely banned in the future.

Re: This is not the future

#257

Post by 1970-01-01 »

Ads are inevitable assuming a capitalistic fueled Internet continues. If you can remember the early WWW, you know ads weren't there, but e-commerce existed in a rudimentary fashion. You couldn't buy anything by clicking a mouse, but you could go and download a catalog or some shareware with a phone number during installation for the sales team to give you a license key.

Re: This is not the future

#258

Post by Ritewut »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

Tech artist here so I hit a middle ground.

> I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously

>But somehow if a person “influenced” by people, ideas, art in less efficient way almost we applaud that because what else, invent the wheel again forever?

I understand AI perfectly fine, thanks. I just reject the illegal vacuuming up of everyones' art for corporations while things like sampling in music remain illegal. This idea that everything must be efficient comes from the bowels of Silicon Valley and should die.

> However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being against the internet, industrialization, print press or mobile phones. The idea that AI is anything less than paradigm shifting, or even revolutionary is weird to me. I can only say being against this is either it’s self-interest or not able to grasp it.

Again, the problem is less the tech itself and the corporations who have control of it. Yes, I'm against corporations gobbling up everyones' data for ads and AI surveillance. I think you might be the one who doesn't understand that not everything is roses and their might be more weeds in the garden than flowers.

Re: This is not the future

#259

Post by jamesjyu »

mghackerlady wrote: post #237
fennecfoxy wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Art is an expression of human emotion Yet humans are the ones enacting an AI for art (of some kind). Is not therefore not art because even though a human initiated the process, the machine completed it? If you argue that, then what about kinetic sculptures, what about pendulum painting, etc? The artist sets them in motion but the rest of the actions are carried out by something nonhuman. And even in a fully autonomo…

With a kinetic structure, someone went through the effort to design it to do that. With AI art, sure you ask it to do something but a human isn't involved in the creative process in any capacity beyond that

This is a very reductionist claim about how people use AI in their art process. The truth is that the best artists use AI in a sort of dance between the human and machine. But always, the human is the prime mover through a process of iteration.

Re: This is not the future

#260

Post by mat_b »

chaseadam17 wrote: post #251
mat_b wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree and disagree. It is also possible to take a step back and look at the very large picture and see that these things actually are somewhat inevitable. We do exist in a system where "if I don't do it first, someone else will, and then they will have an advantage" is very real and very powerful. It shapes our world immensely. So, while I understand what the OP is saying, in some ways it's like looking at a river of…

We are the levees in your metaphor and we have agency. The problem is not that one founder does something before another and gains an advantage. The problem is the millions of people who buy or use the harmful thing they create - and that we all have control over. If we continue down this path we'll end up at free will vs determinism and I choose to believe the future is not inevitable.

We aren't the real levees though. The system we live in is. Yes, a few people will push back and try to change the momentum to a different direction but that's painful and we have enough going on each day that most people don't have time for that (let alone agree on the direction). Structural change is the only real way to guide the river.
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