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AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

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Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#91

Post by conartist6 »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #40

AI could be a boon for mankind. it can be a useful tool. We could employ it in a manner which provides more dignity for workers. That is, let them work less hours, have more leisure time etc. That necessitates something which will keep the powers of capital in check, and people don't seem to think that this is possible. Corporations are just so large and powerful, that people feel hopeless. Byt we could still get tog…

I see such positivity in your comment, but also every technology has promised to make everything easier and more convenient and so to give us more leisure time. What the evidence has shown is that the people who end up living the life of leisure are the ones who amass wealth and power, and everyone else is going to be stuck in the rat race because, well, we're living things. The rules we live by are: you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't even stop playing the game.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#92

Post by theshrike79 »

barrell wrote: post #5

An idea that has been living rent free in my head is that "AI is ultimately nothing but a pure destruction of value". It's promise is unlimited value to everyone on demand; but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable. Value and scarcity go hand in hand. I realize the hyperbolic framing of the idea, but none-the-less I haven't been able to get it out of my head. This article feels li…

AI is to many professions like the Knitting machines were to textile workers (where the word Luddite originated[0], people who opposed automation).

Some "value" will be lost, but other will be generated. People WILL lose their jobs as what they did can either be done by AI directly or an AI Agent can write a script/program to do some or all what they did.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#93

Post by King-Aaron »

philipallstar wrote: post #63
barrell wrote: post #5

An idea that has been living rent free in my head is that "AI is ultimately nothing but a pure destruction of value". It's promise is unlimited value to everyone on demand; but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable. Value and scarcity go hand in hand. I realize the hyperbolic framing of the idea, but none-the-less I haven't been able to get it out of my head. This article feels li…

Is water less valuable because it comes out of a tap almost for no money?

The answer is wholly dependent on where you live and how scarce water is.

Most in the west don't understand water scarcity.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#94

Post by simianwords »

conartist6 wrote: post #91
Synaesthesia wrote: post #40

AI could be a boon for mankind. it can be a useful tool. We could employ it in a manner which provides more dignity for workers. That is, let them work less hours, have more leisure time etc. That necessitates something which will keep the powers of capital in check, and people don't seem to think that this is possible. Corporations are just so large and powerful, that people feel hopeless. Byt we could still get tog…

I see such positivity in your comment, but also every technology has promised to make everything easier and more convenient and so to give us more leisure time. What the evidence has shown is that the people who end up living the life of leisure are the ones who amass wealth and power, and everyone else is going to be stuck in the rat race because, well, we're living things. The rules we live by are: you can't win, y…

People who amass wealth are the ones working more hours on average.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#95

Post by theshrike79 »

vanschelven wrote: post #47
rustystump wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps i am a bit odd but i dont understood this take. Why do you do what you do? Why do you create anything? Since before ai all my tiny little works have been public domain and it tickles me pink when i see something of mine out in the wild. Journey before destination. With that said though, the people who press the button and fashion themselves creatives piss me off. Heck anyone who has more than a passing intere…

Journey and destination go hand in hand. Radio amateurs used to be a thing. Because playing with radios is fun, but also because this provided a way to hear things that otherwise could not be heard.

They still are, it's just a full-on boys club where members are getting older and older.

New people are finding the hobby due to all of the stuff going on in the world, an amateur radio license gives you the ability to communicate massive distances without any existing infrastructure - which is super cool.

Digital mode radios are also bringing in people from programming backgrounds because they can move binary stuff over the air with software.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#96

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

theshrike79 wrote: post #92
barrell wrote: post #5

An idea that has been living rent free in my head is that "AI is ultimately nothing but a pure destruction of value". It's promise is unlimited value to everyone on demand; but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable. Value and scarcity go hand in hand. I realize the hyperbolic framing of the idea, but none-the-less I haven't been able to get it out of my head. This article feels li…

AI is to many professions like the Knitting machines were to textile workers (where the word Luddite originated[0], people who opposed automation). Some "value" will be lost, but other will be generated. People WILL lose their jobs as what they did can either be done by AI directly or an AI Agent can write a script/program to do some or all what they did. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

