Stop telling me AI is the future [Still Vreni]
19d 12h ago by lemmy.world/u/cannedtuna in comicstrips
Transcript
Title text: This is how you all fucking sound
[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]
Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]
Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]
Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]
Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.
Thats not how it works.
A better example would be "nuclear arms are already here, theres no going back"
Its not a capitalism thing, its an arms race thing.
Once one country starts making nukes you cant stop everyone from following suit to protect themselves.
Same goes for AI, once one country starts doing it, everyone else is gonna need to keep up so they dont lose the arms race.
Yes, but at least at the end of the day you can use nukes to blow stuff up. Presumably your enemies.
If your enemies win the generative AI "arms" race they can use it to, uh...
???
(Yes, I am aware there are military/governmental applications for neural net learning technologies but they're the types of pattern recognition and signals analysis stuff we already do without needing to build a football stadium sized datacenter every 50 miles and burn the entire nation's GDP on electricity generation. Most of the other applications appear to revolve around a regime using it solely to shoot themselves in the foot, e.g. powering a fantasy army of likely to be highly defective murder robots or using it to propagandize at and spy upon their own population in order to ensure a ready supply of destabilizing internal dissent always exists.)
LLMs are not the final state of AI
But LLMs are not the path to the final state of AI, either. And that's assuming only if — and this is a very big "if" — a true general artificial intelligence can even be created using traditional silicon computing methods in the first place. Blithely assuming that it can be is really rather asking past the sale.
Yep, by design LLM cannot become 'inteligent', you can only make it more believable but it's still copying humans not really thinking by itself. No amount of development or money invested will change that, it's not a pokemon it won't just evolve into something different one day.
And it's worth reiterating, the current crop of generative "AI" is incapable of producing anything new or novel. All it can do is reassemble existing strings, tokens, and patterns in slightly different ways. Innovation can never come from such a machine. That will have to come from a human.
The current push is the notion that "hyperscaling," i.e. throwing even more hardware and space and power and money at the same concept, will magically make it something it isn't. Obviously that's not going to work. It'll allow grifters to make a ton of money over it, though!
Obviously that's not going to work. It'll allow grifters to make a ton of money over it, though!
Well said.
Depends on your definition of novel.
From TFA:
The AI did not prove that its approach is the best anyone can do, though. In fact, mathematician Will Sawin has already improved upon the AI’s grid.
OpenAI privately contacted Litt, Sawin, Gowers and a number of other mathematicians to verify the LLM’s proof. Together (and without the company’s direct involvement), they wrote up their individual takeaways. (No external experts have seen the AI’s original output, however—just an edited version of its train of thought.)
What stood out, they said, was the AI’s preternatural patience and focus.
...
“AIs have an edge: It’s not just that they can try all known methods,” says Jacob Tsimerman, a mathematician at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the work but was part of the companion paper solicited by OpenAI. “They can play for longer and in more treacherous waters than mathematicians without getting overwhelmed.”
...
The mathematical tools the AI used here are not novel, although their application in this domain appears to be. “The model did not invent something fundamentally new that nobody saw coming,” says Sébastien Bubeck, a mathematician leading OpenAI’s mathematical explorations. “It just executed like an amazing mathematician.”
So, it's a monkeys-on-typewriters situation with the computer able to try and reject the hammering of who knows how many square pegs into round holes until it finally arrives at a workable conclusion, which a human has already bested. And we're not allowed to see its homework.
This is categorically failing to set the world on fire, except possibly in the literal sense.
After 80 years of fruitless struggle by human mathematicians, a major geometry conjecture has at last been solved—via a straightforward query to a chatbot.
There's value having tedious work done by AI so it can provide inspiration to real people, which is exactly what happened in this case.
So, it's a monkeys-on-typewriters situation with the computer able to try and reject the hammering of who knows how many square pegs into round holes until it finally arrives at a workable conclusion, which a human has already bested.
Gee, sounds like it's enabling people! The horror.
This is categorically failing to set the world on fire,
Things can be useful in the right context without setting the world on fire.
To strongman your argument, "LLMs with a supervised training pipeline cannot become intelligent".
RL training pipelines are much more open-ended, and experts still unsure one way or the other if an LLM + RL could lead to intelligence.
I think LLMs are intelligent. They're at least as intelligent as My pocket calculator, and My calculator is intelligent.
I think you're setting the bar too low. A tiny amount of intelligence is super easy to program.
Such a fallacy. Anything that falls under the umbrella of machine learning will contribute to future AI. We certainly won’t improve LLMs such that they become AGI, but all of it contributes.
And, whether or not future AI even uses traditional silicon computing is also irrelevant.
What matters is improved understanding of mathematics, neurons, chemistry, electronics, etc. That all happens each step of the way, even if the next technology is completely different.
What matters is improved understanding of mathematics, neurons, chemistry, electronics, etc.
All of which have absolutely nothing to do with what we are currently calling AI.
Doing with it, sure, but the creation of LLMs, and the algorithms behind them, especially the training, are what I’m talking about. It’s a lot of very impressive, complicated math
I think it’s pretty pathetic that “fuck AI” has become the trendy, cool thing. It really misses the mark. It should be fuck capitalism and the sociopathic CEOs abusing AI and shoving it down our throats. AI is not the problem.
It's actually just a lot of pretty simple maths from decades ago, but it's a lot of it. The big changes in those decades have been the feasibility of doing enough of that simple maths to achieve anything useful, and domain-specific network architecture stuff that's rarely transferable, e.g. LLMs are possible because of the invention of the transformer architecture in 2017, and that's also turned out to be useful for a few things like image generation and protein folding simulation, but not for all neural network based techniques, and then most of the things that have made successive LLMs better haven't also been useful for the few other transformer-architecture-based neural networks. Most not-LLM AI isn't going to be meaningfully easier to create than it would have been had the world got bored after GPT-2 and we'd only focussed on doing image and video generation.
Transformer is useful for damn near anything. At the end of the day, what we consider intelligence is the ability to predict what comes next, whether that is what our senses will tell us next or what the next hypothesis to test should be based on the data we have seen so far.
It's not damn near anything. There's loads of stuff that computers can do much more quickly and more accurately without it just by virtue of computers already being fast and effective at maths and obeying logic. With or without the transformer architecture, a neural network is never going to be as fast or reliable at, for example, summing a collection of numbers as just adding them would be, and loads of real-world tasks are like this, hence why we've built billions of computers even before the transformer architecture was invented.
Also, in particular, I didn't say that the transformer architecture wasn't useful for things that aren't LLMs, I said that most of the work done specifically to improve LLMs has no applications outside LLMs, so the next big leap towards making computers intelligent isn't helped more by working on LLMs than it would be by working on any other kind of AI.
I'm saying there is no "big leap" necessary. As the paper that introduced the transformer said, attention is all you need.
If we're going to pull up other people's pithy phrases that aren't intended to be taken entirely literally, then the relevant one here is machine learning is the second best solution to any problem. In the (approximately, depending on how you define it) century people have been thinking about computers, we've already found better solutions to lots of problems. If a transformer-based neural network can get 99% accuracy in sixty seconds on 92 billion transistors of GPU and billions more for its VRAM, that's pretty useless if we can also do it with 100% accuracy in sixty microseconds on a $1 microcontroller, or even faster on a less constrained device.
The attention is all you need phrase is specifically in the context of sequence transduction models, and specifically referring to the discovery that they don't need a combination of attention, recurrence and convolution, but actually only need attention if it's used in the novel way introduced by the paper. If you don't need to transduce any sequences, then this isn't necessarily relevant, and it's critically not a claim that you can do everything by transducing sequences. It was a surprise that applying it to generating new text instead of just converting it worked as well as it did, and a surprise that it kept getting better with larger models instead of plateauing around the GPT-1 and GPT-2 era, and a surprise that the text generation could be used to do other things, even ones as basic as addition. These things weren't predicted by the Attention Is All You Need paper.
"machine learning is the second best solution to any problem"
In much the same way as human thinking is the second best (and soon third best) solution to any problem. The point is that an LLM can come up with the best solution and use it.
These things weren't predicted by the Attention Is All You Need paper.
Obviously not — they're not going to make claims beyond the results they achieved in the paper. It was, however, obvious to everyone who read the paper that all of what we consider thinking could be derived by clever application of a sequence model, and all those papers that came after were results achieved by teams doing the obvious thing.
Not only that, it’s basically eating all the resources that could go into making AGI.
There is nooooo way for companies to invest in actual innovation when they are throwing everything at this dead end.
Then you’re well aware of the massive power that AGI will bring to any nation that can harness it. And no, LLMs alone are not the path, and possibly not the path at all.
GenAI is really fucking useful for propaganda and disinformation warfare.
That may sound like a compliment to GenAI, it's not.
Unfortunately, the ability to programmatically weaponize false-humanity is real, and really effective.
Which is yet another ethical question that has yet to be widely judged before being deployed everywhere. Just a bunch of greedy, short-sighted exceptionalists.
They can use it to do a lot of things. AI is far from perfect and makes all sorts of weird mistakes, but so do people. Arguably there's substantially more value in training inexperienced humans to get better in their fields than in settling for AI as a cheap alternative that starts with a maybe slightly higher or similar but cheaper baseline, but that doesn't eliminate all value they create. You can make arguments about the long term benefits socially or for individual organizations that leverage AI, but spend a couple hours playing with Claude and it becomes extremely evident that they're not anything resembling useless.
Even if we completely throw chat bots out the window, there are some instances of general utility for thinking models. This comic is making a moral argument that's more compelling, but arguing that they're actually totally useless doesn't really reflect reality
As someone who's used Claude and most other big LLMs as part of my job, they're all absolutely useless. They don't have the capacity for thought or care, all they are is a word generation algorithm similar to Cleverbot. So you can't rely on them for useful information, you can't rely on them for remembering info you told them, half the time it feels like talking to a brick wall (because you essentially are), and their only actual value is to CEOs as something they can blame layoffs on, even when it's bullshit.
