Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 430 posts

Re: This is not the future

#331

Post by [deleted] »

wccrawford wrote: post #223
phreezie wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it matter? Like how does it matter? Yes, it matters to me because art is something deeply human, and I don't want to consume art made by a machine. It doesn't matter if it's fun and beautiful, it's just that I don't want to. It's like other things in life I try to avoid, like buying sneakers made by children, or sign-up to anything Meta-owned.

That's pretty much what they said about photographs at first. I don't think you'll find a lot of people who argue that there's no art in photography now. Asking a machine to draw a picture and then making no changes? It's still art. There was a human designing the original input. There was human intention. And that's before they continue to use the AI tools to modify the art to better match their intention and vision…

[deleted]

Re: This is not the future

#333

Post by nickff »

nostrademons wrote: post #303
hyperadvanced wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, game theory is not a predictive model but an explanatory/general one. Additionally not everything is a game, as in statistics, not everything has a probability curve. They can be applied speculatively to great effect, but they are ultimately abstract models.

You can use it for either predictive or explanatory purposes. In the early ('00s) years of Google it was common to diagram out the incentives of all the market participants; this led to such innovations like the use of the second-price VCG auction [1] for ad sales that now make over a third of a trillion dollars per year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80%9...

Google has now (mostly?) transitioned to using first-price, and more complicated (opaque) auction-style pricing for many of its advertising products.

https://blog.google/products/admanager/simplifying-programma...

Re: This is not the future

#334

Post by ericmcer »

jgalecki wrote: post #94

This post rhymes with a great quote from Joseph Weizenbaum: "The myth of technological and political and social inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. Its service is to remove responsibility from the shoulders of everyone who truly believes in it. But, in fact, there are actors!"

That reminds me of water use in California. We frequently have droughts, and the messaging is always to reduce water usage. I have friends who turn the shower off while soaping up just to save a few gallons out of civic duty. Meanwhile a few companies are using more water than every residential user combined to grow alfalfa, half of which gets shipped overseas. Like ban one company from selling livestock feed to Asia/Saudi Arabia and the drought for 40 million people is solved.

but people just throw their hands up "looks like another drought this year! Thats California!".

Re: This is not the future

#335

Post by schubidubiduba »

jjice wrote: post #55
tolerance wrote: post #16

This is high quality blog post! I’m all for a good argument that appears to challenge the notion of technological determinism. > Every choice is both a political statement and a tradeoff based on the energy we can spend on the consequences of that choice. Frequently I’ve been opposed to this sort of sentiment. Maybe it’s me, the author’s argument, or a combination of both, but I’m beginning to better understand how t…

I really don't like the "everything is political" sentiment. Sure, lots of things are or can be, but whenever I see this idea, it usually comes from people who have a very specific mindset that's leaning further in one direction on a political spectrum and is pushing their ideology. To clarify, I don't think pushing an ideology you believe in by posting a blog post is a bad thing. That's your right! I just think I ha…

I believe that one point of the author precisely is that there seems to be no room for middle ground left in the tech space:

Resisting the status quo of hostile technology is an endless uphill battle. It requires continous effort, mostly motivated by political or at least ideological reasons.

Not fighting it is not the same as being neutral, because not fighting it supports this status quo. It is the conscious or unconscious surrender to hostile systems, whose very purpose is to lull you into apathy through convenience.

Re: This is not the future

#336

Post by JuniperMesos »

groby_b wrote: post #148
unformedelta wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you don't intend this, but I intuit that you imply that Game theory's inevitability leads to the inevitability of many claims the author's claims aren't inevitable. To me, this inevitability only is guaranteed if we assume a framing of non-cooperative game theory with idealized self-interested actors. I think cooperative game theory[1] better models the dynamics of the real world. More important than thinking…

I'll just take the very first example on the list, Internet-enabled beds. Absolutely a cooperative game - nobody was forced to build them, nobody was forced to finance them, nobody was forced to buy them. this were all willing choices all going in the same direction. (Same goes for many of the other examples)

There's a slight caveat here that you are sometimes forced to effectively buy and use internet-connected smart devices if you live in rented housing and the landlord of your unit provides it. This is probably not an issue for an internet-connected bed, because conventionally a bed isn't something a landlord provides, but you might get forced into using a smart fridge, since that's typically a landlord-provided item.

