I would tend to agree with you, but I do think the OP has a point. Even by Christian standards (which is a low bar) American evangelicalism is a whole different level of evil, and isn’t even Christian except in the broadest sense of the word. It’s just hateful extremism with a coat of Christian iconography.
Canon fodder and stagnant trade markets with no apprenticeships. This is the glorious future you’re recommending?
Look for union work. The only way to play this game is numbers. Build unions, organize, protest, and vote like your life depends on it. Because it does.
If you want a future, stop looking for motivational speeches from people who live large at your expense. If you try to succeed on your own you will die alone. Link arms with your brothers and sisters and pull together.
They cannot stop all of us.
As someone who is unfortunately already stuck in the IT trap, I promise you AI isn’t as magical as the hype makes it out to be. It’s probably also not as bad as its worst dissenters think it is, but expectations of its capability are definitely light-years beyond its actual usefulness. The former scenario is fortunately very unlikely.
Complete industrial collapse? Well, that’s unfortunately a much more realistic concern. Not a guarantee mind you, but not out of the realm of possibility. People will still need to poop though, and AI are terrible at conventional engineering and won’t be piloting drones to fix pipes for a long, long time.
Have you considered plumbing?
Yes, sadly in this case, they are in fact correct in assuming the AI has better judgment than themselves. It’s a very low bar to clear.
As their kind always do. The only thing that changes that is a Mario Party. Ever.
Utopic might be a bit of a stretch, but I should probably qualify that as good human coders.
One thing I’m noticing about AI code is it’s very, very task oriented. Like it will produce code, that works for the one objective, but absolutely will not account for other interactions with other parts of the system. It’s really bad at juggling multiple priorities so for every solution it creates, it causes another 2 problems with other parts of the stack. Human coders would design a solution that takes those interactions into account from the ground up. With an AI solution, you kind of have to rebuild those interactions as an afterthought, which is where a lot of failures occur. Since interaction of multiple subsystems is kind of the whole point of a kernel… I have concerns.
Liability already gives them legal incentives to avoid incidents.
That’s quite optimistic, especially since there’s almost no enforcement of liability.
… open-weight models capable of doing all the things that we’re concerned about are already in the hands of bad actors around the world.
Computational resources are the limiting factor. AI companies have resources which no independent actor could ever dream of, which makes them far more dangerous to the general public. A chihuahua with an attitude problem can only do so much damage. A Great Dane with an attitude problem is a threat no one can afford to ignore.
They really don’t grasp that the point of money is to use it to do things. Things that benefit, not just you, but your family, your community, your nation and humanity in general. They really think just sitting on giant piles of cash like a nesting bird is what it’s there for.
I swear the richer you get the dumber it makes you. Like I honestly believe there’s a point at which you get rich enough that the “Skills Atrophy” you see with people who get hooked on AI actively starts breaking down your own brain.
Do you not see that daily? There’s nothing internally consistent or coherent about 3/4 of what bots post, it’s just garbage that sounds plausibly human.
I mean, a number of news reports of outbreaks and adverse outcomes from MAHA nonsense already are out there. People don’t watch positive news though. They could probably run PSAs but where? Netflix ads? Cable? The media ecosystem is fragmented to the point that even if they did, you’re going to have to run a dozen different campaigns on different mediums to get heard by the 5% or so of people who still pay attention to PSAs.
It’s just a more efficient use of resources to focus on the Influencer side. I don’t have to like it to understand the logic.
Because they’ve trained people not to trust journalists and the gubmint, so they’re not going to listen to PSAs, news outlets and official sources. They need people who can cultivate personalized parasocial relationships with an audience and generate organic word of mouth, because the only thing most people have left that they have any faith in is personal peer bonding.
It’s good to highlight the efforts of some of the little keystones that are all too easily overlooked. The deeper you dig the more you realize there are more people silently doing their job that makes anything else we do on the internet even possible. Millions of people all over the world, invisible to you on a normal day, doing things you only have the vaguest awareness of making every moment of every day possible to begin with. Offline too if you want to get technical. The intricate web of civilization is humbling when you think about it.
“A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision” ~IBM Training Manual, 1979
Yeah, chips are more of a perishable good than any kind of durable infrastructure, and at the end of the day, the models themselves have no durable value because information is never truly scarce, regardless of how they try to make us pretend it is or poison the well with lies. There’s no magic solution to making LLMs actual AGI or even effective tools outside of their narrow scope. Not only that, the way they’re using it is extremely reckless, deeply inefficient, and supremely cost intensive, on a level that makes the Manhattan Project look wholesome. There isn’t going to be a “last man standing” to win, it’s just going to go up like flash powder and take everyone in the dogpile with it.
Listen, I’m not going to tell them to get bent for doing the only sane thing they’ve ever done, but I’m not throwing them a welcome-to-the-family party either. The lesser evil is still evil and I will continue to avoid so much as letting my shadow darken their doorway.
The Chinese aren’t trying to bake censorship and refusal algorithms into their LLM…
Buddy, I hate to be the one to break it to you, they absolutely are, it’s just censoring different things. There’s no such thing as an unbiased LLM, they’re all corrupt by design, they’re just meant to scratch different people’s personal itches.
That’s nice. You built it on stolen training data, so I fail to see the problem here.
There’s an old saying in economics. “The market can stay irrational for a lot longer than you can stay solvent.” It feels very applicable.