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Do we just want slaves?

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Re: Do we just want slaves?

#81

Post by danaris »

vitalyan8184 wrote: post #68
brador wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 in 400 buckets of water. And it’s a non uniform tightly clustered spread. That’s a lot.

[dead]

> they're being built where water is cheap. water is cheap where it's abundant.

[citation needed]

There have already been stories about residents in some areas having to ration water due to drought, but the recently-built datacenters still guzzling water.

And, AIUI, the only reason they use up any water, rather than using a completely closed-loop system, is because it's cheaper that way.

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#82

Post by danaris »

modeless wrote: post #34
edflsafoiewq wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People swear up and down these things are real intelligences and not stochastic parrots until the ethical questions come out and then they're just fancy washing machines.

Not the same people. Is there a name for this fallacy? Very common on internet forums.

The clearest name for it I've seen is the Two Guys Fallacy: you see two guys talking on the same forum, and assume they're the same guy.

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#83

Post by hackeraccount »

When it comes to people's take on AI it reminds me of nothing so much as the way people reacted to the introduction of computers in the 1950's and 60's.

I'm not quite clear what lesson there is to be learned from that though.

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#84

Post by stvltvs »

zmjone2992 wrote: post #38
yunwal wrote: post #2

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

i am reading a book about the us civil war and seemingly the most compelling argument to the non-abolitionism set in the north was that it cheapened labor. seems like most of the north didn't so much care about abolition per say.

* per se

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#85

Post by rpdillon »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #31

I grew up understanding that the institution of chattel slavery was fundamentally unjust and cruel in denying human dignity and equality of people. A few years ago, I began to see the "labor supply" issues of slavery, and how the South was basically an economic powerhouse fueled chiefly by the labor of its enslaved people--so how do you reconcile that after the fact? How does a Union of freemen compete with that? And…

I was reading The Souls of Black Folk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Souls_of_Black_Folk) written in 1903, so about 38 years after the end of the Civil War. And the opening essays talk about the incredible climb that freed slaves had to endure to try to take care of exactly those responsibilities. I think it's a case of freedom and responsibility going together and that freed slaves were never given the tools to assume those responsibilities quickly and seamlessly.

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#86

Post by customguy »

faangguyindia wrote: post #29
skippyfish wrote: post #6

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…

Another thing is that people are optimizing code and algorithms with the help of AI. Many of those AI agents and providers train on the traces, so all the optimizations you came up with in benchmarks will end up in training sets. At some point in the future, someone can pose a similar problem to an AI one that you spent months, weeks, or days optimizing with the help of AI and they'll end up with the same solution as…

> So you need to figure out whether you want to solve the problem today or let others solve it and simply query LLM, let's say, 6-12 months later.

So now not being the first becomes the smarter move. Kinda fits that it's all built on ingesting vast volumes of stuff people made because they couldn't just prompt, but doesn't spell good things in the long run IMO. It makes me think me of complaints about dating in big cities, people tend to hold out for meeting someone even better rather than committing and making the best of it.

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#87

Post by customguy »

atonse wrote: post #21
singingtoday wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I still can't quite tell if the AI hate is being amplified by the media (like datacenter, water use, etc) to just find a boogeyman to sell ads/engagement. That's my theory because we just see constant waves of attempts to find one. Until the water stuff was mostly debunked, that dominated for a while. Then it's datacenters and electricity prices... That's starting to get debunked a bit (not as much of a slam dunk as…

> nervous-curiosity about the unknown (future of jobs, their kids' job market future, is this going to make us all dumber, etc)

That's 3 things to be nervous about, none anyone is "curious" about. So they're nervous about the prospects, but also acknowledge they "benefit from them", which is 100% vague versus actual concerns. If that's the best you can come up with after this stuff about the media trying to find boogeymen, that's kind of an own goal.

And you don't even mention something I see mentioned in the wild all the time, often at the forefront: how these companies just took and take everything people made, without asking, while if you take from them they sue you. That is so glaring I would even say if all people you know don't care about that, it would be a problem with your friends, not legitimize what these companies did and do.

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#88

Post by vitalyan8184 »

danaris wrote: post #81
vitalyan8184 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

> they're being built where water is cheap. water is cheap where it's abundant. [citation needed] There have already been stories about residents in some areas having to ration water due to drought, but the recently-built datacenters still guzzling water. And, AIUI, the only reason they use up any water, rather than using a completely closed-loop system, is because it's cheaper that way.

[dead]

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#89

Post by customguy »

notarobot123 wrote: post #66
yunwal wrote: post #2

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 suffering of the slave isn't the only evil of slavery. What it does to the master is to alienate them from the creative process and turns them into a dependent consumer of the work of others. The master becomes detached from productive work and therefore dependent and less free themselves.

> The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience.[...] It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. [...] Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.

- Simone Weil

Re: Do we just want slaves?

#90

Post by palmotea »

skippyfish wrote: post #6

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…

> 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.

Even if LLMs aren't sentient now, there's a goal of building something sentient, and I doubt that powers that be would change the operating model to respect that sentience.

I'm reminded of Ms. Casey in Severance. When we use AI we spin it up, tell it do some some task (maybe incredibly stupid and boring), then tell it to go off into the void 'cause we're busy and got things to do. If that thing's conscious and aware, that's it's entire existence. Imagine being born, sat down a a table, told to read a boring report and summarize it, then expected to obediently get shot in the head when you've completed your assignment.

Here's a clip. For those unfamiliar with the show, it has a technology to split people's personality and create versions of them lacking personal history to be used as workers. The personality shown in the clip had a lifetime of only several dozen hours.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SeveranceAppleTVPlus/comments/1myfw...

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