What do you use them for? I use them day to day for significant automation hooked into a rag tool and several custom mcp services. They are absolutely amazing but with some serious flaws that do require significant guard rails and human in the loop points.
They are obviously over hyped and being used as an excuse by shitty CEOs but to call them useless is a mistake I think
Sorry, I’m curious: what’s your workflow looking like when you’re dealing with LLMs?
Because I‘m just tinkering with them as a hobby and while I consider them erratic and certainly limited in many regards, I still find them useful. Even fun, but on the other hand I’m not forced to use them.
I'm with you: the experiences people have with these tools are just dramatically different from mine. They are quite good. By no means even close to perfect, but they're just so much faster than me at pulling up some random information that would be hard to find with an Internet search myself and very good at going from nothing to something that works with code. I don't particularly enjoy using them because I find the whole industry abhorrent, but their usefulness isn't in question to me.
Laughable to call an LLM a thinking machine. It's glorified auto-complete built on stolen data. I work in the industry and the fact that any of this can impress anyone is fairly depressing to me.
That's not what "thinking model" means. It's not a statement about cognition, it means it takes steps in which it explains itself to itself to check if it's missing something.
Whoever coined that is using those words wrong, then.
The people no longer review their broken code the catch is that if they do it would negate all the gains.
AI is far from perfect and makes all sorts of weird mistakes, but so do people.
I gotta pull you up on this one. Realistically, they're not in the same ballpark. The mistakes made by people are so minor and infrequent they can be trusted to perform brain surgery, and the kinds of mistakes made are things like 'we miscounted the sponges on 1 out of 1000 surgeries,' or 'I took too little tissue and didn't get all the red cancer out of the identically red tissue because I was trying to conserve quality of life,' while LLMs are doing the equivalent of hallucinating a spleen inside someone's head or ignoring the cancer to look for cankers. You can't even rightly call of a mistake because the LLM isn't 'trying to do something and failing.' It's just producing probabilities and we're hoping they're useful.
When it's really important to get something right, we have a person double check the work of the first person, which they can do, because they are grounded in reality. When you want to check the output of AI, you use a person for the same reason. AI has no grounding in reality, only words, which are famously not the same thing as reality if you have an intellectual age greater than seven.
If you'd like to take the next sentence into consideration and respond to the context of what I was actually saying there, feel free.
The rest of it is just as silly, albeit differently. The point is not that AI is useless, but that it is being used and will be used in ways that make things worse. You, as a person who seems like they have more than two braincells, can tell AI can be used by smart people to do smart things. But that's not how they're used. Most people are stupid. Many of them are staggeringly stupid. They will also use the AI, and they will use it to do staggeringly stupid things. They will replace humans with LLMs where they can because they are stupid and don't care when the eggheaded nerds tell them it's a bad idea because it makes them feel smart. We are at the whims of idiots with money and power who now have automated even the position of sycophant who tells them they are right.
100%
There's definitely a ceo-driven tendency to insert AI anywhere and everywhere whether or not it actually is a reasonable application. What I'm saying is that there are also some reasonable applications. When people focus entirely on "AI useless!", they're fooling themselves every bit as much as the people who think it's suitable for every possible application. Their arguments are just as empty and vibes-based.
Making a better LLM isn't the point of all this, it's taking what they have and building on it until they create a true AGI.
Whoever gets there first, makes basically everything else obsolete in an instant.
In a world where the organisations that are blazing the trail are in private hands, this is very bad news for everyone who isn't in the winning organisation.
That's essentially the arms race: who gets to be king of the world.
The slim chance of it not being monumentally detrimental to humanity is basically tied to us abandoning capitalism wholesale and uniting the world, so I'm not holding my breath.
Edit: few downvotes on this, so check my other replies for clarity, if you still think I'm taking out my arse, comment and set me right. It's Lemmy, the points don't matter, I'd rather have a conversation. Plus read again if you somehow get the impression I'm advocating for any of this
Nobody's making AGI anytime soon. LLMs do not have any of the baselines required for this. They're expensive predictive text algorithms, more or less the same ones used in mobile keyboards, but upscaled to an absurd degree. Anyone truly worried about other companies or nations developing AGI has no idea how our current "AI" works. You're never going to get there by building on them.
I'd like to believe too, but it doesn't really track when you watch what these companies are actually doing.
Of course an LLM on its own isn't going to become an AGI. Anyone with a braincell can see that. These orgs aren't so high on their own farts that they ignore this.
Nearly all of the actual uses today aren't just the LLM, but the tooling built on top of it, the LLM is the bit that you can plug into the past century of computing developments to enable much greater autonomy.
It's true to say an LLM in isolation isn't going to become AGI, but it's also looking very likely that an AGI will feature an LLM as a key component.
That's what's happening in parallel to the model development, tooling and harnesses that make the overall system more capable. If it can be done by a computer (or by extension a sufficiently advanced robot), the LLM can do it too with a bit of integration work (which it is very able to do on its own today, with minimal steering). If you can test for something being correct in any way, that too can be ultimately hooked up to an LLM as another input to push it back onto the desired path when it veers off.
Frankly I'm starting to feel like for most people it'll feel like it's years off until the day it happens. I don't see remotely enough people taking the risk seriously in time to do anything.
It’s true to say an LLM in isolation isn’t going to become AGI, but it’s also looking very likely that an AGI will feature an LLM as a key component.
Wheels are a key component of my car I guess.
You know what, that's actually a very good example.
The wheels are the interface between the engine and any kind of° surface, with no prior knowledge of those surfaces
We've got an engine of basically everything that followed the industrial revolution until now.
An LLM can very much function as the wheel to marry a surface to that engine.
°Horizontal, don't be a smart ass
LOL.
In my "analogy" you just invented all of the actual complexity of the car in the same hand wavy way you claim AGI will just coalesce from the ether.
These orgs aren't so high on their own farts that they ignore this.
You make some interesting points.
But...the vast majority of corporate decision making for the last ten years is solid evidence that they are 100% high on their own farts.
LLM is the bit that you can plug into the past century of computing developments to enable much greater autonomy.
Interesting point. But the folks giving these things autonomy are mostly just creating huge messes, right now, and then claiming victory and taking a quick bow before the stage caves in.
The places we do see success are where no human could be patient enough - which is the stuff computers were already better at, than us.
As you point out, all that can be fixed.
But it's all already not worth the money invested, before they build dozens more data centers in the hope that they can fix it. There's just massive amounts of magic thinking going on, by investors.
I do agree with your point that there's probably somethings that are useful and some that are dangerous on the other side of this.
But...the vast majority of corporate decision making for the last ten years is solid evidence that they are 100% high on their own farts.
Completely agree, but in the gap left by "vast majority", these guys don't seem to be behaving entirely like your conventional consumer squeezing companies, they seem to be playing a much more collusive game at the very least
But it's all already not worth the money invested
That's the flaw in the common view of this. You're looking too short term. The second someone can offer to replace a business owners employees for half price, it's basically infinite money.
That is what they're pouring all the money in for: a chance at that prize. A chance at replacing all paid work with an automation they own.
Whoever gets there first, makes basically everything else obsolete in an instant.
TechBros repeat this constantly, but it just isn't true.
Plenty of second-on-the-scene solutions have emerged as most popular, or most impactful.
But Tech Bros need the fear of missing out (fear of arriving second) to justify huge investments with no worthwhile results.
I'm answering the question of what the arms race is
The goal is a technology that replaces the need for humans in any job.
The FOMO is different now because they don't give a shit about the consumer. The FOMO is versus the other competitors because it's a winner takes all scenario.
They will keep accelerating to the detriment of literally everything else.
Whether you believe they'll make it is almost moot. They're going to burn the world down trying.
Whether you believe they'll make it is almost moot. They're going to burn the world down trying.
That is a really good point.
True AGI is not happening within the lifetime of anyone or anything alive today.
See my other comments
Except 90% of what people talk about when they refer to AI is LLMs which have no direct military applications other than vague productivity boost claims. You could say the same thing about sending kids to the mines, “our society is more productive sending kids to dig out coal instead of playing. If we don’t send our kids to the mines China will and then we’ll really be behind”.
... no I am talking about actual AI as a field as a whole, not just LLMs...
Yall forgetting about Boston dynamics or something?
We got fuckin guns strapped to the back of autonomous robot dogs that can run at over 60 km/h
We got autonomous drones with facial recognition that can fly through dense forests at 90 km/h+
The fuck you think Im talking about lol...
Boston dynamics isn’t building countless data centers and (poorly) replacing peoples’ jobs. OP’s comic is obviously about ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini etc.
Are you conflating robotics with intelligence?
To be fair, we tried robots without much intelligence and they sucked. They couldn't figure out how to balance on two legs so they just fell over a lot. Robots are just better now that they have more intelligence.
AI as a field is the study of any form of NN application, which includes the software powering Boston dynamics robots...
You didnt think those robots capabilities were programmed manually by hand, did you?
The biggest strength of LLMs is in processing a huge amount of text very quickly. I imagine that contributes a lot to military intelligence.
Again that’s a use case with entirely speculative applications at best. It can “process info”, but the answers it gives from them could be hallucinated. So if it’s analyzing nuclear threats, what if it “hallucinates” one? This isn’t Comcast ticket support, the military can’t afford LLMs making up bad info.
Implying that the only way to use LLMs is with 0 human oversight.
The AI "arms race" as you put it is absolutely capitalism at its core. Replace humans with shitty robots so they don't have to continue paying wages to actual humans. Its just the the first person that makes it work will be able to set the rules for the ones that follow. Getting paid for those rules and making further entrenched in capitalism.
The frustrating part is that we could be on the precipice of an amazing time. We could be in a space where it makes sense to dump tons of resources into rapidly progressing automation because it would enable people to finally stop doing tedious labor.
