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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

#271

Post by em-bee »

cm2012 wrote: post #227
bawolff wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

a tiny minority can't but somewhere between 10% or a quarter is enough to pressure the rest to support them. for example to force the majority of restaurants to make sure their food is halal, because otherwise muslims would not eat there. or to port your software to run on macs, etc...

it depends of course on the cost of compliance. halal food is fine, because everyone can eat it. a minority of vegans could not force restaurants to stop serving meat because that would in turn exclude the majority of meat eaters.

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

#272

Post by helterskelter »

skeledrew wrote: post #235
helterskelter wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This, but we need to prevent as much of this data from being collected in the first place. All our traffic cameras for instance are being coopted into a massive surveillance network with no oversight, but this network doesn't exist if you don't have traffic cameras in the first place.

I propose the J Edgar Hoover heuristic. Would X be something you'd want Hoover to have access to? If not, then don't build it.

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

#273

Post by em-bee »

dist-epoch wrote: post #95
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.

It's not that simple, some principles are more principled than others. Would you be friend with Goebbels, knowing he has some different stances than you on some subjects?

yes, if if there is a chance to show him how he is wrong. see daryl davis.

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

#274

Post by tptacek »

queenkjuul wrote: post #266
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.

Ah yeah, lowly web dev me, self-taught with no capital, is responsible for the choices of faceless corporations and sinister magnates I've never worked for nor interacted with nor influenced in even an infinitesimal way. I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. But because I'm a programmer at all, it's partially my fault?

Like everyone else in the industry, you're almost certainly the beneficiary of an industry predicated on automating people's jobs away. Your labor is fungible. Your comp is based on supply and demand. Whatever work you do, you are subsidized in large part by the demands of projects that improve productivity elsewhere in the workforce.

I'm not saying you personally set out to take anyone's job away. But our field is unusually well compensated because of its function in the broader marketplace. The point is that moralisms like "fault" don't operate here.

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

#275

Post by xyzzy123 »

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…

From the perspective of pre-history, anyone living in a western country is in a post-scarcity society.

Practically no one starves. The murder rate is down by crazy numbers. I'm not sure how much of a problem racism was at that time, but you wouldn't have had many chances to meet people from different haplogroups in any case.

The abundance created by industrial society is not distributed "evenly" or "fairly" but the baseline shift is insane.

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

#276

Post by [deleted] »

strueman wrote: post #190
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…

[flagged]

[deleted]

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

#277

Post by pixl97 »

Glawen wrote: post #270
thewebguyd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now. Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying…

> I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now. I grew up in a small village, 300 people. There you learn to accept your neighbor political rant, otherwise you're socialy dead and that's a pretty bad place to be. I learned to dissociate the person from its opinions. I'm living now in the city, where you don't n…

>are more open minded than city dwellers.

I mean it's a bit difficult to be open minded to someone that would gladly have you killed.

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

#278

Post by ajam1507 »

bensyverson wrote: post #99

This article is representative of what's wrong in internet culture. It's fine to take a moral stance, but it's not reasonable to expect others to agree with and align with your personal morals. I've been vegetarian for over 30 years, on moral (environmental) grounds. It does put me in the minority. But I don't expect others to change their behavior. If you want to avoid AI, avoid AI. If you feel strongly enough that…

Having a libertarian stance on morality is great unless its actually important to take a stand. It's the difference between "I would never own slaves" and being an abolitionist. I think it's pretty reasonable to expect others to agree and align with my personal morals around slavery.

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

#279

Post by xg15 »

yallpendantools wrote: post #158
YoukaiCountry wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?

I think it's not so much the technical scope that makes it "not the AI you read of as a child" but the societal impact. AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails. Cue the quote about AI supposedly about taking over the boring tasks so we can spend more time making art, achieving self-actualization. The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myse…

Maybe also whether AI is a "person" or not? A prominent theme of AI in fiction was discussion whether an AI can have a consciousness, can be considered to be an individual, etc - with author and reader usually being on the "yes, they are a person" side.

Even if not, interesting AIs were at least interesting characters in a story sense (e.g. C3P0).

Now we're dealing with effectively the opposite - something that looks and behaves like a person but is decidedly not one. If you grew up with all the scifi about sympathetic (or at least charismatic) AI characters, this is probably sobering.

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

#280

Post by ajam1507 »

cm2012 wrote: post #227
bawolff wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

The history of social pressure would disagree with you.
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