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Shunning AI is the human choice

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#471

Post by bena »

NoGravitas wrote: post #386
bena wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historians. Well, one. Well, he's not a historian. He's a biochemist and physiologist who has studied some anthropology. It's Jared Diamond. That's who says agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.

He's actually pulling that from about 70 years of anthropology and anthropological archaeology; it wasn't in any way original to him.

Which is why anthropologists published a book containing a bunch of essays that basically said, "No, this guy is wrong".

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#472

Post by zozbot234 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #444
zozbot234 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If one person can become as productive as two or three, why keep the extra one or two employees? You might think that keeping the head count the same means the company can now do more but that is only true if the company has the bandwidth or market to grow into. If the extra one or two employees are 2x or 3x as productive as they used to be, why would they not be employed? There will be plenty of market to grow int…

Money and customers are finite. The market will only grow via finite constraints changing. And ai is not changing these finite constraints.

A growth in productivity throughout the market is a changing constraint, and the flow of money and spending expands to reflect that change.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#473

Post by sp1nningaway »

barnabee wrote: post #302
afavour wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this attitude is part of the reason there's so much pushback. "it's here, it's staying, so shut up and like it". You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.

I feel about the same about both cars and AI. Cars are useful but they ruin places. AI is useful and it ruins at lot of what it touches, too. I own a car for occasional trips to the countryside and couldn't imagine using it anything like daily. I use AI plenty in my work and for finding information, and similarly don't want it in most of the rest of my life.

Your comparison just helped me understand how I feel about AI a little better. I too own a car but don't like driving, and don't like how my environment is shaped by what cars need. I use AI daily and I'm excited about it, but reshaping our whole world around it will make our lives worse.

It also gives me a better sense of what to do about it. It's not too late to stop the AI equivalent of how cars killed streetcars, vibrant communities, and literally children walking to school.

I, maybe naively, think if AI users and AI abstainers can actually talk about what it can do and what it shouldn't, we have a shot at making the world better, not worse.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#474

Post by dodu_ »

BosunoB wrote: post #93

Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need to in order to survive is probably in the low single digits. Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against hum…

Yeah surely the workers will be the ones reaping the downstream benefits of it right... right?

Anakin stare

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#475

Post by throw4847285 »

splittydev wrote: post #301
dml2135 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people don't like cars to this day.

Yes. And I'm sure they're having a hard time. ^

It's so funny when technological progress guys encounter YIMBYs. They can't even perceive that somebody would have a criticism of the impact of a technology on one's lived environment. "But, history is one big game of Civilization, and we replaced the little horses with tanks? What do you mean you don't like it?"

Whigs gonna whig I guess.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#476

Post by sifar »

ang_cire wrote: post #428
sifar wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swords, bows and arrows, castles were all here to stay. Technologies fade away when they are no longer useful, cost/benefit ratio is too high or something better comes along. It is question of when.

I don't know about you, but I can buy bows and arrows at hundreds of sporting goods stores in my local area alone, and I even know of 2 local blacksmith shops that sell swords. Castles still exist as well, you just aren't invited to them (which was true for us peasants back in the day, too). Trump is still trying to get one built under the ruins of the East Wing, in fact.

The point is not that these cease to exist. The point is that their significance decreases greatly.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#477

Post by BosunoB »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #451
BosunoB wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy is what allows regular people to have negotiating power vs the rich, and the majority of these battles are actually won through legislation, not union negotiation. I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just v…

When the mine closes, democracy does not save the town. It still becomes a ghost town. Democracy cannot work upstream against fundamental market forces. Every industry is being pitched as becoming a ghost town. Democracy will not save us. We will all die in the future and not be replaced. This is the end of our line in this century. I hope you are proud of how far we’ve come because this is the end for us. There will…

That's not a very good analogy. When the mine closes, democracy doesn't save the town, because the town only has control over the economic activity inside of it.

AI or no AI, the US will still have control over the economic activity inside of it. America is not pitched to be a ghost town, but instead a vastly productive and wealthy economy driven by AI. A ghost town cannot redistribute wealth it does not have, but America will still have all of the wealth.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#478

Post by lbrito »

ihumanable wrote: post #430
thrw045 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can actually understand this view even if I don't agree with it in the same way. I tried to use ChatGPT to edit and modify real photos I took, and it can do a good job changing the image in a photo realistic way, but at the same time, the images lack the "entropy" and "real lifeness" of the real photographs. The AI sort of flattens the images so that they look kind of cheap. It's almost imperceptible but it's there…

Magical editing of pictures is so wild to me. Most photos people take have a longterm have an audience of basically 1. That's why there's jokes about how awful it is when a coworker corners you to show you their vacation photos, the vast majority of photos taken by the average person are only ever going to be viewed again by the person taking it (and maybe their immediate family). Memory is already this squishy thing…

Maybe that's the goal. That picture you took last week with a Wendy's on the backdrop - was it a Wendy's or a McD's? Let me check. Oh, it was actually a Subway. By the way, did you know Subway has two new exciting foot-long offers?

Reality doesn't matter. If it gets in the way of money and or ads, we can just change it!

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#479

Post by gdee21 »

kimbernator wrote: post #333
splittydev wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing happened when we transitioned from horse carriages to cars. I'm sure a lot of people were quite outraged. But aren't we glad it happened? Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.

I feel like there's this idea that progress is good because of economic output, but there's this much squishier and more subjective concept of how much a change impacts our satisfaction with life. I think cars have produced a lot of good in the world, but I also live in the US where we've paved so much of the world that people don't feel like being outside on their feet very much anymore. I think it's had some negati…

Now you’re getting somewhere.

I’ll give you the brutal answer that many of you don’t want to hear.

None of you (including me) matter. The only thing that matters is the sovereignty and security of the nation. The people in power care a great deal about furthering this. All the billionaire’s sing to their tune for money does not exceed power.

Moreover - you are only of interest to the state to the extent you are productive. The moment you cease to be productive, it’s in the interest of the state to diminish your quality of life.

Therefore the state cares about output and progress - not about how you feel whilst progress continues on.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#480

Post by lbrito »

d_burfoot wrote: post #178

Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a bland diet that did fully meet nutritional requirements; it meant social hierarchies of kings and priests. But societies that did not adopt agriculture were outcompeted and eventually…

I don't think that's a very mainstream view amongst historians. I can only name two popsci authors, Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari, that espouse that thought.
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