I lived in a building some years ago there where the landlord bragged about their Google Nest thermostat as an apartment amenity - I deliberately never connected it to my wifi while I lived there (and more modern smart devices connect to ambient cell phone networks in order to defeat this attack). In the building I currently live in, there are a bunch of elevators and locks that can be controlled by a smartphone app (so, something is gonna break when AWS goes down). I noticed this when I was initially viewing the apartment and I considered it a downside - and ultimately chose to move there anyway because every rental unit has downsides and ultimately you have to pick a set of compromises you can live with.

I view this as mostly a problem of housing scarcity - if housing units are abundant, it's easier for a person to buy thier own home and then not put internet-managed smart furniture in it; or at least have more leverage against landlords. But the region I live in is unfortunately housing-constrained.

Re: This is not the future

#337

Post by ike2792 »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

I work at a company trying very hard to incorporate AI into pretty much everything we do. The people pushing it tend to have little understanding of the technology, while the more experienced technical people see a huge mismatch between its advertised benefits and actual results. I have yet to see any evidence that AI is "paradigm shifting" much less "revolutionary." I would be curious to hear any data or examples you have backing those claims up.

In regards to why tech people should be skeptical of AI: technology exists solely to benefit humans in some way. Companies that employ technology should use it to benefit at least one human stakeholder group (employees, customers, shareholders, etc). So far what I have seen is that AI has reduced hiring (negatively impacting employees), created a lot of bad user interfaces (bad for customers), and cost way more money to companies than they are making off of it (bad to shareholders, at least in the long run). AI is an interesting and so far mildly useful technology that is being inflated by hype and causing a lot of damage in the process. Whether it becomes revolutionary like the Internet or falls by the wayside like NFTs and 3D TV's is unknowable at this point.

Re: This is not the future

#338

Post by olelele »

"Talking to chatbots instead of public servants is not inevitable."

I firmly believe this is where people will get the most annoyed in the long run. Not having any public facing human beings will lose people.

Re: This is not the future

#339

Post by upboundspiral »

nostrademons wrote: post #38

I think a more accurate and more useful framing is: Game theory is inevitable . Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that y…

This argument has the unspoken premise that in large part, people's core identity is reacting to external influences. I believe that while responding to influences is part of human existence, the richness of the individual transcends such an explanation for all their actions. The phrase "game theory is inevitable" reads like the perspective of an aristocrat looking down on the masses - enough vision to see the interplay of things, and enough arrogance to assume they can control it.

Re: This is not the future

#340

Post by nunez »

I sympathize with this so deeply:

> "Requiring a smartphone to exist in society is not inevitable."

Seeing smartphones morph from super neat computer/camera/music players in our pockets to unfiltered digital nicotine is depressing to think about.

Notifications abuse is _entirely_ to blame, IMO.

Every app that you think of when you think of "addictive" apps heavily relies on the notifications funnel (badges, toasts, dings) for engagement. I'm disappointed that we as a society have normalized unabated casino-tier attention grabs from our most personal computing devices.

Growth through free, ad-subsidized tiers also helped create this phenomenon, but that strategy wouldn't be nearly as effective without delivery via notifications.

Big AI (more like LLM/Stable Diffusion as a Service) is going to prey on that to levels never seen before, and I'm definitely not here for it.

Obligatory end-of-post anecdote: My phone stays home most of the time when I work out. I only bring my Apple Watch.

My gym bag has an iPad mini and a BOOX eReader, but I only use the iPad to do Peloton stretches and listen to KEXP Archives, as those can't be done from my watch (though I'm working on something for the latter).

Using this setup has given me a lot of opportunities to soak in my surroundings during rest periods. Most of that is just seeing people glued to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. TV addiction on steroids, in other words.

Thanks to this, people like me who use their phones as tools are forced to carry huge, heavy black slabs because small phones aren't viable and, as market analysis is showing, thin and lightweight slabs won't cut it either.

Post reply on HN