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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

#321

Post by phil21 »

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…

> AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails.

Depends on which sci-fi and/or literature you've been reading, I suppose?

Plenty written on these subjects where the future does not turn into some techno-utopia. And I've always found these takes on the subject much more compatible with the human condition as I've personally observed it in practice.

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

#322

Post by mplanchard »

arvid-lind wrote: post #312
thunky wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think your analogy fits. Tech is directly responsible for automation, which impacts jobs. Tech workers didn't cry moral outrage then. But mow that tech may automate their job, suddenly it's evil.

My point was that the world we have is here, for better or worse, and "reaping what we sowed" seems like a wildly reductive and self-defeating interpretation. There's no way this guy who says he never worked directly on automation-related tech should feel like he's banking bad karma by earning a living doing the best he can. I'm assuming that not working in automation was a conscious decision, like I've also been ver…

I think you’re objectively right, and I try to maintain that perspective. But, I think of this karma not necessarily in a negative way, just kind of like the chickens coming home to roost for us all.

I’m (and presumably many of us are) feeling the destabilizing effects of my industry now in a similar way to how many other professions have felt its effects before. Given our industry’s impact on society, it’s important that we feel this effect directly, so that we can do a better job of empathizing with the industries we’re “disrupting.” Whether or not I have personally participated in those aspects of the industry, I share inescapably in its overall karma, which is why it’s important to not just opt out of the parts of it I feel are immoral, but try to push for it to be better where I can.

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

#324

Post by queenkjuul »

phil21 wrote: post #320
queenkjuul wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. I think this would be very difficult to do as a web-dev. The web itself is a form of global scale automation in-itself. I am also a self-taught tech nerd. I have not "directly" worked on any specific automation project in terms of "come put this group out of work" - but I can't think of a single project I worked on that wasn't making current processes…

It's perfectly possible for software to enable people to do things they couldn't do before without putting anyone out of work. I'm sorry you're struggling to imagine such a thing.

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

#325

Post by queenkjuul »

marcosdumay wrote: post #317
queenkjuul wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the West has yet to have their socialist revolutions

What's "the West"? UK an Germany practically invented the concept, and the US practically wrote the manual on how to make a welfare state.

Hilarious

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

#326

Post by tptacek »

phil21 wrote: post #319
w29UiIm2Xz wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that. But now, it is not obvious what 'trading up' in this situation is. There was optionality: upskill and increase your compensation. Now, there may be no opportunity to upskill. And that is a meaningfully different environment. The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living (and many of…

> Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that. This is precisely the karma that is coming to us as a group. Because of this sort of stuff. No, a 50 year old trade worker cannot "trade up" in any realistic sense. That's idiotic on it's face. And that also ignores that many folks don't want to trade up because they get satisfaction in what they do - just like some tech workers do.…

The exact same thing has happened with IPR.

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

#327

Post by tptacek »

mplanchard wrote: post #322
arvid-lind wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that the world we have is here, for better or worse, and "reaping what we sowed" seems like a wildly reductive and self-defeating interpretation. There's no way this guy who says he never worked directly on automation-related tech should feel like he's banking bad karma by earning a living doing the best he can. I'm assuming that not working in automation was a conscious decision, like I've also been ver…

I think you’re objectively right, and I try to maintain that perspective. But, I think of this karma not necessarily in a negative way, just kind of like the chickens coming home to roost for us all. I’m (and presumably many of us are) feeling the destabilizing effects of my industry now in a similar way to how many other professions have felt its effects before. Given our industry’s impact on society, it’s important…

Virtually everybody in the industry is a participant in the impacts our industry has on the broader economy!

This isn't a nit. It changes the way you have to look at this. You can't say "we need to better feel the impacts IT has on the broader workforce, therefore I should avoid working on things that automate jobs away". So long as you take anything resembling a market salary anywhere, you're supplying labor to the system that does that.

Your options therefore are:

* Adopt an ethical stance that doesn't intrinsically penalize work that increases global productivity and thus exerts downward pressure on labor.

* Do work that somehow works against that pressure, for instance by donating 20-40% of your compensation to labor causes, or something like that.

* Leave the industry.

I don't look at this quandry and see an ethical imperative; I look at it and see a broken ethical calculation. From that observation, I get to: "I should shut up about things that impact employment for software developers, because there's nothing intrinsically bad about that."

(Whether or not developers, or dockworkers, come out on net positive or negative is a separable question.)

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

#328

Post by mlyle »

Schmerika wrote: post #315
mlyle wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't think your moral stance is the correct one That's not what's asserted. The title is "To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast" But the reality is "To have his moral stance is to be a self-imposed outcast".

Yes, he thinks his moral stance is the correct one, and lives by it. ... And?

A is an indefinite article.

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

#329

Post by phil21 »

queenkjuul wrote: post #324
phil21 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. I think this would be very difficult to do as a web-dev. The web itself is a form of global scale automation in-itself. I am also a self-taught tech nerd. I have not "directly" worked on any specific automation project in terms of "come put this group out of work" - but I can't think of a single project I worked on that wasn't making current processes…

It's perfectly possible for software to enable people to do things they couldn't do before without putting anyone out of work. I'm sorry you're struggling to imagine such a thing.

As opposed to hiring someone to do it? Or rather, that software not competing with the wider market as a whole? Those areas are exceedingly small in the web-dev space. Or even technology as a whole.

I recently used AI to make me a custom song for a silly thing. It put no one out of work and I'd not hire someone to make such a thing. But the fact the tech exists to enable such a thing means its absolutely putting musicians out of work. My trivial usage of the technology is part of what enables it to exist at all and put others out of work. Those devs probably point to things I use it for to pretend it doesn't impact anyone negatively. But what I did with it makes using it for stuff like a 30s advertising jingle even more trivial.

My very first web-dev work in the late 90's to enable a pet store to sell their wares on-line absolutely put folks out of work, even though I could have easily seen it as it enabling a small company to do something they could not have done before.

Same goes for my first "real job" where I was debugging Java Applets for an expense management company. This was in direct competition with the existing industry that did it via paper receipts and phone calls. It put massive numbers of folks out of work if you zoom out to the larger industry, while also enabling many other folks to do things they never could haven even thought to do before.

There are extremely small use-cases along the margins where you won't be using technology that directly competes with an existing industry, I can certainly imagine them but you'd have to go extremely out of your way to ensure you are only in these spaces. I will certainly admit it is unlikely but possible to find a way to make a living in these edge cases while still working within the IT space.

As a hobby? Sure. Easy. Making a living as a web-dev at it over a longtime career? I do find it very difficult to imagine - since that's where the money comes from to pay overhead such as IT folks and programmers.

As an industry ? IT (and especially web tech over the past 30 years) exists to make things more efficient and put entire categories of folks out of work.

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

#330

Post by CamperBob2 »

okeuro49 wrote: post #316
CamperBob2 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Really not intelligent," yet capable of taking gold at international math and programming competitions.

The ability to solve maths problems still doesn't mean it is intelligent. It doesn't know what it is doing.

Neither do we.
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