61–70 of 110 posts
Is a calculator a slave? Is a car a slave? What a silly blogpost. We have always been automating away the things we don't want to do, even before AI.
The thesis of the article is spot on. The title is weird - I don't know what's the point of bringing such an emotionally charged term into it. Unless your point is that LLMs are sentient creatures capable of suffering, but I don't think that's what the author is trying to say. I agree with the author that almost everyone wants to use AI to do the things they have no interest in and don't want to pay someone else to d…
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That’s a lot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't just some leftist thinkers, it was most people through history. Working for wages was something slaves did, free men supported themselves with what they could grow or sell, and people routinely preferred what seems to us fairly miserable self-sufficiency over paid servitude. You don't have to go far into history to find examples, this is stuff you find in regular genealogy.
Paid servitude and working for salary are two massively different things. And over the course of history, free men worked for salaries, were free, were happy and it was not the same thing as being a slave.
To take some examples from genealogy, I had trouble identifying a guy described merely as "servant" in a census as the father of some quite powerful and wealthy people. But it turned out, he was a bailiff, a servant of a fief holder.
I also found out there were laws against not going into servitude in my country. Many, especially young unmarried men, would prefer to work and especially to fish on their own, rather than to work for wages. So the authorities had to resort to actually make it illegal. This wasn't just to be nice to big owners, it was because economies of scale meant lower tax revenues if everyone went fishing on their own little boat.
In general, governments did quite a lot of deliberate effort like that pushing people away from a sustenance economy and into a cash economy where they could produce things rich people (e.g. kings) wanted rather than things they needed themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't just some leftist thinkers, it was most people through history. Working for wages was something slaves did, free men supported themselves with what they could grow or sell, and people routinely preferred what seems to us fairly miserable self-sufficiency over paid servitude. You don't have to go far into history to find examples, this is stuff you find in regular genealogy.
Paid servitude and working for salary are two massively different things. And over the course of history, free men worked for salaries, were free, were happy and it was not the same thing as being a slave.
It seems like maybe this person missed why slavery is bad. Which is that it takes away the freedom of a human being. The fact that it takes away work from you is not the problem
The thesis of the article is spot on. The title is weird - I don't know what's the point of bringing such an emotionally charged term into it. Unless your point is that LLMs are sentient creatures capable of suffering, but I don't think that's what the author is trying to say. I agree with the author that almost everyone wants to use AI to do the things they have no interest in and don't want to pay someone else to d…
Is the ai hate a global or western thing? A friend of mine in Japan says people don't hate it there. Maybe she's just in a bubble?
And so much more...
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No, you missed what makes AI bad in our culture. It doesn't just take your work, by your choice. It also takes your self-worth (because our culture is based on working being worthy) and for many people also a job (which is a material representation of that cultural value).
Trying to reduce how much you pay other people, with its attendant job and self-worth losses, has been happening since at least the Industrial Revolution; nothing about it is novel. The only novelty of the latest wave (AI) is that it affects a class of society (knowledge workers; smart people with degrees) that previously considered itself immune to this process. If you also hold all technological advances since the…
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1 in 400 buckets of water. And it’s a non uniform tightly clustered spread. That’s a lot.
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If that 1 bucket is 1 of 2 available to you then it’s a huge issue with climate change increasing risk of draught and extreme weather events.
And cheap water is a very tiny factor in locating a data centre.