But a combination of our inability to demand collective ownership of these systems and a similar disdain for social welfare means the prospect is instead terrifying. We need to continue to allow people to work cash registers for well below livable wages because otherwise they’ll starve.
There is an alternate reality where the end result of AI is that people are just free to live how they want, to socialize, to explore art and novel ideas within their passion, engage in social supports, etc. but instead we will continue to prop up the need for mind numbing and tedious labor out of a fear of homelessness because collectivism is scary and bad
I think we may very well be on the precipice of the world you imagine, or something like it. But the old world dies hard and takes effort to abolish. We didn't get where we are because we were given what we have - we fought for it. I think we're seeing the beginning stages of people demanding that the benefits of AI and automation flow to them, rather than to just the elite. Won't be without pain, but I think we get there. Partly because we kind of have to. People get over their fear of socialism and collectivism really fast when they get desperate yet there's people making huge piles of money off the automation that stole their job. I can't say for sure what the future looks like, but I don't think we stay locked here forever. To think so is to look at the situation during the first gilded age and say nothing can change. Well, it did and we got the progressive age.
I agree with you, I think the will for change is there. The next challenge is turning will into action.
The frustrating part is that we could be on the precipice of an amazing time.
Either the collapse of civilization or a literal uprising.
Seeing as we're already heading down the nightmare route, it seems poor risk management.
I mean we passed that point decades ago, im not an expert but im pretty sure it's literally been decades since we produced enough food for everyone on the planet to be obese and at least in the US I believe we have more empty houses than individual homeless people. AI overinvestment is another step in the wrong direction but it's not the cause of any of our current problems.
We could be in a space where it makes sense to dump tons of resources into rapidly progressing automation because it would enable people to finally stop doing tedious labor.
I dont think this is true.
Space mining is only for resources to use in space. The economics of transporting resources back to earth will never stack up.
I dont think any significant number of humans will spend any amount of time in space in any practical time scale.
I don’t mean people actually being in space. Perhaps a better word choice would be place, eg “we could be in a place where…”
Oh my bad i misread that.
I think we could be seeing a shift in the economics if humans can reliably live off world anyway.
I think NASAs SR-1 can show a reliable link to mars via what amounts to automated space trucks, but really only time will tell if we can kick off a new age of humanity or just keep letting neo-aristocrats take over again and again.
Nah.
It would be infinitely better to go live in a box in your back yard for several years. At least that way you avoid the chronic health issues arising from "living off world".
Even with a lot of yet-to-be-theorised physics, I just cant see the motivation for humans to leave earth in significant numbers.
IMO space will be populated almost exclusively by machines.
Maybe that's the end use for AI.
Edit: i think of space as like this infinite ocean depth. There is eventually gonna be like this massive pocket of new world down there, but until there is, there just isn't any reason to go ourselves unless you're one of those types of people.
I'd also like to invoke the cautions of 2001 Space Odyssey as food for thought
Thats kinda of my point though, im predicting that there will never be a new world, either under the ocean or "off world".
Its a fascinating concept, and I do love sci fi, but in reality it just doesn't seem plausible.
I suppose my time as a submariner may skew my view of life out there some.
Actually I'm interested to hear your perspective because I have no experience of anything like that.
I just feel like star trek has romanticised space exploration to the point where most people can't conceptualise the hardships that would be involved.
Just as an example, on the ISS, just outside earth's atmosphere, ive heard that the air smells putrid. Astronauts just deal with it because they're passionate about the project.
I guess my pessimistic view is that "life on Mars" would basically be very similar to life on a submarine but with no ports or shore leave or furlough.
It will definitely not be a walk in the park, but the newest ships and landers as well as the tech is so much more than I had on the USS Ohio. The longest we went underwater was 3 months. It definitely wears on you, but you work so much that exhaustion keeps you from any serious cabin fever. This is also helped along by the fact that we keep the oxygen percentage on the sub a little lower than surface air to lower the risk of fires.
To me, the biggest challenge won't be comfort, necessarily, but zero Gs and being able to hold off the deterioration of the body in hypotension. Humans can live in some pretty shitty conditions and space will necessitate them for now, but having the best view money can buy probably helps morale some.
I think that humanity is on the cusp of its next big jump into a new era. The old ways of doing things are no longer working, and new paths to the future will have to be charted. We are still very much in the veery early days of space colonization, kind of like the build up to the mercury program back in the 50s.
Tech is advancing so rapidly that even at 30, I've seen some technology I couldn't even dream of being real is now just in everyday use, so I remain hopeful about humans in space. Our drive to discover is so ingrained in to what we are that I see it as inevitable (if we don't destroy ourselves first) It is a compulsion that spread our species to the farthest reaches of our world and I have no reason to believe our world would be the last boundary.
I don't think this is quite how the world works. The reason people need to work to survive is because we can't survive if everyone stopped working. We have to make people work under threat of homelessness because if we didn't there is too great a risk they wouldn't work at all and that would eventually mean the collapse of society. How many people would quit their job tomorrow if they won the lottery? Sure some would find work doing something they preferred, but not all of them, and often the thing they prefer doing is not the job that actually needs doing the most. If it's something they even are good at. Loads of people would love to be an actor, but how many actually have both the talent and the skills needed to do that?
In a society where most people actually don't need to work because most work can be handled by machines without significant negative consequences things would change to be very different. People like to think rich people or politicians or kings control the world by themselves but the reality is there are always limits on what they can actually do. If you dick around too much even in an absolute monarchy you will be overthrown one way or another. Typically by your own military, underlings, or family, sometimes by revolution or insurrection. The same thing applies today to liberal democracy. In fact it applies even more so. Anyone who tried to kill off the working class as a whole would find themselves very quickly dead or dethroned one way or another.
We have to make people work under threat of homelessness because if we didn't there is too great a risk they wouldn't work at all and that would eventually mean the collapse of society
No, people want to work. Look at Wikipedia, SCP, Minecraft, all those job simulator games, Linux, the Fediverse. The drive to create something that benefits people is fundamental to the human experience.
It's a tool, use it as you wish but you either have it or not.
Tool of your own destruction and a death knell of human logic, reasoning, and creativity.
No, thats not what I was talking about at all.
The thing, western governments fear is AI-powered terminators. They want the tech first, so they can win the war when someone attacks them. That is the arms race part.
The unemployment explosion is obviously also happening. But that's actually a pretty good thing in the long run as a society with 90% unemployment and the need to work to live is absolutely unsustainable. AI will basically force the end of capitalism by increasing the system's volatility until it adapts.
LLMs will never be able to be terminators. This is just an expensive exercise in futility.
I thought, LLMs would never become able to write code. And now, I use Claude Code as the always available senior on coke.
LLMs have a reliability problem. If that gets solved somehow, they can actually drive a worker bot - or a terminator.
And the big money pits also don't only do LLMs. Those just get all the press because they are usable by normal users right now. Of course, some of those money pits are just investor scams. It's a fully corrupted society after all.
The "reliability problem" is a fundamental part of how they work. There is no solving it.
BTW, I wish you luck debugging all that vibe code when it stops working. Seriously.
Never say never
The thing, western governments fear is AI-powered terminators. They want the tech first, so they can win the war when someone attacks them. That is the arms race part.
I think you're right that this is what they are thinking, but they are being idiots.
My bash script terminators will easily destroy any AI terminators.
My bash scripts don't hallucinate, and aren't so bloated that they require an always-available link to a data center.
What we call "AI" today is not remotely close to being a good combat-ready solution.
The winners of any coming AI war won't win it with the bullshit slop-peddling tools being pushed by con artists, today.
Once one country starts making nukes you cant stop everyone from following suit to protect themselves.
Except we did stop. We ended nuclear testing. We downsized our arsenal. We never deployed the high yield, neutron bombs, or other "tactical" variants in subsequent wars. And neither did the French or the Russians or the Chinese. Or even the Israelis.
Our nuclear program is derelict. It belongs in a museum. There's an outstanding question as to how many of the bombs currently in circulation are duds.
Unlike with the F-35 or the Bradley Fighting Vehicle or the Predator Drone or even the Virginia class submarine, we're just not putting any more money into nuclear proliferation and improved first strike capabilities like we were 60 years ago.
Mutually Asssured Destruction is an easily technolngically achievable goal, that's why we don't see much development past that point. You only need to exterminate an enemy's population once.
The lesson learned by the world, at this point, is that nukes are the only way to guarantee your country isn't invaded and that agreeing to unilateral nuclear disamament is downright idiotic. Expect more countries gettng nukes this century.
Even before there was an atomic weapon, the utility, the effectiveness, of atomic weapons was never in doubt.
"AI" isn't like that.
pushes glasses up um actually the usefulness of AI has never been in doubt, we've been using it for years, what actually isn't like that is specificly generative AI.
We've been calling the good stuff "machine learning" since forever, and we've overwhelmingly been calling the new generative stuff "AI," however inadvisable that may be. If we can just stop insisting that machine learning is AI, actually, we'll have no trouble of this kind. This is an unforced error, it's just muddying the waters for no benefit at all.
The only people who think ML isn't AI are science fiction nerds who play too many video games and think AI means Cortana.
It would also apply to child labour and slavery. We may have outlawed it locally, but that doesn't change the fact that companies who make use of it will be at an advantage, so we just ended up outsourcing it.
^
Thing is: All of the examples still exist to various degrees.
And just like them AI is not going to vanish. Even more so than the others because AI is information. It's like trying to ban E2E: The genie is out of the bottle.
I mean yeah I have one friend that smokes indoors still and it’s wild to be transported to the 70s when I visit her, and there are casinos where you usually smoke indoors. I just think if these models were trained on the worlds data then we should probably nationalize the data centers or just have the majority of people have affordable gpus again to self host and continue making strides optimizing the models to run on lower vram if people insist on using these things. I think it should be considered cringe to try to make money off them or use them for art, and the other use cases need to be regulated - giant scam apparatus manipulating the shit out of people, propaganda spreading convincing bot accounts, automated cyber attack attempts…ya know all the wonderful and most popular use cases benefiting humanity and improving our lives.
