Posted by mooreds 5 hours ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
So, just like with crypto, there are people inside the bubble who simply believe they're going to get rich off of whatever is happening. So instead of seeing the flaws or the exploitation, they see a system where ultimately they will benefit from it. In crypto, you saw people who missed out on Bitcoin so kept looking for the next Bitcoin in everything that came after. That's why rug pulls worked.
AI is just accelerating a trend where a few thousand people are increasingly owning everything. Automation (including AI) will just be used to further concentrate wealth. We will be minting trillionaires when the majority of the world can barely afford to live.
But there are people inside the bubble who don't see that or don't care because they think they will get rich so none of that will affect them. It's not even that intentional. A lot of people see poverty as a personal moral failure. So it's just that they view themselves as not having that moral failure.
A more realistic view is that not everyone can be Jeff Bezos. You're more likely to win the lottery than you are to end up a billionaire. Also, you're one bad day away from being unable to work. Medical event, accident, whatever. This is why we look after the most vulnerable in society because you could be one of them one day.
People who did engineering studies often think that "tech is pure", it's a simple "knowledge field" where something is "true or not". That's completely wrong. Tech is indissociable from society
But engineers don't understand that. Only researchers (and militants) do
You can be a very principled person resisting and spotlighting norms you strongly disagree with, but how you do it tends to matter a lot. It makes the difference between people opening an ear to listen to you and reflexively pushing you away as an annoyance.
Every time I criticize the Vikings on The Ultimate Vikings Enthusiast-and-Reenactment Society web forums, they downvote me too. It's ridiculous. Don't they have any integrity? Do they not believe in freedom of speech? One guy even started to rant about how the subforum's topic was specifically about a torment where the vikings would cut out of a man's tongue with a red hot knife... what does that have to do with my first amendment rights? just unbelievable.
This has played out a million different ways throughout history, nothing special about this case, it just happens to be rooted in anxiety about AI.