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AI optimism is a class privilege

joshcollinsworth.com

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Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#41

Post by tptacek »

Wilder7977 wrote: post #23
tptacek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the logic of this post will be incoherent in a world where AI has replaced software jobs wholesale. You have to pick a lane. Is it so effective that it (and the labor market more broadly) needs to be aggressively regulated, or it not very useful for anything but trolling? It can't be both.

This assumes every decision-maker is a rational actor. Just today an executive was rambling about "quantum-empowered AI". These are the people who take decisions about firing workers. It is entirely possible that AI will replace many jobs while being useless (at achieving what those workers do). At least in the short-medium period. We would live in a post-scarcity utopia if big economic decisions were taken based on…

I'm interested in how you can tell an industry-wide job displacement story about AI, where AI isn't actually doing the job, that isn't a just-so story.

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#42

Post by antonly »

delichon wrote: post #24

Unpopular opinion: the reverse. God created men, but Sam {Colt, Altman} made them equal. Commoditizing physical or intellectual power makes them more accessible to lower classes, and keeping them more expensive protects class privilege.

How does it help equalise, if the commodity is sold "at market value" by the richest, and all intellectual input is immediately fed back into the tool. Looks at best like a weapon to supress

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#43

Post by petercooper »

> AI optimism requires believing that you … are not among those who will be driven to psychosis, to violence, or even to suicide by LLM usage. At the very least, this means you feel secure in your own mental health

This has echoes of moral panic to me. We hear about mental health crises triggered by LLMs in the media because they’re novel, uncommon and the stories grab attention. The modern equivalent of video games cause violence, or jazz is corrupting the youth?

I’ll concede AI has many perils, and I doubt we’ve even broken the surface of it yet, but I don’t think user psychosis is either now, or going to be, a common one.

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#44

Post by abeppu »

nomdep wrote: post #10

(I feel that I write a comment like this every few years) The author catalog of harms is real. But it's worth noting that nearly identical catalogs were compiled for every major technological shift in modern history. The Internet destroyed print journalism, local retail, and enabled cyberbullying and mass surveillance. If we applied the same framework used here, Internet optimism in 2005 was also a form of "class pri…

> but the author does advocates from a position of "class privilege": of having access to good lawyers, good doctors, and good schools already, and not feeling the urgency of tools that might extend those things to people who don't

I dunno I think you can also take a really dim view of whether society as currently structured is set up to use AI to make any of those things more accessible, or better.

In education, certainly we've seen large tech companies give away AI to students who then use it to do their work. Simultaneously teachers are sold AI-detection products which are unreliable at best. Students learn less by e.g. not actually doing the reading or writing, and teachers spend more of their time pointlessly trying to catch the very common practice.

In medicine, in my most recent job search I talked to companies selling AI solutions both to insurers and to healthcare providers, to more quickly prepare filings to send to the other. I think the amount of paperwork per patient is just going to go up, with bots doing most of the actual form-filling, but the proportion of medical procedures that gets denied will be mostly unchanged.

I am not especially familiar with the legal space, but given the adversarial structure of many situations, I'm inclined to expect that AI will allow firms to shower each other in a paperwork, most of which will not be read by a human on either side. Clients may pay for a similar or higher number of billable hours.

Even if the technology _works_ in the sense of understanding the context and completing tasks autonomously, it may not work for _society_.

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#45

Post by nicoburns »

small_model wrote: post #38
jdross wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new robot demos from Unitree make me wonder how many classes of unskilled labor are about to be automated (garbage collection, laundry & dishes, pothole repairs, last mile delivery, simple food preparation…) Skilled labor still has some legs.

Can't wait for silent robots to collect the garbage, human ones seem to enjoy making as much racket as they can.

There are already human-operated robots that collect garbage. Things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pl9vRCC6V0. If the automated robots end up being anything like that, I wouldn't expect them to be silent.

