Not sure if this is the best community to post in; please let me know if there’s a more appropriate one. AFAIK Aii@programming.dev is meant for news and articles only.
Not sure if this is the best community to post in; please let me know if there’s a more appropriate one. AFAIK Aii@programming.dev is meant for news and articles only.
Most arguments people make against AI are in my opinion actually arguments against capitalism. Honestly, I agree with all of them, too. Ecological impact? A result of the extractive logic of capitalism. Stagnant wages, unemployment, and economic dismay for regular working people? Gains from AI being extracted by the wealthy elite. The fear shouldn’t be in the technology itself, but in the system that puts profit at all costs over people.
Data theft? Data should be a public good where authors are guaranteed a dignified life (decoupled from the sale of their labor).
Enshittification, AI overview being shoved down all our throats? Tactics used to maximize profits tricking us into believing AI products are useful.
I’ve seen it said somewhere that, with the advent of AI, society has to embrace UBI or perish, and while that’s an exaggeration it does basically get the point across.
I don’t think that AI is as disruptive as the steam engine, or the automatic loom, or the tractor. Yes, some people will lose their jobs (plenty of people have already) but the amount of work that can be done which will benefit society is near infinite. And if it weren’t, then we could all just work 5% fewer hours to make space for 5% unemployment reduction. Unemployment only exists in our current system to threaten the employed with.
You might be right about the relative impact of AI alone, but there are like a dozen different problems threatening the job market all at once. Added up, I do think we are heading towards a future where we have to start rethinking how our society handles employment.
A world where robots do most of the hard work for us ought to be a utopia, but as you say, capitalism uses unemployment as a threat. If you can’t get a job, you starve and die. That has to change in a world where we’ll have far more people than jobs.
And I don’t think it’s as simple as just having us all work less hours - every technological advancement that was once said would lead to shorter working hours instead only ever led to those at the top pocketing the surplus labor.
Yes, I 100% agree with you. The ‘working less’ solution was just meant as a simple thought exercise to show that with even a relatively small change, we could eliminate this huge problem. Thus the fact that the system works in this way is not an accident.
I think you are right and yet so wrong.
My problems with ai aren’t unique and I am no special snowflake who see through the matrix while everyone else is distracted. I am just a dude. I really doubt that the points tell I will bring up, is anything boring as generic arguments against ai.
My problem with data theft is not based on the concern that artists has the rights on their work. I want them rewarded for your labor but in this case, it is not my primary issue. It is the hypocritical nature of company entirely based in IP law stealing IP protected work. I hate that the system is not ripping them into piece like Nintendo rips an online super smash tournament into pieces. It is so obviously “rules for thee, not for me”. You can claim that capitalism is causing that but I really don’t think capitalism requires this shit. Sure the rich and powerful are rich and powerful in capitalism because of capitalism, but special pledging for the elite existed in every system we have tried.
I hate ai because people invest in the dumbest applications for it. LLM are trash. Voice cloner??? Wtf. Image generation? Why?? But for medical applications in which we have comparably amazing clean data, let’s invest into that a little bit. But x billions into LLMs please.
I hate ai because the most brain dead application gets the most usage and people will tell you how it is bad but use it anyway. Then they obviously don’t have the computing power to run a decent local model and just pipe any personal or confidential information into the online service that tells you that the data will be used for training, so it can be leaking back out to other people.
I hate ai because it is literally everything bad about society (e.g. nonconsental nudes) and tech (e.g. data collectors) and their interaction.