It’s a pipe dream to think someone will pull a big switch and turn off AI. Blockchain stopped being relevant but it’s still being used.
AI being irrelevant is good enough for me.
That will never, ever happen. It has a usecase nothing can replace. It’s not perfect, but you’re delusional if you think it’s ever going away. It might go away from your toothbrush and everything that doesn’t need it, but AI for eg. writing your emails is here to stay forever.
But Blockchain did stop being needlessly added into everything, at least.
In 2021, there were an estimated 50 million people living as slaves, and in 2013, there were an estimated 168 million children (aged 5-17) involved in child labor. These are the numbers I found off of Wikipedia.
Agreed, the technology exists and bad faith actors will from now on be able to use it for massive disinformation. No matter what happens, you just need some computing power, some decently smart people and time and you can train an LLM from scratch. But those damn datacenters can still be not build.
Asbestos is already in all the buildings, we can’t remove it. All the cars already require leaded gasoline, we can’t unlead it.
Fun fact I didn’t know until recently: if you have a classic car that requires leaded gasoline, they actually sell lead substitute that you mix with modern unleaded gas
Depending on where you live, you can also install a conversion kit to run your older car on natural gas instead of gasoline
Isn't the problem now the ethanol and not the octane?
I don’t know the exact mechanisms at play that make it necessary, but they sell the additive at automotive stores!
Lead helped with the valves not getting as much wear because of specific metallurgy that depended on it. It wasn't strictly needed, the change occured after cars were already mainstream.
Except child and slave labour was cheap and profitable. AI is neither cheap nor profitable.
Well to be fair to the giant pieces of shit in positions of power all over the states they are trying to bring child labor back as well
I'd bet good money it's the same people fighting to keep child marriage.
Good bet they'd like to bring smoking indoors and slavery back, too.
Whats wrong with blowing smoke into the face of your child slave??? We used to be a country
- Smoking indoors happens all the time because someone who's good at vaping is unclockable
- Slavery is still legal in the USA as long as it's prison work (ever wondered why American police always look for excuses to arrest black people?)
- Child labour has never gone away
Most people want to bring smoking indoors back. The only people who don't are the weird shut-ins who sit around posting online all day. People out in the real world don't view having an after meal cigarette as equivalent to fucking slavery.
You guys have to remember that if you ask a random person on the street what Cthulhu is, they're not going to have a fucking clue. Everyone in this thread is a weirdo. Including me.
The only people who talk positively about bringing indoor smoking back are smokers and pub owners, and they're in the minority.
Of course it's not morally equivalent to slavery, but the ban on smoking indoors made my life and a lot of people's lives much nicer, even before you factor in the reduced risk of lung cancer from secondhand smoke.
The only people who talk positively about bringing indoor smoking back are smokers and pub owners, and they’re in the minority.
I like my booze, but if someone wants to light up, they ought to be outside with their booze.
This proves my point. Normal people don't think like this. It's weird. A bar without smoking is like a church Jesus. This is one of those topics online where you feel like you're being deliberately gas lit. But I have to remember I'm surrounded by the weirdest of the weird.
No, "normal" people don't want to bring back smoking indoors. Alcoholics who spend most of their time indoors in bars want to bring smoking indoors back. Your "normal" people aren't the norm.
Im an off and on smoker and am SUPER against smoking indoors and even around kids (like even within eyesight fr). I even got to xperience it before the bans. I remember being a kid in that and its why i have asthma now. Its awful. This person is a minority even among most smokers i know. Its only the selfish lazy people that think that way.
They are not in the minority. The Internet is not the majority. You and I do not remotely represent the vast majority of people in any way shape or form. No one here does.
I there data that backs up your claim?
Is there data that the vast majority of people in the world are not communist Linux-using weebs on the autistic spectrum suffering from anxiety problems who find jokes about operating systems, Lovecraftian horrors, and quantum mechanics hilarious, and relate to memes about standing in the corner at a party and not talking to anybody?
We are not the majority, my friend. This is one of those things where you really need to take “trust me bro" as the best double blind study you’re gonna get. Your question is the best data I can give.
I meant the claim that most people want to bring back indoor smoking. I'm assuming you have nothing more than "trust me bro" for that too.
The only people who talk positively about bringing indoor smoking back are smokers and pub owners, and they’re in the minority.
You and I do not remotely represent the vast majority of people in any way shape or form. No one here does.
What you say about Lemmy users is true, but I wasn't talking about Lemmy users, I was talking about the general public. Most people don't smoke.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/smoking-rates-by-country
I'm a chainsmoker and I'd prefer if they didn't.
As much as I hate ai/llm's, here we're conflating new technologies with bad practices. This is a fallacy.
However much we hate llm's they definitely aren't going away anytime soon. You can't make laws or policies to make ideas/technologies go away.
It is like the machine in industrial revolution stayed and flourished, yet the child labor and unfair labor practice are being fight against.
Clearly, this is not a justification for current LLM system or those feeding it. I feel it is important to keep these companies accountable for the crime they have commited.
In the long run, I feel it is also important to think about what do we need to do to keep LLM working for humanity, and organize to make that a reality. If that requires complete removal of LLM as a technology, so be it; but I am not entirely convinced we even need to go that far.
You can’t make laws or policies to make ideas/technologies go away.
Yes you can. You write a bill saying AI data centers are banned. That's it. That's the bill.
About as effective as writing a bill saying war is banned.
Ah yeah, that'll stop China. Or the UK. Or India, or whatever other country wants a piece of the pie.
Pushing back isn't like trying to ban child labour, it's like trying to ban factories.
This would make sense if I believe AI was even valuable to have.
Legit, I do not care if China has the monopoly.
Cool. But it still means that AI will be out there and being used.
No one can stop me from using chat IRC—no one!
I'm not sure you can really draw a clean bright line between a "technology" and a "practice."
I think you could call the American practice of slavery -- which required a network of infrastructure, culture, agricultural conditions and market opportunities, and government policies -- a "technology." As surely as the Internet is, anyway.
Luddites completely failed to prevent industrialisation. But through successive incremental efforts, child labour was banned in most countries.
Trying to prevent AI is like trying to prevent factories.
Whatever you have to tell yourself, man.
I don't "have to tell myself" anything. Forgive me if I misinterpreted your extremely vague reply, but it sounds like you think anyone who says that AI is going to continue to be used must be some kind of AI-hyping techbro fanboi, which is idiotic.
I have no interest in trying to convince you that AI is likely going to remain in use, but you really need to make at least a minimal amount of effort at understanding (not agreeing with) other people's positions, if only for the sake of your own blood pressure.
But you are an AI hyping fanboi. Like, just own it man.
I'm not that upset, either; when AI has finished tricking people into becoming dependent on it before summarily dropping them into the dark pit of unemployment, I will be one of the few remaining capable of doing any work.
What makes you think I am hyping it or a fanboi?
It's comparing apples to oranges.
AI is software. We never stopped any software change before. Even heavily disliked and banned systems like crypto currency or vpns etc. still exist.
For the record I agree that AI needs more regulation and we could even force stop development of new models but LLMs will never be stopped in any meaningful way. You can take an open source model and run it today.
LLMs are here to stay until it's replaced by other technology.
I am more mad about people saying "it's improvng exponentially." The rate of improvement is falling, if anything.
Bunch of people said it because sci-fi made them believe so, and then everyone else went along with it for some reason.
Either the exponent is 1/2 or people are just having shared delusions.
Or people don't know what exponentially means
Ha the exponene might be half, but you're right exponential is a huge oversimplification, even as the processing power increases exponentially, the resl world results increment much less quickly.
Smoking indoors, child labor and slavery are all still here, just transformed and under a different coat of paint
Reminds me of when the stupid "Web 3.0" made up by blockchain freaks was supposed to be the future. Not every technology will be as widespread as the internet. The internet facilitates communication across the entire world and offers many advantages over phone, mail, and other forms of communication.
The use cases and advantages are clear, even if there was an overly eager hype cycle in the 90s. AI might have some uses, but a clear advantage has not actually been established yet, nor have the legal challenges been ironed out. Remember that the current iteration of AI would not have been possible without breaking tons of IP law, slurping up as much data as possible.
Distributed web is a great idea. With a shitty vibecoded reference implementation (IPFS). And then also buzzworded as "Web 3" together with blockchain DNS and everything else.
Agree AI is as overhyped as the internet in the late 90's was. I also think AI or some descendent of it will likely be as ubiquitous as the Internet is now. There's quite a few problems right now that AI just seems really well suited to solving, unlike the blockchain where it really only solved one sorta esoteric problem. I look at AI as being the bridge between the real world where things are fuzzy, rules are inconsistent, things don't have clear cut answers, etc and the digital world where everything is precise and well defined. That's not something that's going away.
However, what I see happening with AI is much the same thing as what happened with the Internet. To use the Internet in the late 90's was frustrating. The computers sucked, they were huge, they used a bunch of power, the connection was slow, connections dropped, they weren't always on, they took quite some to establish, etc. It wasn't till CPUs got good enough to be able to be battery powered and still render full websites (in other words, the key building block of a smartphone) that the Internet really became a ubiquitous thing for most people. Today's AI uses way too much power, requires hardware that's way too expensive, is less smart than people think it is, has problems learning, has problems with hallucinations, etc. What I see happening is the AI bubble crashes, like the dotcom crash, but then it comes back once the technology is really ready.
As far as law and IP go, the Internet often had lots of issues with that too. Lookup the origins of why we have Section 230. It's still something we're arguing over. We'll figure out the legal issues. And IP law is broken, has been for a long time. It needs a revamp to bring it back to some sanity. I have no problem with AI breaking IP law. Much of that shouldn't be under copyright anyway.
