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The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

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Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#301

This was evident everywhere except within the AI industry itself. The rhetoric from many of the industry’s top leaders has been “this technology will eliminate millions of jobs, fundamentally reshape countless other jobs, and automate the use of lethal force, but we’re going to develop it anyways”. Many of the current economic woes, including mass layoffs, have been blamed on AI by the very executives conducting said…

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>> People hate AI because AI is on a trajectory to replace them and become better than a human. That is the fundamental reality.

Let’s explore this fundamental reality a bit. The “and” necessitates both parts of the clause be true, but would people hate AI if it became better than them but didn’t replace them? That’s an easy no; Big Blue and AlphaGo didn’t cause mass hatred, and machines have been broadly better than humans in some capacity for centuries - that’s literally why we build machines.

Would humans stop hating AI if it replaced them, but wasn’t able to become better than them? Again, no. So the second piece is both incorrect and unnecessary, and what we’re left with is “People hate AI because it’s on a trajectory to replace them,” which is accurate, but not exactly revelatory; many people have already come to this same conclusion, including in this very comment thread. So the good news about your face reality line is that you’ll find a lot of people already facing that direction alongside you.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my book, you are a hero if you sacrifice your own well-being for the utilitarian good of the public. Many people here would call Putin's assassin a hero, the important distinguishing factor is whether it's a clear societal good or bad. If it's unclear then it's assumed bad. I am not disagreeing with you here. But platitudes do nothing to convince people. You need to actually explain why the world is a better place…

Violence isn't going to give you the quick answer you think it will. Once you start shooting, everyone starts shooting. Bystanders get hit. Companies start defending their businesses with private armies. The economy collapses. We all lose. Countries high in political violence are the worst places in the world to live.

People who are desperate will be relatively happy with "we all lose" instead of "a few people win and everyone else loses"

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#304

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

The main critique of AI is that it's a dumb hallucinating parrot. It can't do genuine human quality work at all, outside of extremely narrow domains like basic translation and copyediting. Even for Q&A, while it can be useful by quickly accessing a huge storehouse of learned knowledge, the vulnerability to hallucinations means that human expert verification will always be required.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#305

This is a problem of misaligned incentives that echoes other waves of new technology. The arrival of the washing machine was not resisted, because it directly benefited people who could now move up to higher value and less difficult work. AI doesn't seem to be playing out that way.

> AI doesn't seem to be playing out that way.

Because it's even less useful than a washing machine. Unless you trust a frickin' humanoid robot doing your house chores, which is batshit insane as things stand.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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>> People hate AI because AI is on a trajectory to replace them and become better than a human. That is the fundamental reality. Let’s explore this fundamental reality a bit. The “and” necessitates both parts of the clause be true, but would people hate AI if it became better than them but didn’t replace them? That’s an easy no; Big Blue and AlphaGo didn’t cause mass hatred, and machines have been broadly better than…

>but would people hate AI if it became better than them but didn’t replace them? That’s an easy no;

Yes they will. Jealousy. But they'd never admit it. What are you proud of? What skill do you value and identify yourself with? Say AI did it 1000x better than you but some law was in place to prevent it from replacing you. You'd love that law, and you'd make up some excuse to to hate AI.

>Big Blue and AlphaGo didn’t cause mass hatred

Excuses. Just think a little rather then finding some obvious surface level reasoning that fits within your own bias. First nobody hates those things because it's only a select niche that takes pride in their chess or go skills. Those people will hate alphago if alphago was a direct challenge to their identity as a player. But laws are in place to prevent that as in tournaments only allow humans. Why are such laws in place? Because go and chess are just games. They produce no intrinsic value so it doesn't hurt the bottom line if you restrict AI in that case.

This isn't the case for programming and any other field out there that can be replaced by AI. Ai will be directly attacking a business skill you use to pay the rent and it is currently challenging my identity as a programmer. And laws to restrict this will be actively fought against because monetarily and utility wise there is actual real world benefits to AI.

But why do I even need to spell this out to you? You're not mentally deficient. You're not stupid. All of this is obvious. Why do I have to literally tell you why your example is biased when it is OBVIOUS. It's because you're lying to yourself. You subconsciously avoided the obvious reasoning above. You chose convenient rationale to fit the narrative YOU want. Nobody hates "alphago" lol, did you see that koreans guy face when alphago fucking dominated his ass? Come on bro.

That is the reality. And you are denying it. When there's two people in disagreement and one of them is lying to themselves... how do we know which one it is? The lie is so convincing that both people believe in it.

I'll tell you the best way to determine this. The best way is to see which persons reasoning aligns with their identity and biases. Which person is constructing a logical scaffold that is optimistic? Because lies are told to cover up the horrors of reality. Guess what? I'm a programmer. I hate AI. But I cannot lie to myself. You? Probably made up all kinds of lies about how you're not afraid of AI taking over your job cuz AI can't do this... or that... or whatever bs to help you sleep at night.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, companies will go for the third route: hire a company in India to launder AI. It has already worked out once with the offshoring wave.

This will still wind up with them paying UBI eventually

For the Indians?

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be going too far, as in your critiques assume the tech is further along than it actually is. There are three fundamental problems for mass AI adoption/AGI: 1. Lack of memory/continuity 2. Lack of agency 3. Lack of self-awareness Based on my understanding of the basic 'loop' of an LLM, solutions for these may be decades off or not possible. Which leads me to the fourth problem: 4. Lack of compute To ge…

I think people really confuse their imagination and expectations with reality. There's so much talk about AGI and mass layoffs. Then there is my experience. I was talking to Claude and ChatGPT, trying to fix an issue with a simple function in Rust, which is returning a boolean depending on day of week and time of day. The logic looked ok to me, but tests were failing. Notably, my real world data derived tests were su…

And if the current models really are so great, why do we need to have a massive hype-train for each time the number goes up 0.1?

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#309
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

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You mean 12k a year with free housing and free health insurance?

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#310
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

If companies are faced with the choice between: - employ you at 60k/yr - replace you with a machine that costs a lot of money, and also send you UBI of 60k/yr It should be obvious the latter is not an option that is ever going to happen.

The solution to the subsequent devaluation of labor, and ability for tech oligarchs to pocket the cash instead, will not be found in capitalism.

Unless we are all to become serfs, a new way to distribute resources needs to be on the table.

UBI is a salve, offered to keep victims of the system out of abject poverty. It is too little, too late.

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