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#46

Post by akoboldfrying »

georgemcbay wrote: post #25
nomdep wrote: post #10

(I feel that I write a comment like this every few years) The author catalog of harms is real. But it's worth noting that nearly identical catalogs were compiled for every major technological shift in modern history. The Internet destroyed print journalism, local retail, and enabled cyberbullying and mass surveillance. If we applied the same framework used here, Internet optimism in 2005 was also a form of "class pri…

> The author catalog of harms is real. But it's worth noting that nearly identical catalogs were compiled for every major technological shift in modern history. I think both the scale (how many industries will be impacted effectively simultaneously) and speed of disruption that could be caused by AI makes it very different from anything we have seen before.

I think it will be big, but I don't think it's bigger than the automation of manufacturing that began during the Industrial Revolution.

Think about the physical objects in the room you're in right now. How many of them were made from start to finish by human hands? Maybe your grandmother knitted the woollen jersey you're wearing -- made from wool shorn using electric shears. Maybe a clay bowl your kid made in a pottery class on the mantelpiece. Anything else?

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#47

Post by dogmayor »

d_burfoot wrote: post #9

> they mimic and amplify the inherent racism present in their own training data LLMs turn out to be biased against white men: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/me7wFrkEtMbkzXGJt/race-and-g... > When present, the bias is always against white and male candidates across all tested models and scenarios. This happens even if we remove all text related to diversity.

Important sentences immediately before the ones you quote.

> For our evaluation, we inserted names to signal race / gender while keeping the resume unchanged. Interestingly, the LLMs were not biased in the original evaluation setting, but became biased (up to 12% differences in interview rates) when we added realistic details like company names (Meta, Palantir, General Motors), locations, or culture descriptions from public careers pages.

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#48

Post by [deleted] »

jdross wrote: post #26
antonvs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption in your comment is that those changes were all net good. In hindsight though, the automobile has had possibly existential costs for humanity, the internet has provided most benefit to those who most abuse its power, and so on. In the end, it doesn’t seem as though you’ve actually made any sort of case.

The set of people who believe the automobile (or the Internet) are net negatives taken as a whole for society is extremely small, for good reason

[deleted]

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#49

Post by elzbardico »

petercooper wrote: post #43

> AI optimism requires believing that you … are not among those who will be driven to psychosis, to violence, or even to suicide by LLM usage. At the very least, this means you feel secure in your own mental health This has echoes of moral panic to me. We hear about mental health crises triggered by LLMs in the media because they’re novel, uncommon and the stories grab attention. The modern equivalent of video games…

Well, maybe one day, there’ll be a situation justifying a moral panic.

We can’t simply dispose of an argument just because it smells in a particular way to us.

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#50

Post by marginalia_nu »

Wilder7977 wrote: post #23
tptacek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the logic of this post will be incoherent in a world where AI has replaced software jobs wholesale. You have to pick a lane. Is it so effective that it (and the labor market more broadly) needs to be aggressively regulated, or it not very useful for anything but trolling? It can't be both.

This assumes every decision-maker is a rational actor. Just today an executive was rambling about "quantum-empowered AI". These are the people who take decisions about firing workers. It is entirely possible that AI will replace many jobs while being useless (at achieving what those workers do). At least in the short-medium period. We would live in a post-scarcity utopia if big economic decisions were taken based on…

Seems to be what is happening in a lot of the places it's encroaching.

AI journalism is strictly worse than having a human research and write the text, but it's also orders of magnitude much cheaper. You see prompt fragments and other blatant AI artifacts in news articles almost every day. So we get newspapers that have the same shape as they used to, but that don't fulfill their purpose. That's a development that was already going on before AI, but now it's even worse.

Walked past a billboard the other day with advertisement that was blatantly AI-generated. Had a logo with visible JPEG artifacts plastered on top of it. Real amateur hour stuff. It probably was as cheap as it looked.

You see the trend in software too. Microsoft's recent track record is a good example of this. They can barely ship a working notepad.exe anymore.

Supposedly some birds will eat cigarette butts thinking they're bugs, and then starve to death with a belly full of indigestible cigarette filters. Feels a lot like what is happening to a lot of industries lately.

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