There's quite a few problems right now that AI just seems really well suited to solving, unlike the blockchain where it really only solved one sorta esoteric problem.
That's a great point.
- Web 2.0 was way overhyped, but widely useful.
- Web 3.0 was way overhyped and really useful in some very niche applications.
- "Mobile first" was way overhyped, but basically correct (they typed into their phone, lol.)
- AI is way overhyped, and probably falls somewhere in between - not as complete of a waste of time as most of the blockchain crap, and nowhere near as practical as web 2.0 or mobile first.
Edit: (Sarcasm incoming:) But we can all agree with the tech bros, that I became obsolete during each of these transitions, because I didn't drop everything else and focus on it completely to the exclusion of all else.
I guess my paycheck disagrees, but who are we going to trust - cold hard cash, or some con artist tech bro CEOs? Lol.
I actually think that AI might be closer to Web 2.0 than blockchain. Where I see it's biggest potential though isn't in the stuff most people do everyday, but in specialized applications. I see some of the uses in stuff like medical research and find the potential there to be wild. In alot of ways, it's sort of a revolution in how we think about doing computing. We're still really early on it, so its hard to know just where it takes us. Even on the more mundane stuff, it really does help programmers be alot more productive (though it's hardly a replacement for talented programmers). Which is a huge for helping us build the next generation of tech.
There's alot of stuff they say is obsolete but really isn't. For example, in my day job, I'm an analog IC design engineer. The most advanced process I work on is sort of 90nm (but not really). The previous silicon process I worked on was basically a 0.5um process. Ask most people and that's all stupidly obsolete - should have died out in the 90s or something. But I work on power products. Power is analog, not digital. We may have some digital stuff, to be sure, but what we fundamentally do is analog. And you can't use 5nm processes to deal with "high" voltages - that's all on "old", "obsolete" silicon processes. Oh and you know what we power with all this? Among many other things, those fancy AI chips. So yeah, alot of these transitions do obsolete stuff, but there's often still important niches in older technologies. I mean you still have people learning COBOL so they can program mainframes for banks.
I actually think that AI might be closer to Web 2.0 than blockchain.
I 100% agree. I use AI on purpose for things, once in awhile. I've never had a use for blockchain, only had it shoved at me.
I mean you still have people learning COBOL so they can program mainframes for banks.
Exactly. Ilike Cobol as an obvious point against both extremes of the AI argument.
"AI is going completely away..." - Sure. Right after Cobol and the Fax machine.
But also "AI has eliminated all need for X, Y and Z." Sure. Right. And it also just got rid of Cobol and fax machines, right?
Things change surprisingly fast, at the same time as things change shockingly slowly.
What doesn't go out of style is learning and expertise.
What do you mean clear advantage has not actually been established?? Im getting weeks worth of stuff done in hours, like it's self evident how powerful AI is. If you use it to make deepfake porn instead of making you better at your job, that's a human choice. If you make a half decent effort, AI makes you an order of magnitude more productive. It's pretty freaking amazing, like how the automobile was a massive improvement over a horse and buggy.
I get your point. There's real benefit here. The question is if the benefit really outweighs the real costs, once they start charging for the actual resources used.
One reason we expeirence it differently is that some of us were already an order of magnitude more productive than average, without AI.
AI is a great tool for catching up. It slurps up popular patterns and spits them out, sometimes in novel contexts.
For everyone who used AI to catch a productivity technique(s) they had not yet encountered, I can see how it feels life changing.
I suspect we have a wave of realizations coming from folks whose token costs get too high, and realize they can get 95% of the AI productivity gain they experienced, with zero use of tokens - just by copying and pasting the patterns and tools AI already introduced them to. We don't talk about that aspect enough - genuine acceleration is happening, and some of those folks will stay more productive after the AI hype wave ends.
Of course, there's a whole other category of folks genuinely benefitting from AI because they need needlessly verbose language output to bullshit their dumb bosses. I don't currently have a dumb boss, so I'm not making use of that. But I 100% will start, if needed. Lol.
Such a dumb comparison.
No, it's apt. They're all tools of capitalism promoted by oligarchs and bootlickers.
It really isn't, they're completely different things. This is comparing the invention of the transistor to slavery and child labour. It's fucking idiotic is what it is. If they made valid comparisons they'd be making a point, instead thayre making a fool of themselves and the message.
You are aware that AI, as it is currently used, is a mass plagiarism machine, yes? That threatens to put people in many different sectors out of work? And accelerates climate change to do so?
Why haven't we heard about AI doing literally anything good, like curing cancer, solving famous unsolved problems, reducing waste in logistics and distribution, etc?
Each character in the OP comic is an arrogant chud trying to reassure themselves that their precious methods of control aren't fragile.
Solving famous unsolved problem: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an-80-year-old-erdos-problem-and-mathematicians-are-amazed/
Drug discovery (AI can't do anything about the time needed for clinical trials): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03434-4
Assisting the blind: https://www.acb.org/i-am-blind-self-driving-cars-waymo-give-people-me-independence
Re: solving famous unsolved problem
“I guess it got lucky that it found one of the cases where experts tried and missed something,” Litt says. Genuinely new, groundbreaking ideas remain beyond the reach of current LLMs, instead leaving the machines to mine the literature for rare gems where humans missed a relatively simple approach.
You're lumping in other uses of AI with LLMs (chatGPT etc), which is how pfried@reddthat.com contradicted you.
It's specifically the LLMs, which were trained with AI but are more like context-specific hyperplausible random text generators, and yes, are mass plagiarism projects currently being used as an excuse to fire a bunch of creative folk in multiple industries.
Other non-LLM AI uses tend to be more specifically problem-solving and narrowly useful.
Why is plagiarism bad? Aren't you a bit of a bootlicker here for enforcing anti sharing constructs now? Nobody owns information, period.
You think artists, writers, musicians etc should all get replaced by data centers? The bootlickers are the ones groveling at the oligarchs' feet
What doss that have to do with what I said? Plagiarism doesn't exist, it's a social construct that we made up entirely to protect information "theft" but since information cannot be stolen the entire premise is not sound.
I'm sure you are just mouth-agape salivating at the thought of getting to watch all the Mickey Mouse you've ever wanted to for free, but even a socialist society would shame plagiarism.
The idea that a society that has cast off its capitalistic chains to embrace freedom, compassion, and mutual aid would not be one that properly celebrates its people for their valuable hard work is... fucking insane.
So are photocopiers.
You're really not getting it. You are saying the comparison of the printing press, the photocopier and then the scanner are equal to slavery and child labour.
Somethings pretty fucked up in your head if you're making that correlation.
Also, ML has done a lot of good things too, even LLMs have their function and benefit, be it at a cost that may not be worth paying with our current energy generation and cooling solutions. You just don't want to see it, you are deliberately looking away in your blind hatred for the system. Which I get, fuck the system and it's owners. But God damn, comparing it to the torture that is slavery?
LLMs are a tool, they have no inherent morality to them (I'm not talking about companies stealing shit to train their LLMs, you can do it without theft).
Slavery is not a technology or a tool, besides a "tool of capitalism" or whatever the fuck you want to call it, seeing as it's been around since we learned to lift a rock to another human. Humanities evil behaviour is not a technology.
Somethings pretty fucked up in your head if you're making that correlation.
You don't understand the comparison. Genuinely, I don't think you are smart enough to even talk to about this.
LLMs are a tool, they have no inherent morality to them
All tools have morality.
A slave is a tool.
I don't mean in the capitalist sense, I mean, literally, in the leveraging them to build a pyramid sense.
Treating people like tools is why it is immoral.
Ah, the classic argument, claiming that you have the superior intelligence. Yes God, whatever you say.
Genuinely, I don't think you are smart enough to even talk to about this.
Sometimes it is true. I mean, what else am I supposed to say to creationists and homeopaths?
No, really, its a technology.
A more apt comparison would be more like internal combustion engines, wood burning stoves, or magnetic tape hard drives. That is to say, it probably has some niche place where its still a practical use or may be advantageous (backup/emergency generators for hospitals, in remote wooded locations without modern infrastructure, for cheap long term data back ups, for my examples, respectively), but that place is not the common place.
An individual stove, engine or hard drive has a negligible effect on climate change. AI requires huge amounts of material, space, energy and water to run. So a closer comparison would be if a civilization threw all their building materials, firestarter and food into a big pit and lit it.
Right now, yes. You can thank greedy capitalists for that. There's no fundamental reason why it must be an environmental disaster. Look at the human brain. It's way beyond any AI today and uses 10 watts. That's peanuts to any AI. Drop the power consumption of AI by a couple orders of magnitude and nobody cares. Impossible you say? We done crazier power drops in conventional computing. Take a Pentium 3 500Mhz computer. Ran about 200 watts. It's about the same compute performance as a Raspberry Pi Pico at 2 watts. Or take a 486 vs an Arm Cortex M3. The 486 is 2-10 watts, depending on variant. The M3 is a couple of mW for equivalent performance. Point is, we've slashed power consumption wildly in the past and I see no reason to think AI should be any different. We just let greedy capitalists push the technology out way too widely before it was ready. Which means we waste alot of energy and resources to build stuff that will likely soon be very obsolete.
I find it ironic that every top comment author seems to feel the urge to point out why it's actually different, but never question the point. I'm also sick of people telling me there's no turning back, like, yeah, you do you, bro. My life is great without social networks, which are not going anywhere I guess.
I feel like this comic is bait
No, because you guys debating with actors who exist only in your head
Why do you say that? I had this exact conversation today at work
Because people do not listen. Pro-ai people are not as charged as pro trump people - most of them would debate in a good faith
The guy I know who crows the most about AI, consistently can't spot glaring mistakes in AI-generated art. It's impossible to talk him down, not because he's an unpleasant person but because he literally can't perceive the bullshit so he assumes others are just nitpicking.
