Posted by aphyr 14 hours ago
Well, yes, the entire world order is currently being upended. The USA is completely unrolling its place in the global order and becoming isolationist (and soon an authoritarian single-party state). The Petrodollar is either dying or being converted to a Northwestern-Hemisphere-Petrodollar, with the Yuan in the ascendancy (so there goes the strong economy powering VC money). China, EU, and Russia are the new global leaders. The Middle East and its oil is being taken over by Israel. Taiwan will fall to China and thus the whole technological world follows. Countries that are friendly with China will have good renewable tech, countries that aren't will be doubling down on oil and coal. Fresh water will become as valuable as oil. A world war will decimate global productivity for decades. Most of the democracies in the world will be gone by the end of the century.
But none of that has to do with AI.
Bad things will always happen in the world. Good things will happen too. But you're only focusing on the bad. That's not good for your health, or others'.
> Refuse to insult your readers: think your own thoughts and write your own words. Call out people who send you slop. Flag ML hazards at work and with friends. Stop paying for ChatGPT at home, and convince your company not to sign a deal for Gemini. Form or join a labor union, and push back against management demands that you adopt Copilot [..] Call your members of Congress and demand aggressive regulation which holds ML companies responsible [..] Advocate against tax breaks for ML datacenters. If you work at Anthropic, xAI, etc., you should think seriously about your role in making the future. To be frank, I think you should quit your job.
He's freaking out, and rejecting AI completely, out of fear. And that's okay; we all get a little freaked out sometimes. But please try not to make other people freaked out as well? Just because you are scared of something doesn't mean the fear is justified or realistic.
What's going to happen now is the same thing that happened during the pandemic. A bunch of irrationally fearful people will decide that the only way they can cope with their fear, is to reject the basis of it. COVID deniers and anti-maskers/anti-vaxxers were essentially so terrified of the loss of control they had, that they refused to acknowledge it. They instead went full-bore in the opposite direction, defying government mandates and health warnings, in order to try to regain some semblance of control over their lives. And it did not go well.
That's what's now gonna happen with AI deniers. They're so freaked out about AI that they're going to reject it en-masse, not because it is actually doing anything to them, but because they're afraid it might. And the end result is going to be similar: extreme people do extreme things, and the end result isn't good. So please try to reign in the doomerism a bit, for all our sakes.
of course, non Americans never comment on American policies
Do LLMs lie? Of course not, they are just programs. Do the make mistakes or get the facts wrong? Of course they do, not more often then a human does. So what is the point of that article? Why my future is particularly bad now because of LLMs?
The solution is obviously some form of socialism but a lot of tech people are blinkered libertarians who refuse to put two and two together.
To take the car analogy: it matters how we use the car.
The car in itself can be used to save time and energy that would otherwise be used to walk to places. That extra time and energy can be used well, or poorly.
- It can be squandered by having a longer commute that defeats the point
- Alternatively, it can be wasted by sitting on a couch consuming Netflix or TikTok
- Alternatively, it can be used productively, by playing team sports with friends, or chasing your kids through the park, or building a chicken coop in your back yard
It’s all about wise usage. Yes it can be used as a way to destroy your own body and waste your time and attention, but also it can be used as a tool to deploy your resources better, for example in physical activities that are fun and social rather than required drudgery.
I think it’s the same for LLMs. Managers and executives have always delegated the engineering work, and even researching and writing reports. It matters whether we find places to continue to challenge and deploy our cognition, or completely settle back, delegate everything to the LLM and scroll TikTok while it works.
Yes, individuals have choices. But in a collective, dynamics occur and those dynamics can't usually be overcome by individuals.
Social media could be used differently, but the way it exists Irl is determined by the nature of the medium, the economic structure and other things outside of individuals' control.
Kyle' recommendation to stop/slow using AI is phrased as another individual choice, but given that lesson I think it's appropriate to interpret it as a collective choice - collective through regulation, collective resistance etc.
But the majority have always chosen the path of least resistance. This is not new! Socrates’ famous exhortation is “the unexamined life is not worth living”. People were living mindlessly on autopilot before TikTok.
I think if you want to give a call to action, as this piece does, the right call to action is “think carefully about how you can make a good use of your time and energy, now that the default path has changed.” I know it’s not as simple or emotionally powerful as “go down kicking and screaming, stick it to the man”, but as a rule of thumb, the less fiercely emotional path is usually the right one.