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AI optimism is a class privilege

joshcollinsworth.com

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Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#71

Post by akoboldfrying »

> Imagine the damage one bad kid could cause using deepfakes

Deepfakes are highly damaging right now because much of the world still doesn't realise that people can make deepfakes.

When everyone knows that a photo is no longer reliable evidence by itself, the harm that can be done with a deepfake will drop to a similar level as that of other unreliable forms of evidence, like spoken or written claims. (Which is not to say that they won't be harmful at all -- you can still damage someone's reputation by circulating completely fabricated rumours about them -- but people will no longer treat photorealistic images as gospel.)

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#73

Post by elzbardico »

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.

This is an incredibly naive take and it definitely has the feelings of anti-intellectualism in it.

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#74

Post by metalman »

If the ultimate form of goodness is a miracle, and the ultimate form of badness is evil,then, in reality evil, is infinitly easier to realise, perform, refine, and produce at scale, and miracles remain hard and rare, but of course, somehow spoken of as some sort of yet to come but assuredly triumphant ,however eventualy. now with real time personalised halucinations!

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#75

Post by elzbardico »

leptons wrote: post #6
georgemcbay wrote: post #4

I would say it is privilege (now) combined with denialism (for the future). Not only do you have to believe that you're in the group that benefits, but you also have to believe that "AI" improvement from here forward will stall out prior to the point where it goes from assisting your job to replacing it wholesale. I suspect there are many less people for whom that applies to them than there are people who believe it…

>what happens when some significant percentage of everyone else (your potential customers) loses their income and society starts to crumble? They will start to burn down data centers.

If you believe ICE purpose is to enforce immigration law… yeah. Quite possible

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#76

Post by techpression »

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…

I don’t think we can haphazardly apply history like this, it’s never the same, we just like to find patterns where there are none.

The biggest harm that would come from AI is ”everything at once”, we’re not talking about a single craft, we’re talking about the majority of them. All while moving the control of said technology to even fewer privatized companies, the printing press didn’t centralize all knowledge and utility to a few entities, it spread it. AI is knowledge and history centralized, behind paywalls and company policies. Imagine picking up a book about the history of music and on every second page there’s an ad for McDonald’s, this is how the internet ended up and it’s surely how LLM providers will end up.

And sure, some will run some local model here and there, but it will irrelevant in a global context.

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#77

Post by r00tanon »

Josh Collinsworth paints an accurate picture here, and he’s not wrong. People will be hurt by the displacement and disruption that new technology brings, not just AI. It has been happening since humans first picked up stones and sharpened sticks. No one says you have to be happy about it, or even optimistic, even if you happen to be part of a privileged class.

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#78

Post by pseudalopex »

jostylr wrote: post #70
pixl97 wrote: post #19

So the problem here is this isn't an article about AI. When the Luddities broke machines and burned the buildings that held them it wasn't because they hated machines (well at least initially). It's because they hated starving in the streets. This is just a continuing part of the class war that has been going on since humanity started writing. Now, the only thing that might make this different is class/capital may ha…

We are at a fork in the road with lots of potential darkness, but simply thinking any old social safety net is going to work is not going to cut it. Nets can be, and generally are, used to capture. An interesting multi-pronged approach is post labor economics which is being promoted by David Shapiro: https://www.youtube.com/@DaveShap The basic premise is that currently we have households being supported by labor, cap…

A generality about 1 word of a metaphor is not a legitimate argument.

I read what David Shapiro called concrete interventions.[1] They were public ownership, redistribution, public ownership or redistribution systems he called predistribution, shorter work weeks, and under developed blockchain ideas.

[1] https://daveshap.substack.com/p/understanding-post-labor-eco...

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#79

Post by lowsong »

small_model wrote: post #21

It seems like the author hasn't really used the latest models, I wrote my last line of code about a month ago after 20+ years coding. Claude Code can do it for me, better faster and never gets tired etc. Yes I have to keep it on leash but humans coding is over, unless its to learn or for fun. Actually it's the lower classes that will escape the longest from AI replacing their jobs, unskilled physical work will remain…

> It seems like the author hasn't really used the latest models

The author addresses this point.

> While I’m sure the technology and its costs will continue to improve, it’s hard to see how that would mitigate most of these harms. Many would just as likely be intensified by greater speed, efficiency, and affordability.

> This sort of technology distributes instability to the many at the bottom, while consolidating benefit at the top—and there has arguably never been a more efficient mechanism for this than AI.

Personally, I'm really tired of every criticism of AI being met with "you haven't tried the latest models". The model isn't the point. It doesn't matter how good it is, it cannot possibly outweigh the harms.

> I wrote my last line of code about a month ago after 20+ years coding

You are exactly the kind of person the author talks about

> To be an AI optimist, I’m guessing you must not be worried about where your next job might come from, or whether you can even find one. The current dire state of the job market, I have to assume, doesn’t scare you. You must feel secure. Maybe it’s because you’ve already made a name for yourself. Maybe you’re known at conferences, or on podcasts. Maybe you’re just senior enough that your résumé opens doors for you.

I fear you've entirely missed the point of the article. Just because you believe you can get value from it, does not make up for the downsides to everyone else, and it's quite literally privilege to ignore that.

Re: AI optimism is a class privilege

#80

Post by scarmig »

antonly wrote: post #42
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

Imagine two bright high school students. One goes to a tony private school taught by people with PhDs; the other is in a developing country. They both want to understand, say, Morse theory. In a world without AI, only the former has access to knowledge about it. In a world with AI, the kid in a developing country can access the knowledge roughly as easily. Even if they were paying for tokens, but free tier models provide an absolute equality.
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