Yeah but i mean who cares ai art is atrocious, making memes is literally the least important aspect of AI.
Genuinely, why?
AI can improve your programming speed but it can't improve memes? You would rather people spend 2 weeks painting something they could generate in 2 minutes? They'll check the output, don't worry.
Sure it could and i dont rather anything like that, it just doesn't matter.
None of those things were new technology. The assembly line didn't go away when people were angry about being laid off.
If you're talking about a specific product of AI ("art" for example), you might want to make that clearer. If you're talking about AI in general, you're treating this one thing like it's a reason to try turning back the clock.
The rational thing to do would be getting politically involved to get AI out of corporate ownership.
I think another reasonable thing is for our justice systems to tie human responsibility/culpability to the actions of AI (or whatever we may be calling these computing advancements in the future).
Wish in one hand...
American justice isn't a guarantee, and until political action comes back into style we can't expect good outcomes.
Is there something about new technology that affects economic incentives in a way unlike anything else before it?
If you light a cigar in a room, the smoke makes people cough, but if you start your crank-engine car next to a picnic table, the gas just doesn't exist?
Slavery is so lucrative a deal that we still do it.
If you want to try to get rid of it, I can't stop you. I'm unaware of an example of that ever working, though. I think it's better to seize that tech from the people who would likely use it to make people's lives worse.
Okay, this:
If you want to try to get rid of it, I can't stop you. I'm unaware of an example of that ever working, though.
And this:
I think it's better to seize that tech from the people who would likely use it to make people's lives worse.
Are irreconcilable positions.
If you don't believe we can stop it, how are we going to seize it? Do you think that "seize" means "have access to"? Merely having access is not going to stop anyone from using it to make your life worse.
They're not irreconcilable when you read them, lol. I'm saying you have a choice between two options, but one is guaranteed not to work (trying to get rid of AI).
I don't know how to seize AI, but I imagine you'd have to break the law to some extent. Maybe get comfortable with that, for starters.
Yes, they are. You simultaneously believe that we cannot do anything and that we are capable of assuming control of it.
Since we're just speaking in vague probabilities anyway, you know what else is "not going to happen"? You panic rolling out from underneath Sam Altman's thumb. This is oligarch technology, and it will stay oligarch technology. Netflix will cost $40 a month, gas prices will rise to $25 a gallon, Nintendo will make $170 video games an industry standard, Reddit will always be more popular than Lemmy, there will never be a year of the Linux desktop, and there is nothing you can do about any of it.
Oh cool, sounds lovely.
Look, I get pissed off at AI and the AI industry every day. I definitely don't hate it as much as some people, but I'm not a fan either.
That said, it seems like there's not many comic artists out there who are able to actually articulate a coherent and rational criticism of AI. 90% of anti-AI comics end up being weak, strawman, or just generally sort of confused and vague. It's shocking to me because it seems like the problems and ways to criticize it are so plain. But comics like this and many others show how silly, reactionary, and unthinking a lot of these complaints are. There can be such thing as overreacting to a bad thing, there can be such thing as being confused about what's bad about a bad thing, etc. And in the case of this comic we have confusion about the nature of the problem and about its solution.
Ngl, it really irritates me seeing these artists think they've served up epic poignant AI ownage when they've really just demonstrated their own poor thinking ability.
And I never cease to get amazed how many upvotes they get despite being logically incoherent. Kinda disappoints me to think the average lemming isn't any better at critical thinking than the tiktokers we love to make fun of.
Yeah, for most people the only gate something needs to pass is whether it expresses a view they agree with. It's certainly a minority that imposes additional constraints. I don't know to what extent this is educational, cultural, vs. just human.
I may as well explain this because apparently I can read better than everyone else.
The comparison to chattel slavery,
is relevant
because we ended chattel slavery.
We . can . change . society . if . we . want . to.
That was not the issue I took with it actually
What, then?
The comic is, specifically, a response to the faux defeatism of pro-AI sentiments, and is perfectly cogent.
As others have pointed out, AI is a technology. It is an understanding of a certain way to program a computer. It's not a behavior, but rather it's a piece of information. That makes it different from the other three things, which are behaviors more than being technologies.
The reason why this matters and isn't just some pointless nitpick is because the comic is conflating the sentiment of not being able to go back from AI with having a bunch of pollution and gigantic data centers. In the other images, for instance, they depict smoking indoors, and say smoking indoors is already here. what they depict and what they say is already here and can't be gone back from are one in the same thing. But data centers and pollution are not the same thing as AI because AI is a technology, not a behavior. It would be fully possible to develop the same AI models without expanding the data centers or polluting any more than we already did. In fact, it would even have been possible to train AI models with sustainably sized data centers and recoverable amounts of normal pollution. It would just take longer. but the comic draws a false equivalence between the technology and the way that the technology is currently being implemented.
It's wrong because there really is no going back from AI. We've never, ever, ever, ever gone back from a piece of technology. It's always known how to create it. And regulations to stop it don't really work, as we've seen with nuclear weapons. Because once knowledge of how to do something is out there, it's pretty hard to stop people from, at the very least, knowing how to do it. And AI models can even be trained on a local computer, though obviously not very powerful ones
But just because there's no going back from AI doesn't mean that we can't build a better world where there's not irresponsibly gigantic data centers creating irreparable pollution, and all these other problems that we see with AI today. In the same way that just because there's truly no going back from nuclear weapons doesn't mean that we need to constantly be living in a cold war situation. We can indeed build better behaviors that regulate that technology.
But conflating the two is a serious mistake because it leads people to think that the only way to fix one problem is to get rid of the other and that's going to produce a lot of pointless hopelessness and confusion because it's just not true.
We've never, ever, ever, ever gone back from a piece of technology.
Bitcoin, NFTs, asbestos, CFCs, leaded substances, the metaverse, 3D TVs like the 7 or 8 different times they've tried to make that a thing, VR gaming, wearable computers, segways, ubiquitous RFID tags, google search (considering they are fucking up their own service, this absolutely counts), the iSmell?, folding-glass phones (culturally insignificant), modular phones (culturally insignificant), gesture control devices for your PC (culturally insignificant), the Internet of Things (culturally insignificant), paper clothing (wtf?), sailors forgetting and rediscovering the cure for scurvy several times, self-healing concrete had to be rediscovered, ...
I imagine you think this list is making the same mistake, but you don't understand this as a cultural issue.
It's not a behavior,
The choice to use it is a behavior.
You, while claiming it is other people who are doing this, are conflating the existence of a technology with the acceptance of it.
Using your own interpretation, we can't go back from cigarettes either. The technology is known. They still exist. People still smoke them. They still give people lung cancer. If we shut down tobacco companies, people can still roll their own. There's no stopping it. It's a societal pitfall we can't climb out of.
And yet, somehow, I can go into a restaurant today without being assaulted by a Counter Strike smoke bomb.
that's going to produce a lot of pointless hopelessness
Let's review something else you've said.
It's wrong because there really is no going back from AI.
In the absolute sense? Like, one person in the middle of Utah won't let it go? Do you really think that I care about them?
This sentiment damages hope for our cause.
You are either doing so deliberately, or do not understand the goal.
Please, spare me the pedantic lecture about what "going back" is supposed to mean.
Maybe I can restate my point more succinctly and spare you a pedantic lecture while still having a useful conversation.
-
In the other panels, the act depicted (smoking indoors) is fully identical with the act discussed (smoking indoors).
-
In the AI panel, the act depicted (pollution) is not fully identical with the act discussed (AI). It is closely related, but not identical.
-
The comic therefore undeniably conflates two separate (but indeed closely related) things. This alone is a mistake in the artist's thinking.
-
In your counter-argument with smoking, you make the same sort of mistake. The comic discusses smoking indoors, and then you discuss cigarettes. Cigarettes and smoking indoors are related, but not identical things.
-
We cannot go back from cigarettes, as you agreed. But we can go back from smoking indoors. Similarly: We cannot go back from AI, but we can go back from polluting to produce it.
-
Because the comic conflates the cessation of pollution to produce AI, which is possible, with the ability to go back from AI, which is not possible, the comic mistakenly implies that it is not possible to stop polluting, contrary to its own purpose, hence why I say the artist is confused and makes a flawed case.
I would love it if you could specify what sentiment exactly it is that damages hope for our cause, and what exactly our cause is. My post, in my opinion, expresses a positive sentiment that would increase hope that there can be a future where there's not pollution for the sake of AI. The comic is what damages hope, according to my reasoning above - Although I would never assume the comic was made in bad faith.
The fact that you think I agree with you on the cigarettes point is part of the problem.
Cigarettes and smoking indoors are related, but not identical things.
To insist on this difference is to divert public attention into pointless bickering. I've read the CIA document, I know how this works.
If you're going to come into every strategy meeting with useless bullshit on this level, I am kicking you off the team. With prejudice.
with the ability to go back from AI, which is not possible
It is possible if I cut off your apartment's electricity. Think of it like Morpheus liberating Neo from the Matrix.
https://futurism.com/data-centers-financial-bubble
The massive investments being made aren't economically viable.
This article assumes the person in the first panel wouldn't want the 3 panels to not still be the case.
Have you guys seen Reddit lately? It’s nothing but bots and AI. Its such a weird time.
"Leaded gasoline is already there, there's no going back."
My theory is that eventually there is going to be so much ai slop on the web all ai will inevitably stop working and the whole thing will collapse
I've found that when people I can clearly tell are intelligent suddenly sound like idiots, it's usually because I don't understand what they're saying. It's never because saying something I don't want to hear suddenly turned them into idiots.
I think this is a prudent approach and worth following through on, but plenty of intelligent people go bonkers outside of their domains.
