Posted by smartmic 6/26/2025
Address the concerns specifically, suggest solutions for those concerns.
I have made a submission to a government investigation highlighting the need for explicitly identifying when an AI makes a determination involving an individual, and the need for mechanisms that need to be in place for individuals to be aware when that has happened along with a method to challenge the determination of they feel it was incorrect.
I have seen a lot of blanket judgements vilifying an entire field of research and industry and all those who participate in it. It has become commonplace use the term techbros as a pejorative to declare people as others.
There is a word for behaviour like that. That is what dehumanisation is.
Luddites fought against automatic weaving stools - by destroying the machines. Reasoning: It is stealing our jobs.
Comics were sure to destroy our children's minds, because they wouldn't read real literature anymore (conveniently forgetting that only 100 years before that, reading was considered a plague of the youth and putting their minds into bad places).
Rock music is of the devil. If you play "Stairway to heaven" backwards, and squint your ears just right ...
Phones that memorise phone numbers? Surely it is brain rot if you are no longer forced to memorise phone numbers.
Social media? Work of the devil! Manipulates the minds, causes addiction, bad elections, and warts on the nose!
Cryptocurrency? Waste of energy, won't someone please think of the environment? Only used for crime!
3D printing? What if someone ghasp prints himself a gun?
And now it is AI. And when AI is normalised, and something new shows up, it will be that.
For one, you, like many, misunderstand the Luddite movement. They didn’t break weaving frames because they were against technology, they broke them because they were being used to grossly devalue the work weavers used to earn their livelihood. There was a mass consolidation of textile manufacturing from small groups of tradespeople into a few very wealthy factory owners who used easily exploitable labor (like children) in very poor working conditions and paid unlivable wages to make low quality but cheap garments. The luddites weren’t against technology, they were against the way it was being used. They even only targeted factories that they thought were particularly exploitative, leaving the ones with fairer business practices alone. But they get mischaracterized as anti-technology, anti-progress…but maybe they just wanted to be able to live their lives well and support their families.
There’s really a lot to learn from the luddites and their historical context, and it really goes to show that history is truly cyclical.
I would put AI into that same group. It is and will continue to be weaponized against you by people with more power than you.
It’s heralded as a tool for increasing efficiency (a western capitalism favorite euphemism for cancerous exploitation of the environment and humans) while neglecting it’s externalities, which includes destroying the jobs of the very people it stole the work from, and making you more reliant upon it, possibly to the point you forget how to do the things you use it for.
It’s a pretty devilish poisoned fruit.
There is definitely a huge gap between what is happening right now and public perception (and, I'd argue, a few people with a lot of money to gain or lose going out of their way to increase, not decrease, that gap).
In that context, the overall notion the post approaches (that Canada would do well to avoid basing decisions that could help or harm real people on the output of these unproven systems at this juncture) is a good notion.
> Elon Musk - whose xAI data centre is being powered by nearly three dozen on-site gas turbines that are poisoning the air of nearby majority-Black neighborhoods in Memphis - went on the Joe Rogan podcast
Christ, who even reads this stuff. This constant palavering is genuinely too much.
We have been duped for half a century into solving increasingly niche problems whose benefits accrue ever upward beyond our reach, and whose harms are forcibly distributed across an unwilling populace. On the whole, technology has done exponentially more harm (mass surveillance, psychological exploitation, automated weapons, pollution, contamination of data, destruction of natural resources, outsourcing, dehumanization) than good (medical technology, targeted therapies, knowledge exchanges, Wikipedia, global collaboration). Instead of focusing on the broader issues of survival staring us in the face, we have willingly ceded agency and sovereignty to a handful of unelected Capitalists who convinced us that this invention will somehow, finally, inevitably solve all our ills and enable a utopia.
Not one of the boosters of any prior modern “technological revolution” can point to societal good that outpaced the harms caused by their creation. Not NFTs, not cryptocurrency, and certainly not AI. Even Machine Learning has seen more harmful than helpful use, despite its genuine benefits to human society and technological progress, enabling surveillance advertising and the disappearance of dissidents instead of customized healthcare and efficient distribution of resources in real-time.
Yet whenever someone dares to point this out, we’re decried by proponents as Luddites - ignoring the fact the real plight of the Luddites wasn’t anti-technology, but anti-Capital. To call us Luddites derisively is analogous to admitting the indefensibility of your position: You’re acknowledging we are right to be angry for being harmed for the sake of Capital alone, but that you will do everything in your power to stop our cause. We aren’t saying we want technology to disappear and to revert to the dark ages, we’re demanding that technology benefits everyone more than it harms them. We demand it be inclusive rather than exclusive. It should amplify our good works and minimize societal harms.
AI in the current context is the societal equivalent of suicide. It robs us of the remaining, dwindling resources we have on yet another thin, hollow promise that this time, it will be different. Four years ago we literally had Crypto Miners lighting up Coal Power Plants while proclaiming cryptocurrency and NFTs will solve climate change somehow, and now AI companies are firing up fuel turbines and nuclear power plants while promising the same thing.
We need to stop obsessing over technical minutiae and showing blind faith in technology, and realize that these are all tools of varying utility. We have mounting evidence that AI is causing more harm than good now, and that there is no practicable roadmap where its benefits will outweigh its harms in the near term. For all this obsessing over share value and “progress”, we need to accept the gruesome reality that our talent, our intelligence, and our passion is being manipulated to harm the masses - and that we alone can decide to STOP. It’s about taking our heads out of the sand, objectively assessing the whole of the system and superstructure, and taking action to change things.
More fuzzy code and token prediction isn’t going to save our asses or make the world a better place. The only way to do that is to acknowledge our role in the harms we perpetuate and choosing to stop them, regardless of the harms to ourselves in the moment.
And if we define being good as “help us to further keep human race alive as top spiecies”
Then yes, technology caused more harm than good.
World is currently experiencing another mass extinction event and at the current pace of events billions of ppl will either die from starvation or dehydration or various ecological disasters or wars caused by population migrations.
>...have willingly ceded agency and sovereignty to a handful of unelected Capitalists who convinced us that this invention will somehow, finally, inevitably solve all our ills and enable a utopia.
I've been around for that half century. The system of government is much the same. The new tech like pcs, mobile and the web are mostly tech gizmos that people quite like and choose to buy, not some fiendish plan sold as utopia.