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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

351–360 of 467 posts

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#351
post #161

> To think that with enough compute we can code consciousness is like thinking that with enough rainbows one of them will have a pot of gold at its end. What does consciousness have to do with AGI or the point(s) the article is trying to make? This is a distraction imo.

Consciousness is a physical phenomenon; rainbows, their ends, and pots of gold at them are not.

I'm well aware that many people are wrong about consciousness and have been misled by Searle, Chalmers, Nagel, et. al. Numbers like 55% are argumentum ad populum and are completely irrelevant. The sample space matters ... I've been to the "[Towards a] Science of Consciousness" conferences and they are full of cranks and loony tunes, and even among respectable intelligent philosophers of mind there is little knowledge or understanding of neuroscience, often proudly so. These philosophers should read Arthur Danto's introduction to C.L. Hardin's "Color for Philosophers". I've partied with David Chalmers--fun guy, very bright, but has done huge damage to the field. Roger Penrose likewise--a Nobel Prize winning physicist but his knowledge of the brain comes from that imbecile Stuart Hameroff. The fact remains that consciousness is a physical function of physical brains--collections of molecules--and can definitely be the result of computation--this isn't an "assumption", it's the result of decades of study and analysis. e.g., people who think that Searle's Chinese Room argument is valid have not read Larry Hauser's PhD thesis ("Searle's Chinese Box: The Chinese Room Argument and Artificial Intelligence") along with a raft of other criticism utterly debunking it (including arguments from Chalmers).

> It's an analogy.

And I pointed out why it's an invalid one -- that was the whole point of my comment.

> But just like the pot of gold, that might be a false assumption.

But it's not at all "just like the pot of gold". Rainbows are perceptual phenomena, their perceived location changes when the observer moves, they don't have "ends", and there certainly aren't any pots of gold associated with them--we know for a fact that these are "false assumptions"--assumptions that no one makes except perhaps young children. This is radically different from consciousness and computation, even if it were the case that somehow one could not get consciousness from computation. Equating or analogizing them this way is grossly intellectually dishonest.

> Someone sees computing, assuming consciousness is at the end of it, so they think fi there were more computing, there would be more likelihood of consciousness.

Utter nonsense.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#352
> Best case: we’re in a bubble. Worst case: the people profiting most know exactly what they’re doing.

The article literally starts with hyperbole and not being charitable at all. I'm sure there are many arguments for why AI will bring doom and gloom, but outright being dishonest in the first 7 words of the article will put off the people you actually want to read this article.

What happened to well-research and well-argued points of views? Where you take good faith arguments into account, and you don't just gaslight and strawman your way into some easy to make points for the purpose of being "sharable" on social media?

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#354
This recentralization trend was always going to happen and was inevitable anyway because of the dynamics and economics of content deliver, medium enhancements and market expectations. Even before the AI revolution, I foresaw a recentralization: fat servers, thin clients - so it was inevitable.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#355
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are they terrible?

They boil stuff but take up much more space than a kettle.

They warm up things that a) I don't want to put in a kettle and b) don't want to put in a dedicated pot to put on the stove.

Like the remainder of the soup i made yesterday that I've put in a china bowl in the fridge. I was able to eat warm soup out of that bowl without requiring to make any other dishes dirty. Pretty convenient if you ask me.

Bonus: you can take a cherry tomato or a single grape and make a small plasma arc in the microwave. Pretty cool trick to impress and scare people at house parties.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#356
Independently on the hypotesys/conspiracy that the big investors and big tech don't actually believe in AI, the measurable outcome the OP is making remains the same: very few people will end up owning a big chunk of the natural resources, and it will not matter if they will be used to power AI or for anything else.

Perhaps govrenments should add clauses on the contracts they make to avoid this big power imbalance from happening.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#357

I had a thought about AI - suppose they are successful at making software engineers obsolete - not totally but enough that the field becomes another moderately paying shitty job only done by people who couldn't figure out what they wanted to do or who are very passionate about some obscure thing for some reason - like geology for example, instead of a meal ticket to the upper middle class and a well-paying career. Th…

Fundamentally I think the job of engineer is to translate a business or real life scenario into logic. This is true for any kind of engineer, and is not restricted to software.

I held and continue to hold that software engineer shouldn't be constrained to any specific language. And extrapolate to the entire engineering field, the engineering profession will continue to exist because to first translate a business or real life scenario into logic, you would need to describe it accurately - the rest of the translation is rote work. That describing things accurately is a skill I see most common (but still not common enough) among engineers, even if that is done in English.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#358
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you go to yandex, you can see that the russian mafia makes good money with trackers What's the business model though? Most Russian torrents are about giving away copyrighted stuff for free.

Have you ever seen what kind of ads they run?

No. Too many ad blockers.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#359
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another major use case for it is enabling students to more easily cheat on their homework. Which is why it is probably going to end up putting Chegg out of business.

I am shocked when I talk to college kids about AI these days. I try to explain stuff to them like regurgitating the training data, context window limits, and confabulation. They stick their fingers in their ears and say "LA LA LA LA it does my homework for me nothing else matters LA LA LA LA i can't hear you" They really do not care about the Turing Test. Today's LLMs pass the "snowed my teaching assistant test" and…

These kids are only in school to get a meal ticket to white-collar job interviews. AI frees them to be honest about their intentions, rather than pretend for long enough to stumble their way into learning something.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#360
post #89

The use case for AI is spam.

Another major use case for it is enabling students to more easily cheat on their homework. Which is why it is probably going to end up putting Chegg out of business.

AI brought “let someone else do it for you” cheating to the middle class, no longer the domain of wealthy flunkies.
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