I hate that people focus on the tech itself. It only creates a problem because we are living in a system that screws everyone over except a few. Let’s get mad at that.
i find it funny smoking indoors is on the same level of bad as literal slavery 🤣
The same level of bad...?
it is being compared to it yes
I don't know how to tell you this: two pictures being next to each other does not mean they're equivalent problems.
this comic disproves that
I don't like the comic either, but the pictures all being together in the comic is because they're supposed to be the same kind of problem, not because they're supposed to be at the same level of badness.
Mm, nope. Not even close.
mm yep. very close. get comfy, we will be doing this for a while
I am chatting with a parrot, so probably, yeah.
And it's important to remember, when everyone thought slavery was all good because it's free labor, it cost government a lot of money to remove it because they had to pay the slave owners compensation. That's disregarding the human rights and plethora of problems.
For "I'm fiscally right" people, your money will go towards all these extravaganza when it inevitably doesn't bring back the money expended on it.
It would be funnier if they listed things that don't exist anymore though.
Anyone who is impressed with LLMs to the point they believe they should in any way be mistaken for intelligence must be summarily ignored and excluded from decision processes which affect anyone not similarly impaired.
LLMs are only AI as Accelerators and Amplifiers of Ignorance and Incompetence, with vanishingly scarce examples of Iteration and Insight.
Except it is more like "your nudes have already leaked, there is no going back".
This is one of the cases where you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can't uninvent something and delete the knowledge from everyone's mind.
You can regulate it, which is exactly like the comic.
That doesn't prevent it from happening. It's a useful reaction to, for example, smoking, because you can ban smoking (indoors, or whatever) and so prevent your population from being exposed to (second-hand) smoke. But banning AI is not going to protect your citizens from the effects of AI, because AI is still going to be available in other countries.
Well, kinda. But the internet is global and you can hook a data center up to it anywhere. There's plans to build them literally in space. And I run local models on my own machine at home, that's not going away either. So the impact of regulation will be limited and local. AI as a whole isn't going away.
Yep, only the first square depicts the character as the victim, all the other squares show the abusers.
Know what you can and can't control.
A more apt comparison is probably atomic energy or the internet. If AI had no utility like smoking, you could make that comparison. Once we knew how little upside there was to smoking it was easy to ban, but a billion+ people still do it. Until AI provides no benefit for whatever reason, it will be used.
You could look at the popularity of smoking and think either "There must be an appeal here that I'm just not seeing" or "Billions of people are just feckless idiots, I guess."
I've never been a smoker. But experience has taught me that when I have that second impulse, I've always been wrong.
Well, it has initial utility with a bad trade-off and the utility dereases as addiction sets in. There's a point at which smoking a cigarette is reducing stress, but eventually it increases the baseline stress before having a cigarette to the point that it's a net loss. Eventually it's not smoking reducing stress from other sources, it's pushing back against the mountain of stress of addiction.
If it didn't initially reduce stress in the first phase, you wouldn't do it enough to get to addiction.
Personally, one of the things I found most useful for quitting was the idea that smoking another cigarette would never fix the desire to smoke, only not smoking could do that.
it has initial utility with a bad trade-off
It's not that I disagree, but this is your own personal judgement for your own situation. Not everyone is in your situation and not everyone would agree with your judgement if they were. I'm glad you've quit smoking, I'm happy you're sharing your experience, but generalizing your experiences to "everyone" is dicey.
I've never heard "stress relief" as a reason for smoking. I have heard that it can improve concentration and stave off hunger. And that it is a pleasure, pure and simple. There are people living in situations where those benefits may be more valuable than they might be to you and me. The highest rates of smoking are in the third world, for example.
As a 20 year smoker who quit, I agree with hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone . The only thing it gives you is relief from the craving of the addiction that it causes itself. As for how people start, they start when they are kids trying to look cool in front of other kids. No one starts smoking because they enjoy it, it's disgusting. They start "enjoying" it more the more addicted they get, and it doesn't take long.
A lot of smokers mistake relieving withdrawal symptoms as relieving stress. It can create such a strong association that there is an honest belief that it's why most people start smoking.
Ok but this is some of you talking about AI:
id say the head over heels visceral hatred of ai is more common than any sort of praise. not sure who "all" means.
The difference is that AI is not morally repugnant to most people, and its harms are indirect, rather than direct
Second-hand smoke wasn't morally repugnant until people were thoroughly convinced. Also, I think many of AI's harms are pretty direct.
Sigh. This comic is as delusional as the rambling of Sam Altman about AGI.
AI is a tool and despite all its shortcomings not a disease. It’s important to wrestle it out of the hands of the techbros and give it back to the people.
But it’s going to stay and no yelling at the clouds will change it.
It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of why people say "there's no going back".
Practically anyone with a gaming computer can download Ollama today and run a decent open source model and do stuff locally, download it, take their computer offline, then use AI without touching any billionaire's SaaS products.
You can get some productivity out of those models. You can use LLM, generate images, use computer vision, get help coding with local offline agents. It might not be as clean as using some of the paid tools and closed source models, but they work.
And that's what people mean by, "there's no going back". What the technology does is going to keep being a thing. It might dissipate a bit as the bubble pops, but it's not going away just like it'd be weird to try and make the internet technology go away at this point, even after the dot com bust.
It doesn't mean we can't regulate data centers and their construction. It means the technology is developed and open source and usable by practically anyone, and the tooling will stay around.
Exactly. I run some local models on my graphics card for fun and honestly, those things getting kinda good.
But I guess if you’re on Lemmy, have a hateboner for LLMs and are full in your media confirmation bubble, then you probably don’t care. A bit disappointing, I always thought the metaverse is full of people that are interested in new things. I really can’t blame them however, the techbros do a good job to push everyone away from their technology.
99.99999999% of people (ie, normies) have no clue about any words you are saying, will blindly keep using shitty chatbots shoved in their faces (while generating lazy slop that poisons the internet/our brains), all while destroying land/earth to build data centers to push us to full fascist surveillance state.
thats the problem. Bobby Linux on his local ollama is of 0 concern.
Destroy all data centers.
Somebody voted you down, let me upvote you for balance.
Well I say: put the development of AI in the hands of academia and put regulations in place for the building of data centers. Consider environmental impact, force the use of renewable energy and prevent hardware shortage on the market. Let companies and organisations host their own models. Ban the use of phones in schools and shift the weight of exams in colleges and universities to oral questionnaires that confirm the student actually knows this stuff.
Yeah lol. That could be done in Europe, I’m skeptical about the US.
Please send me some looted hardware if you are destroying data centers.
Very much agree.
That was a very misleading comparison I think. There are obvious bad things related to AI but claiming it's something similar to slavery ou smoking indoors is just crazy.
As usual a bunch of cowards downvoting without arguments. You are as simpleminded as the author of this shitty comic.
Lemmy often hates on other platforms because the users there are in a bubble. Yet Lemmy itself is a bubble, just a different one.
Worst analogy ever. Compare AI to the cotton gin or semiconductors or railroad. There usd no going back on things that increase productivity. Only forward.
Explain why globally we cut back on nuclear power please? How does this fit into your argument?
Coal and gas lobbyists pressuring the construction of their plants over nuclear. Fission is the most safe and efficient form of power production we have reasonable access to. We never globally cut back because the plants hardly existed in the first place.
Oh, so it turns out we can choose not to, but only if billionaires agree.
Thankfully, violence persuasion is a great way to change a billionaire's mind.
Ya this isn't the argument the person I replied to was making
Because petro companies pay off politicians and use a couple unfortunate and totally preventable incidents to make nuclear power a boogeyman even though annual deaths related to petroleum power far outweigh all deaths related to nuclear power?
Ya this isn't the argument the person I replied to was making
The thing is 'AI' is a broad net....
So while you do have for example, utility in code generation, that ranges in usefulness to nearly the whole thing to mild completion, depending on the nature of the task. There's not going to be a full "going back", but maybe we can hope that people who are flooding with shit software they don't understand will get over it.
Which highlights one of the major real problems. AI enables people that have shit ideas to make shit content with unprecedented volume. This applies to code, video, text, music. The people that use it to make quality content might be seeing less than 20% more productivity as they keep it on the rails, the people making shit are now able to spew out 1000% more stuff because they just don't care.
Which in turn drives unreasonable infrastructure demands. So if the former "goes back", so too does the infrastructure build out.
The misinformation angle though...
Sure. If the cotton gin lied about 20%+ of the cotton it separated and that portion was full of seeds.
Not sure anything I tell you will convince you. For software development the latest models like opus are literally better at most coding then top tier humans. They still lack strategic context and aren't perfect but they can increase productivity 10x on many tasks.
Do they lie? You can literally write the unit tests and verify behavior and performance.
There is no going back. My job has changed forever.
I use Opus 4.7 in high reasoning mode. If you are comparing to crappy Google models then you are comparing a Ferrari to a tricycle.
For software development the latest models like opus are literally better at most coding then top tier humans.
Bullshit.
It may feel good to use these, but the data doesn't support that claim.
These things are putting out code that doesn't pass experienced programmer's definitions for quality or maintainability.
Where agentic AI runs in production, it is breaching data left and right and deleting production databases and sometimes also deleting the backups.
That you can get high quality code out of them, I won't argue against. I can, as well.
But these things aren't ready to replace programmers, and they actively make most programmers produce worse results in slightly longer timelines.
I'll tell you what is ready to replace programmers is fucking WordPress, lol. If you tell me WordPress is coming for my job, I won't argue.
Anything the AI can write perfectly could (and should) have just been built more maintainably on WordPress from existing plugins.
We're remixing excellent existing open source code, but we would be better off reading the documentation and using what already exists.
You'll get down voted to eternity for speaking truth like that friend. Be cautious, a lot of these kids just don't want to hear it.
And yeah, Google is trying so hard but failing miserably. I'm excited to try Opus 4.8 with my work account 🙈
Slavery increased productivity quite a lot. That was still eradicated (mostly...)
Computers are already here, but I think many people should go back.
Yes I remember when endorsed slavery, child labour and smoking indoors - I was such an idiot
Only works with things that have proven efficacy. Like the car replacing the horse or electricity replacing various manual labour tasks, like doing laundry.