They were not opposing automation. They were opposing loss of jobs, wages, dignity in work and all that. And they turned out to be completely right. AI is just the next attack from capitalism in a long line of attacks aimed at workers. And this time its coming for every single worker, given that the explicit purpose is to create AI that can replace every single person.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#97

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

raincole wrote: post #14
barrell wrote: post #5

An idea that has been living rent free in my head is that "AI is ultimately nothing but a pure destruction of value". It's promise is unlimited value to everyone on demand; but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable. Value and scarcity go hand in hand. I realize the hyperbolic framing of the idea, but none-the-less I haven't been able to get it out of my head. This article feels li…

> but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable It's called utopia. But my issue with AI hype is that it's not clear how it will lead to "everyone can do anything." Like how is it going to free up lands so everyone can afford a house with yard if they want?

> It's called utopia.

Its not. We already see this on social media: creating pictures and clips has become basically effortless and the result isnt utopia, its a massive steaming pile of worthless shit.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#98

Post by theshrike79 »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #55
jmathai wrote: post #10

I feel a lot less pride in my creative work knowing it can be done much too easily with modern AI. It makes me less eager to create which is quite unfortunate. I haven’t felt to bad about my creative works being fed into training models. Taken by itself, my creations are minuscule. But it’s very apparent when I look at AI as a whole, having taken from everyone in aggregate. I feel that.

> It makes me less eager to create which is quite unfortunate. It's been the exact opposite for me. Coding assistance is a great boon towards productivity simply because otherwise I wouldn't work on any of my old ideas stashed in numerous note taking apps. It's way easier today to go from 0 to something like an MVP, and see if there's something there. If there isn't, not much is lost. But without these tools it would…

We watch a ton of stupid Hallmark Christmas movies during December, it's our thing. Very few of them are available here and don't have subtitles in our language, english subs do exist.

So, how hard can it be to translate them automatically? Tried a few ready-made tools and they either just plain didn't work or made stupid mistakes due to bad prompting.

I fired up Claude and had an MVP that could 1) rip english subtitles out of a mkv file 2) shove them to OpenAI API for translation in batches within a few hours

v2 took two evenings of me watching TV and bouncing around between Claude+Codex+Crush(GLM-4.6)

1) Get subtitles from original

2) Feed full subtitle file to GPT-4o for first pass analysis. It finds names for people, locations etc and decides a singular translation so they don't vary and gives a general context for the tone/genre of the movie for translation

3) Give gpt-4o-mini the first pass context file and a section of the subtitles in a loop

4) save them as .srt

The results are SO MUCH better than most of the "real" translation we've encountered. I think a bunch of them were done by a zero-shot AI or a human who didn't give a fuck about quality and had to meet a quota.

And none of this would've been done without AI, there's so much crappy boilerplate on top of the few actually interesting bits I would've just tolerated the bad ready-made solutions instead.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#99

Post by r33b33 »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #40

AI could be a boon for mankind. it can be a useful tool. We could employ it in a manner which provides more dignity for workers. That is, let them work less hours, have more leisure time etc. That necessitates something which will keep the powers of capital in check, and people don't seem to think that this is possible. Corporations are just so large and powerful, that people feel hopeless. Byt we could still get tog…

The only way to solve inequality created by concentration of AI superpowers will be extreme violence, and I'm tired of pretending that's not the case.

Re: AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

#100

Post by Synaesthesia »

philistine wrote: post #48
Synaesthesia wrote: post #40

AI could be a boon for mankind. it can be a useful tool. We could employ it in a manner which provides more dignity for workers. That is, let them work less hours, have more leisure time etc. That necessitates something which will keep the powers of capital in check, and people don't seem to think that this is possible. Corporations are just so large and powerful, that people feel hopeless. Byt we could still get tog…

Haiti's democracy was never, in its storied 200 years of existence, functioning. France saw fit it never did until the damage was irreparable.

I'm referring to the ascendance of Bertrand Aristide. Now he was quickly removed but it was a remarkable triumph of grassroots democracy.
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