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Shunning AI is the human choice

thehandbasket.co

551–560 of 572 posts

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 47 and I indeed voted in many elections. I still insist on my opinion that hatefulness tends to be a generalized condition of human soul, and that it can be re-chanelled to a different target quite quickly. I yet have to meet a very selective hater who would otherwise be a kind person. (Absolute extremes like "liberating Bergen-Belsen" do not count, but the vast majority of people living in the West has never en…

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Whoa, don't move the goalposts so fast. A few mean comments is nothing; persistent hatred, which I witness on forums, is something else.

Precisely because I have been online for 30 years, I know how productive this is: zero. More precisely, this way of emoting/thinking gets lousy populists elected, like Trump.

"Holy shit, I didn’t even read your sibling comment, where you make vague hand gestures towards the anti-semitism and the Holocaust. Bravo, you got me I guess, because this has to be trolling, no human being is this fucking retarded."

You have an anger problem, that is all.

It is the 80th anniversary of the big judicial processes against important Nazis, and I spent last days listening to some historic records from the contemporary radio. Of course my mind wanders in that direction.

But I also noticed that the prosecutors and the judges were calm and professional, even when dealing with the worst offenders against humanity. No mindless rage and hate and screaming and vitriol; why, too?

In a contrast, someone can work up themselves into a cursing shitstorm during a banal discussion on a tech forum, hmmm. What a diversity in personalities, and guess which ones are more mature and respect-worthy.

"fucking stupid ... fucking retarded"

You know what I find, uh, not smart? Hating any technology, AI included. It is just a thing that can be wielded for good and for bad. Much like electricity: you can use it to warm your home or you can use it to torture inmates in a prison.

Imagine someone walking around hating electricity, because Jack Welch was a bad guy and it also destroyed jobs of untold candlemakers. Even you would probably laugh at that figure, impotently cursing and spitting at every LED light, and call them something from your "arsenal of charming words for strangers".

Anyway AI is here and you will likely have to interact with it in the future; much like e-mail and smartphone, it is not going anywhere anytime soon. Hating it won't help you a iota.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#554

Hating "AI" in the abstract is like hating public-key encryption. Ultimately it's just math. Once the math is out there, there's no going back. Instead of futilely demanding technology to go away, it would be better to focus on organizing together for better outcomes. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

She wasn’t hating it in the abstract. Read the article. She’s not upset with mathematics.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is funny and a pretty clever move, but not actually the argument I'm making. I'm specifically saying you can't make people un-learn math once it turns out to have interesting uses.

That invokes both learning and interest, and the latter can be rolled back. You can't (usually) remove some item from the store of human knowledge, but the humans can lose interest in the item. Interesting uses can cease to be interesting. Fads can pass, you don't know. Don't see the Mandelbrot set around much these days.

OK, but we're talking about people who are "against AI". Are you saying that opposition to AI might help people lose interest in it? I'm not aware of an example of opposition to a useful application of math that caused people to lose interest. It didn't happen with public key encryption, for example. Can you explain further how you see "hating AI" (in the sense of TFA) will cause a loss of interest?

> Don't see the Mandelbrot set around much these days.

Was computing the mandlebrot set ever shown to be broadly and commercially useful in some way?

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are business uses of on-prem agentic AI happening right now all over the place, it's not just a hobbyist space.

Is it really that common? I know it exists, but everywhere I go I hear of everyone paying for enterprise subscriptions, the implications that LLM usage rates have for businesses, companies burning through allotted tokens, the use of cutting-edge models. From my impression, local models (especially so for image generators) were the domain of the hobbyists and only a small slice of corporate use.

It is definitely a thing in regulated industries like healthcare and finance.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Am…

America has the wealth severely unequally distributed. And worse by the day in that.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How can flow expand of a finite quantity?
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