If you compare AI with crypto, or NFT ok. This meme doesn't have sense...
Now people watch their phone while eating and the public discourse is filled with their algorithm infused opinions.
Globalisation took care of the rest. Children still work, slaves still exist, but not visible to us.
AI can be hidden but not prevented.
Well, child labor is still a thing, and doing a comeback in unexpected places, smoking inside has "forbidden" in most public places for decades… too bad there are STILL people that don't give a fuck, and slavery, well… I guess it is illegal too.
Apples and oranges
Nah, bio-engineered humans is the future, you can't stop it.
I have often dreamed of having cybernetic body parts. As a haver of chronic pain, it would be so lovely to not have that. I ain't trying to live forever, though. But if I have the option I am signing up for cyborg surgery.
I mean, you can ban 3/4 if these things more or less effectively
Compering technologies with ways of living, aren't we?
Yes AI is crap now.
Yes it is driven by oligarchs who want all the pie for themselves.
Yes it is a bubble.
Yes it is over-hyped and presented as the holy grail.
Yes it fucks our planet.
But it is a new technology that its gonna get integrated in our lives.
...
Well until we make an AGI and it fucks us all.
Replace the buzzword “AI” with “computing advancement” or (more broadly) “technological advancement.”
I think that makes it easier to see how the analogies in the comic strip are meaningless to the basic pattern that our technology has been advancing and will continue advancing, unless or until societal collapse (and maybe not even then if, by then, technology has reached the point where it can start creating its own advancements).
Everyone will have flying cars in the future, technology only advances.
Isn't it's silly how liberal people fall into a conservative trap here? We should be able to figure out AI. That's what being a liberal is all about - believing that we can steer advancement to benefit of all.
Technically being a liberal means believing that government shouldn’t interfere in the free market. Unfortunately, the terms have been muddied a lot in the US.
But conservatives love AI.
Does that mean... that conservatives are the real wokelords?? 😱
You guys, I think this Elon Musk character's got some pretty clever ideas. We should be terraforming Mars before we fix the Earth.
"We already have horses, we don't need cars" .... this is how THEY sound.
Your society is crumbling in no small part because cars have pushed people too far away from each other and now they are lonely. Henry Ford is kind of a dick.
"what you all sound like"
* Equates AI to slave trade and child labor. *
There's something funky here pot and kettle wise, because "AI is here to stay" and "oH my GaaahhhwwD it's an AI sLOP" are two sides of the same annoying coin.
Leave your fragile downvotes from both camps wherever there is space and chill out already.
You guys sound like: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=jkGCsni9TD4
3 of the 4 panels are on topic, the smoking one I would say doesn't belong. The topic is about labor exploitation. Slave labor was cheap brute force labor. Then it was banned. So people pushed for more child labor (not that it didn't exist in parallel to slave labor, just not as utilized). Once child labor was banned from being the dominant labor exploitation there was also the rise of things like company script and company towns. Also banned. For the past few decades we have lived through globalism as the main method of exploitation, pushing for remote jobs filled from cheap labor countries and shipping factories overseas. Now we have AI. And we are seeing that for specific tasks it can be exploited for cheaper labor. Humanity will always find ways of exploiting cheap labor.
In 100 years this will be about cloning slaves and arguing that they aren't real people. Capitalists will control the cloning farms and use the clones as exploitable labor. And in a short time after the exploitation of clones, they will argue that it is already here and there is no point in stopping it.
I dislike what AI could do to art, but i don't really mind AI at work. I mentioned it in another post, I like AI because it minimises the tedious and time-wasting data entry at my job.
AI will eventually enable a society without wage slavery. Everyone will have enough and some extra. No one will need to work.
And there literally is no other option to get a society without the need to work. AI really is the only way.
For that to happen, society needs to be structured in a way that the benefits of greater productivity is distributed to everyone, particularly those most in need.
I sure as hell don't see that happening anywhere at the moment. Productivity has grown steadily since I entered the workforce - my paycheck sure as hell hasn't reflected that.
Yes, society will adapt. If it doesn't, civil war will force it to. There is no way that 90% of the population of an industrialized nation with a second amendment will just watch their children starve to death because some rich guy sits on food he can't sell because no one has any money.
If we were to get the fantasy version of AI you're talking about, the civil war will be more like Dune.
So much wrong with this line of thinking.
First, it relies on societal progress as a given when in reality it is not. We have more slaves now than at anytime in history. We have greater wealth inequality than at any time in history. We have not ended systemic racism, sexism, or ableism.
Second, you highly overestimate the positive effects of the 2nd amendment. So far guns have not solved a single major US problem and instead have contributed to a climate of massive human suffering. From the million people dead from gun violence in the last twenty years in the US to the highest rates of child death by firearm in the world.
While most modern countries have next to zero child related deaths due to guns, in the US it has become the number one killer of children. Guns have not been an effective tool for any major human rights movements and instead have been a tool of oppression. It is important to point out most 2nd amendment gun nutters would be on the side of the government and more than willing to kill agitators demanding equality or equity.
Third, class consciousness is at an all time low as evidenced by lack of organized labor and a nearly universal rule by the wealthy in every major country. Believing that starving is going to suddenly create this instead of delivering more chaos and death is frankly ridiculous.
We have more slaves now than at anytime in history. We have greater wealth inequality than at any time in history.
Lul
Not a fan of reality I see.
There are more slaves than ever before, but they are a smaller proportion of the human race
Of course if you're going for absolute numbers, it's hard to beat our 8B population, but it makes more sense to be speaking in percentages.
Doesn't cover anything more than the past couple of decades. That's not 'any time in history', just a very minute and cherry picked segment of it. Go back to the medieval era and before and see what wealth inequality looked like then.
Yes absolutely absolute numbers. Furthermore, if you consider underemployed people as wage slaves this number is easily ten times the estimated 50 million modern day slaves.
Wealth inequality has been increasingly dramatically for at least the last 8 decades.
You harken back to a mythical era where we don't have actual economic data operating in an entirely different economic system. Sorry, but that is about as convincing as a wet fart.
What we do know is since we have been gathering statistical information on economies the wealth gap has continued to grow. With only a couple of eastern block countries in the post-soviet era that had a brief reprieve from an ever increasing wealth gap, which has long since gone away.
You harken back to a mythical era where we don't have actual economic data. Sorry, but that is about as convincing as a wet fart.
Or perhaps you just didn't bother looking.
https://wid.world/document/inequality-in-history-a-long-run-view-wid-world-working-paper-2024-05/
Yes absolutely absolute numbers.
No disagreement there then, except for which metric is more important.
if you consider underemployed people as wage slaves this number is easily ten times the estimated 50 million modern day slaves.
You better start including serfs and peasants, 99% of the population historically, to those slave number comparisons then. Though there's a good argument to be made they should be included anyway.
Face it, compared to the entirety of human history, we're in a golden age. Things ONLY look bleak when you're looking at recent history. And even then, only in the western world. The rest of us from outside the Anglosphere have pretty much only seen things improving in the past century.
We already talked about absolutely absolute numbers. More wealth inequality than ever before in history. We already have the first trillionaires coming on line my man. You can't make this shit up, but I am sure people are still in denial.
I will readily admit we simply don't know a lot about recent history let alone ancient history economic numbers. To be honest even primary sources can be contrived as we have seen with the US recently. I can only imagine how historians will have to interpret Trumplethinskin's economic numbers.
I could give you a strong sure saying a general statement like income inequality was worse back in the days of kings. I don't know that though empirically. What I do know empirically is it is the worse now than ever in history and it is going to get even worse in the future.
If you think industrialization made things better for the human condition then I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. What I will say is currently there are a lot more people (probably a billion) from let's say 40 years ago that have access to fresh water and electricity. That is pretty amazing and perhaps some kind of silver lining to a very dark fascist cloud.
As typical of capitalism, if it is small and well regulated it can somewhat equitably distribute resources. This mythical small market capitalism invariably gives way to monopoly due to corporatism and I would argue eventually leads to a hyper capilitistic corporatocracy (aka fascism).
This is purely my opinion but why I bring it up is every single nation is a victim of this. The wealth gap is growing dramatically everywhere, even in a place like China where people thought capitalism could be tamed. China is now pumping out more billionaires per year than the US.
This is not unique to western anglosphere and frankly if you studied history you would not be looking on any nation kindly. Atrocities and genocides are universal, but I will admit the US, in particular, has outdone everyone.
The military industrial complex that sprang forth from it and subsequently spread to the whole world has caused worldwide suffering on an unimaginable scale compared to all of history. Just imagine an industry that constantly has to grow in every country and the only way they grow is through murder. I digress though.
I hate to say it, but anything past hunter and gatherer has been real shitty for humans. I don't think history shows things getting better at all and your rosy outlook is probably because your ancestors were not ruthlessly murdered in the countless human purges throughout history.
You do have a point by some metrics though. Overall violence, war, and even crime have been decreasing. That and with billions of people no longer living in abject poverty, I can see your point and it is very hopeful. if not for a lot of other unfortunate factors I could even agree to it.
You're really comparing the use of AI to actual slavery?
That’s the read you take from the comic? I read it as, “here’s this entrenched system that is clearly harmful but was also overcome”. The presentation is essentially a reductio ad absurdum, not a comparison.
Yes, when the datacenters use up the resources, and take jobs away from people? We are trading the things people need to live, for slop. Those with the resources will get more and those without the resources will get less, and the divide will widen.
Hard disagree. There was a pod I was listening to where the argument was AI is akin to the farming revolution. A coworker this week said the steam engine may be valid too.
The point is, AI is a train roaring down the tracks. You can't stop it. You might be able to slow it down at best but it's here and it's heading in the direction of the future.
The worst thing you can do is dig in your heels and pretend the train away. I acknowledge the train and will use the train but it concerns me.