Posted by smartmic 6/26/2025
It's obvious what electricity and mass production can do to improve the prosperity and happiness of a given society. It's not so obvious to me what benefits we'd be missing out on if we just canceled LLMs at this point.
Full disclosure: I think protein folding and DNA prediction could quite possibly the biggest advancements in medicine, ever. And still, all the critiques of LLMs being janky and not nearly sufficient to be generally intelligent are true.
So yes, I think it’s absolutely on the scale of electrification.
When people were dying of hunger then being able to create more food was obviously a huge win. Likewise for creating light where people used to live in darkness.
But contemporary technologies solve non-problems and take us closer to a future no one asked for, when all we want is cheaper rent, cheaper healthcare, and less corruption.
You also didn't address my point that those technologies do nothing to solve the real problems that real people want solved. There's a strong possibility that they'll just exacerbate them.
The luddites were a labor movement protesting how a new technology was used by mill owners to attack collective worker power in exchange for producing a worse product. Their movement failed but they were right to fight it. The lesson we should take from them isn't to give up in the face of destabilizing technological change.
Hard to say. They sort of represented the specialist class being undermined by technology de-specializing their skillset. This is in contrast to labor strikes and riots which were executed by unskilled labor finding solidarity to tell machine owners "your machine is neat but unless you meet our demands, you'll be running around trying to operate it alone." Luddites weren't unions; they were guilds.
One was an attempt to maintain a status quo that was comfortable for some and kept products expensive, the other was a demand that given the convenience afforded by automation, the fruits of that convenience be diffused through everyone involved, not consolidated in the hands of the machine owners.
This was exactly what the historical Luddite movement was trying to archive. The industrialists responded with "lol no". Then came the breaking of machines.
Unionization and collective action does work, it's why we have things like the concept of the weekend. It's also generally useful when advocating change to have a more extreme faction.
But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
Okay, so where are those? Where are even the proposals for those?
What would you propose? What do you think is fair distribution of these gains?
The telemetric enclosure movement and its consequences have been a disaster for humanity, and advancements in technology are now doing more harm than good. Life expectancy is dropping for the first time in ages, and the generational gains in life expectancy had a lot of inertia behind them. That's all gone now.
The industrialisation itself, although increased material output, decimated the lives and spirits of those who worked in factories.
And the printing press led to the Reformation and the thirty years war, one of the most devastating wars ever.
Consider we still place particular value on products which are “artisanal” or “hand crafted.”
There were people whose entire identities were tied to being able to manually copy a book.
Just imagine how much they seethed as printing press was popularized.
https://academic.oup.com/book/27066?login=false
Seems the scribes kept going for a good hundred years or so, doing all the premium and arty publications.
> The Luddite movement began in Nottingham, England, and spread to the North West and Yorkshire between 1811 and 1816.[4] Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was suppressed by legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites.
All these arguments could be made for, say, news media, or social media.
AI being singled out is a bit disingenuous.
If it is dehumanizing, it is because our collective labor, culture, and knowledge base have concerted to make it so.
I guess, people should really think of it this way: A database is garbage in, garbage out, but you shouldn't blame the database for the data.
Gonna have to disagree there. A lot of models are being used to reallocate cognitive burden.
A phd level biologist with access to the models we can envision in the future will probably be exponentially more valuable than entire bio startups are today. This is because s/he will be using the model to reallocate cognitive burden.
At the same time, I'm not naive. I know that there will be many, many non phd level biologist wannabes that attempt to use models to remove entirely cognitive burden. But what they will discover is that they are unable to hold a candle to the domain expert reallocating cognitive burden.
Models don't cause cognitive decline. They make cognitive labor exponentially more valuable than it is today. With the problem being that it creates an even more extreme "winner take all" economic environment that a growing population has to live in. What happens when a startup really only needs a few business types and a small team of domain experts? Today, a successful startup might be hundreds of jobs. What happens when it's just a couple dozen? Or not even a dozen? (Other than the founders and investors capturing even more wealth than they do presently.)
Yet, if we trust all these VC-backed AI startups and assume that it will continue growing rapidly, e.g., at least linearly, over the next years, I'm afraid that it may indeed reach a superhuman _intelligence_ level (let's say p99 or maybe even p999 of the population) in most of the areas. And then why do you need this top of the notch smart-ass human biologist if you can as well buy a few racks of TPUs?
If you can’t ask the right questions, like everyone without a phd in biology, you’re kind of out of luck. The superhuman intelligence will just spin forever trying to figure out what you’re talking about.
Read Neil Postman or Daniel Boorstin or Marshall McLuhan or Sherry Turkle. The medium is the message.
>What happens to people's monthly premiums when a US health insurance company's AI finds a correlation between high asthma rates and home addresses in a certain Memphis zip code? In the tradition of skull-measuring eugenicists, AI provides a way to naturalize and reinforce existing social hierarchies, and automates their reproduction.
This sentence is about how AI may be able to more effectively apply the current values of society as opposed to the author's own values. It also fails to recognize that for things like insurance there are incentives to reduce bias to avoid mispricing policies.
>The logical answer is that they want an excuse to fire workers, and don't care about the quality of work being done.
This sentence shows that the author perceives that AI may harm workers. Harming workers appears to be against her values.
>This doesn't inescapably lead to a technological totalitarianism. But adopting these systems clearly hands a lot of power to whoever builds, controls, and maintains them. For the most part, that means handing power to a handful of tech oligarchs. To at least some degree, this represents a seizure of the 'means of production' from public sector workers, as well as a reduction in democratic oversight. >Lastly, it may come as no surprise that so far, AI systems have found their best product-market fit in police and military applications, where short-circuiting people's critical thinking and decision-making processes is incredibly useful, at least for those who want to turn people into unhesitatingly brutal and lethal instruments of authority.
These sentences shows that the author values people being able to break the law.
> This sentence is about how AI may be able to more effectively apply the current values of society
*whoooosh*
No, it's about how poor people growing up in polluted regions can be kept poor by the damage being inflicted upon them.
Keeping a permanent poor hereditary underclass is not a "current value" of in society at large.