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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

#301

Post by Awoooooo »

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…

You know what you are

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

#302

Post by Awoooooo »

YoukaiCountry wrote: post #114
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.

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?

Dude we were having "actual conversations with our computers" ten years ago and weren't pretending it was AI because it fucking wasn't then, it was markov chains, oh and it's ADVANCED markov chains now.

Delusion.

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

#303

Post by Awoooooo »

helterskelter wrote: post #20

This is becoming a mainstream position for a number of reasons but I think the unifying concern across many demographics is the concern about the effects on power it will have. Nobody wants an omnipresent big brother in anybody's hands, and people are waking up to the fact that the infrastructure is already there without any real safeguards, all that's really needed is cheap intelligence to handle all the data.

The main reason is that almost everyone's experience of AI is that it has replaced something or someone that did the job better before AI. That means the experience that vast majority of people have with AI is that it has made things worse.

It's only the software devs with a different experience and they're over-represented in online comment sections. Also because the software devs have no lives and only talk to other software devs they're out of touch with the vast majority of people who fucking hate this shit now.

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

#304

Post by Awoooooo »

217 wrote: post #8

First ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment" GUYS PLEASE The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing? There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it

wrong

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

#305

Post by gitaarik »

morislz wrote: post #128
throwawaytwice wrote: post #11

Why should I feel bad for using AI when the people telling me not to use it all use phones and computers which are the result of exploitation somewhere in Africa to mine for the resources needed to make them.

Probably should feel as bad about it as you do for owning and using your phone. The world is unfair and will stay that way, but now with AI it'll probably just get worse. And if you only look out for yourself - fine, that might work, but all of it has consequences. If you use AI for coding you will most certainly have noticed already that your actual skills might have declined - at least that's the observation I made…

Or it gets better; every industrial revolution has made life for everyone better, not only the rich ones.

Coding skills will decline indeed, like math skills of bookkeepers declined when they started using computers. But other skills come in their place too.

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

#306

Post by gitaarik »

FloorEgg wrote: post #106
sealeck wrote: post #12

I think the issue with these kind of stances is that they are basically status quo bias; why don't you object to the computer itself, and thus refuse to write programs? After all: they were invented by the UK military in the pursuit of military goals (and much of their subsequent development was funded by the US military - see https://types.pl/@graydon/110648447694201698 - and the fact that ARPAnet, GPS, etc were all…

Being able to discern what is and isn't in our control helps tremendously in doing what is right and constructive. The fact that some people opt out of engaging with AI, I think is healthy for society as a whole. If that's within their control and they exercise their control to do what they think is right, then I commend them. That said, I do think there is a greater natural force at play, something involving entropy…

Yeah so therefore I think a positive attitude is all the more needed, where you see the potentials, see solutions instead of problems. But I feel most anti-AI people are just negative people seeing only problems and don't have any solutions to offer.

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

#308

Post by senordevnyc »

ryandrake wrote: post #196
senordevnyc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History has the most optimistic vibe imaginable, what are you talking about?? Look at where we are as a species right now, vs century ago, a millennium ago, ten thousand years ago! What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?

There is none, and that’s my point. Despite technological advances throughout history that made things easier to do and less scarce, over and over we keep the scarcity mindset and winner-takes-most economics around, funneling the majority of the value and benefits up to the few. At every point when some advancement could have greatly improved everyone’s lot in life, humanity chose to spread that improvement around to…

Nonsense. The median human is wildly better off than ever before.

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

#309

Post by cm2012 »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #275
krapp wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Especially now that we have magic boxes to answer any question and speak any language

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

#310

Post by juliendorra »

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…

"Our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal" It might be a recency bias, because the 19th and 20th were extremely polarized, politically… from entire nations split up on one issue, up to political assassination, civil wars… slavery, women’s vote, antisemitism, prohibition, civil rights, asylum, universal marriage, and much more.
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