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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#531

Post by whattheheckheck »

anon84873628 wrote: post #502
dijksterhuis wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we interact with. I haven't started training it on their writing style so I can mirror back to them... yet. have you asked these people how they feel about this? have you asked them for permission, for their consent to do this with their communications to you? what you’re doing sounds incredibly creepy . like, meta/facebook kinda of creepy. granted, it’s at…

Um, I absolutely expect my colleagues to update their internal model of me every time we communicate, to a greater or lesser degree depending on how much that communication deviates from their expectations, or how much new information it contains. In fact, that is essentially the purpose of communication. Do you think you are not constantly being "influenced" to do what people want from you? What do think happens dur…

Really makes you wonder about freewill and information determinism

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#532

Post by stephc_int13 »

archagon wrote: post #521
stephc_int13 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption is that orders of magnitude more people will benefit from the efficiency gains, like it was the case in agriculture automation or factory work automation. In those cases, that led to a transition period, nowadays only a small fraction of the human population is working to produce food, and their job is more about planning, finance and orchestration of machine work, but many specialised jobs were lost o…

All this skips the fundamental question: can this job be done by a machine? Or does the job just have a vaguely machine-doable look, particularly to those outside the trenches? Because the latter is how you get the software engineering equivalent of collapsing bridges, en masse.

Almost nothing is fully automated yet. So the answer is tricky.

In the beginning, they are irrelevant, but at some point, edge cases are everything you have to deal with.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#533

Post by CamperBob2 »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #514
CamperBob2 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sigh" is indeed a thought-terminating cliche. So is "Common sense."

“Sigh” is “I don’t respect you and will now talk down to you.” “Common sense” at least invites the question, “what do you consider common sense solutions?” and if I were to balk at that then clearly I’m not discussing the topic in good faith.

But it's just argument bait, isn't it? What are the odds that the guardrails you consider common sense will agree with my own?

It's like how 90% of people might be in favor of "common sense gun control," but when you drill down and propose specific gun-control measures, you find that it didn't help a bit to start the conversation by invoking "common sense." We're seeing the same with AI.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#534

Post by krupan »

thih9 wrote: post #183
krupan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free/Open Source software is very mainstream now I'm not sure what you mean, but maybe we are taking too much of it for granted?

I meant that “open source” achieved pop culture level recognition. Libre software never did, most people are still unaware of the difference or don’t care. A popular claim against open source is that it alone is insufficient to prevent abuse (here: accumulation of power). Recent decade has shown many cases of that, with corporations adopting open source projects without giving power to their users; e.g.: Android or c…

I can agree that the original aims of the movement haven't fully caught on, especially the subtle difference between Open Source and Free/Libre software. The pragmatic side of better security, low-bureaucracy standardization, and low price won out over Freedom for freedom's sake.

To me that's most apparent today with LLMs. Those are completely proprietary and privately controlled, yet the software world now LOVES them.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#535

Post by timoth3y »

pitched wrote: post #172
timoth3y wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is the core truth of the matter. Technology itself does not make life better. I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented. https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have.…

The Luddites were against the systems that were shifting work away from skilled workers (them) to unskilled workers (commonly children). I have no doubt serious injury and death happened at those machines but find it hard to believe that was the cause of the Luddites. All signs point to them being more worried about themselves. There’s no way they would have been pro-AI. It would take a very skilled VC to warp the wo…

If you look at what their actual demands, the pattern is clear. They lobbied for support for unemployed, the right to vote, improved safely and labor conditions across all industries, and enforcing the labor laws that were already on the books. Banning machines was not part of their demands.

The Luddites were part of a larger labor movement that spanned multiple industries.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#536

Post by somewhatgoated »

zmmmmm wrote: post #366
somewhatgoated wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR won’t be huge someday. We won’t live to see it at least. We also won’t experience quantum computing having a real world impact. We also won’t see humanoid robots doing any meaningful real world work. There also won’t be a Mars base in our lifetime or datacenters in space or underwater. There won’t be any flying cars either.

I can't tell how serious you are. But I'm curious - thinking of your past self (depending how old you are), what would have said about the current AI revolution 10 years ago? Eg: the chances that fully agentic generalised automated software engineering would become orthodoxy? What chance would you have given it happening by 2026?

I’m like 8%5 serious. And you are right I never would have dreamed of some of the things that we have now including LLMs. So it might well be true that I’m very wrong on all of these.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#538

Post by somewhatgoated »

johnfn wrote: post #349
somewhatgoated wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR won’t be huge someday. We won’t live to see it at least. We also won’t experience quantum computing having a real world impact. We also won’t see humanoid robots doing any meaningful real world work. There also won’t be a Mars base in our lifetime or datacenters in space or underwater. There won’t be any flying cars either.

I would definitely bet against the humanoid robot thing on good odds.

You mean that we’ll have robots that can do the same (more or less) things that humans can?

I think the field made great advances in the last decades but still so far away from a meaningful human robot.

Personally I also think it doesn’t make sense - we can already produce humans at mich cheaper cost than robots, they grow, repair themselves, can learn all kinds of stuff, etc.

I would rather invest in more humans than humanoid robots.

Specialised non-humanoid robots are a great idea on the other hand.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#539

Post by somewhatgoated »

umeshunni wrote: post #368
somewhatgoated wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR won’t be huge someday. We won’t live to see it at least. We also won’t experience quantum computing having a real world impact. We also won’t see humanoid robots doing any meaningful real world work. There also won’t be a Mars base in our lifetime or datacenters in space or underwater. There won’t be any flying cars either.

Underwater data centers: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-powers-ai-b... "Flying cars" https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/joby-flie...

Sure there have been attempts, but nothing that regular humans actually use. Once I can book a flying taxi like I can book a regular one I’ll admit defeat.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#540

Post by adastra22 »

stingraycharles wrote: post #395
adastra22 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the nature of the product itself. It's a key logger software. That's literally what it does -- take every input on your computer and route it to their servers.

Right, I was just confused by your use of the word honeypot. “keylogger mode” is optional, and to my understanding, you always see a visual indicator in the text area. it doesn’t take every input as far as I know, and security firms don’t consider it a threat. but point taken, it’s not for people with privacy concerns.

It installs itself as an accessibility tool, which requires special user permissions. With these permissions, it sees literally every keystroke you make (except, in some cases on some OSs, system password prompts). The visual indicator is just their UI.

Regarding "honeypot" -- that's also what a honeypot is. They provide a service you want, then collect data. We have to take their word that they're only using this data to train their AI (which, btw, they are upfront about -- they log everything and feed it into their training. it's in their TOS).

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