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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

#281

Post by pixl97 »

nerdsniper wrote: post #63
ambicapter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.

When I was a kid, “AI” was quake 2 bots, starcraft pathfinding algorithms, and chessbot personalities. I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.

>old definition of AI

There was never any old definition AI that limited it to such a tiny set of capabilities.

AI is controversial because the term intelligent is controversial and covers so much.

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

#282

Post by bawolff »

em-bee wrote: post #271
cm2012 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While i agree with your general point, i'm not sure i agree with your example. i don't think a minority of muslims (or jews) are going to convince all resturants to stop serving pork, because bacon is too popular.

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

#283

Post by bensyverson »

ajam1507 wrote: post #278
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.

To me, slavery is an ethical issue and transcends morals, but setting that aside:

You have to follow your own moral compass and do what's workable. If you're compelled to take a stand, take a stand. Just know that you can't force other people to change their morals. People who follow this line of thought to its extreme end up killing people who disagree with them. This is how you get everything from anarchist bombings to civil wars.

Personally I think car culture is more damaging than data centers and the threat of super intelligence, but I'm not willing to kill anyone over any of it.

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

#284

Post by binary132 »

tedmiston wrote: post #258
Silagi wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I generalized the statement from one cloud to big public clouds categorically to show by hyperbole that ... what difference does it make?! [One can find analogous critiques of Azure, GCP, etc.] Last year, AWS did ≥ $100B in revenue across millions of customers. But where do you draw the line exactly? "Everyone who uses is " feels extreme.

I could even agree with “is problematic” although I don’t see it as black and white, but “is problematic and therefore doesn’t get to comment / needs to own this / did this” is definitely not a legitimate critique of the critical discourse.

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

#285

Post by [deleted] »

simonreiff wrote: post #172

To the author: You are so consumed, with absolute certainty, of the permanent and eternal correctness of your moral position, that you literally say you would rather throw away personal connections to human beings than be triggered by the presence of ideas or things. Please reconsider. I'm not even going to try to persuade you that you're wrong about AI because it isn't even relevant. The truth is that if you carry o…

[deleted]

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

#286

Post by indemnity »

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…

Try mentioning AI in a remotely positive light on Mastodon, e.g. just as a side comment about how it let you finally finish a side project or something cool, and you’ll get a wave of neckbeards swarm in to tell you they are blocking you, you are a bad person, killing the earth, fascist supporter, etc.

Very strange, but I’ve seen the same folks dog pile in for other causes, so I guess it’s just a part of the identity now.

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

#287

Post by nomdep »

thewebguyd wrote: post #87
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…

> 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…

[flagged]

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

#288

Post by nomdep »

skeledrew wrote: post #175
SoftTalker wrote: post #81

Earlier 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.

Can't exactly have a post-scarcity economy with the current dominant economic system in place. As long as a few are allowed to "own" the means of production and gate access to it, there will always be scarcity.

Like if any of those ideas had bring anything other than poverty, hunger, suffering, and millions of deaths.

We don’t get Star Trek post-scarcity by forcing everyone to do less, only by doing more. Creating more technology and creating (and consuming) more energy. Much more, near infinite amounts of it, that is what the replicator needs to create mass from energy.

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

#289

Post by elxr »

intended wrote: post #191
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…

If someone who has never had any major financial benefit from tech, but loved it all the same, criticizes AI, do they get a pass?

Depends what part of AI they say they don't agree with. Anyone with a reasonable, sound argument can give it a shot.

Is a 100% local, open-weight model that you only use for learning purposes / generating questions meant just for you the same thing as criticizing the use of "AI" in large corporations replacing workers?

How about DLSS 4 frame gen in a game? That's AI too, and pretty universally seen as neutral or positive by anyone who's aware of it.

How about AI assisting doctors scanning for cancers in medical checkups?

How about running google translate on a street sign when you're in a new country?

Folks gotta be more specific than just saying they're anti-AI, because what does that statement even mean in practice?

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

#290

Post by hahahacorn »

newaccountman2 wrote: post #269
hahahacorn wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quite a stretch. The open source stuff is nice and all, but I wouldn't say React, GraphQL, Cassandra, or any of the other stuff is "beneficial to humanity" lol wtf > facebook marketplace Craigslist exists, plus other startups were aiming to do that and one would have found its footing if not for Facebook marketplace. Either way, this doesn't make up for any of the negatives people ascribe to Facebook. > messenger con…

I am at least objective in my criticism. I'm not going to reply to 5 different emotionally charged strawman arguments, especially because I don't care to defend Meta.

If you're going to engage in discussion, at least try to interpret the other parties argument charitably. You're wasting both our time replying to the dumbest interpretation of what I said.

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