You are allowed to comment if you absolutely hate AI, or love it. If you think it is overrated or underrated, ok (although I think it's too early to say what the consensus even is to know whether it is overrate/underrated). But if you think it is just a scam, gimmick, grift, etc I don't need to hear from you right now :soviet-heart:

Let the discussion begin:

So it's clear there's this big alignment debate going on rn. Regardless where you stand, isn't it fucked that there's a cabal of the biggest freaks money has ever produced debating the future of humanity with zero input from normal society?

Even if it isn't humanity's future they think it is. There's probably like 100 people in the world paid to work on alignment. How can you not develop a megalomania complex?

What kind of chatter are you hearing about AI?

I very occasional hear people irl obliquely mention AI. A cashier said like 'oh that AI stuff, that's pretty scary'. That's about it.

Now the blogs I follow have been basically colonized by AI news. These aren't even strictly technology blogs. I started following David Brin for UFO takes, I started following Erik Hoel for neuroscience takes. Literally everyone I follow has published takes on AI and zero of them dismiss it out of hand.

Sorry this will get long.

I basically feel like we are in another version of the post nuclear age except only insiders know it. After the first A-bomb, everyone knew the world was different starting the very next day. Now only designated take-havers are aware of this new reality.

Or regular folks are aware of it but they're so disempowered from having a say that they only engage with the realization online like I'm doing now. Medicare for all is Bernie's thing. The border is Trump's. Even if nothing will ever be done about healthcare, the fact that Bernie talks about it justifies you thinking about it. AI isn't any politician's thing.

I'd put the odds of a nuclear war around 1% a year. I'd say there's a 1% chance AI can be as world-ending as that. That's such a low number that it doesn't feel like "AI doomerism". But 1% multiplied by however much we value civilization is still a godalmighty risk.

When I've heard this site talk about it, it's usually in the context of "holy shit this AI art is garbage compared to real art? Where's the love, where's the soul?" If it was 1945 and we nuked a city, would you be concerned with trying to figure out what postmodernism would look like?

Usually when I've gotten to the end of my post I delete it.

  • ssjmarx [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    AI DOES NOT EXIST. "AI" IS USED AS A MARKETING TERM. THIS IS WHY I CANNOT CONTAIN MY ABSOLUTE HATRED OF ALL COMPUTER ALGORITHMS MARKETED AS "AI". THE FACT OF THE MATTER IS THAT CHAT GPT AND ALGORITHMS LIKE IT ARE AS FAR FROM BEING "INTELLIGENCE" AS A RANDOM SAND DUNE IS FROM BEING A SUPERCOMPUTER.

    Anyway these algorithms are just a way to reduce labor as any other capitalist invention. There's nothing particularly novel or unique to them as they currently exist, except that they can do something that used to have to be done "manually" much faster.

    Take image generation for example. Computer image generation is not "AI art", and it's not "art". But from the point of view of the capitalist, that's completely acceptable. Marketing imagery, for example, doesn't need to be "art" in order to shove an image into the public consciousness and increase demand for a product. In fact, I would say that the fact that marketing images until now have also been a form of art is, from the capitalist's perspective, a liability that they will be happy to part with. No more art that might accidentally make a statement that the corporation doesn't want to make, no more artists who can go off and harm the brand indirectly - just pure marketing straight from the computer, in infinite amounts.

    I just want to emphasize that I don't mean to come off as dismissive here. Obviously this is going to be incredibly disruptive, and we're only beginning to see the outline of all of the people whose jobs are about to become proletarianized. Marketers, journalists, some programmers - but what about doctors? A machine that can diagnose patients with 99% accuracy is not far off. Architects and engineers? Unless they're working at the cutting edge of science, an algorithm that does what they do faster is easy to imagine. It will be pretty funny seeing the first "virtual CEO" outperform all of its peers, but this will not meaningfully change the trajectory of our economic system.