This blog post basically reads as, AI doesn't always adhere to my leftist values.
rolha-capoeira · 17m ago
This presupposes that human value only exists in the things current AI tech can replace—pattern recognition/creation. I'd wager the same argument was made when hand-crafted things were being replaced with industrialized products.
I'm not saying those things aren't valuable, or that humans can't express social and spiritual value in those ways, but that human value doesn't only exist there. And so, to give AI the power of complete dehumanization is to reduce humans to just pattern followers. I don't believe that is the case.
danielbln · 13m ago
It kind of makes sense if following a particular pattern is your purpose and life, and maybe your identity.
giraffe_lady · 10m ago
> And so, to give AI the power of complete dehumanization is to reduce humans to just pattern followers.
It would but I don't think that's what they're saying. The agent of dehumanization isn't the technology, but the selection of what the technology is applied to. Or like the quip "we made an AI that creates, freeing up more time for you to work."
Wherever human value, however you define that, exists or is created by people, what does it look like to apply this technology such that human value increases? Does that look like how we're applying it? The article seems to me to be much more focused on how this is actually being used right now rather than how it could be.
cheevly · 18m ago
Down with data-driven decisions and probabilistic computing!!
nh23423fefe · 3m ago
I'm sure there were people complaining about agriculture 10000 years ago. Anarchists still whine about states.
Complaining about computation seems so insane to me. Literally we have people crying about function approximation. They are blind and they will lose. Their arguments will fail, their children will ignore them, they will die and be forgotten and the world will move on with 7000 IQ AI gods.
cynicalsecurity · 22m ago
This almost reads as AI is from devil.
suthakamal · 20m ago
This feels like a really reductive view of what AI is. Is it true that a bunch of it has historically been stochastic parrots that look not unlike the next word predictor? Yeah, sure. But that's certainly not the direction in which this stuff is moving. Any information processing technology can be argued to be a surveillance technology. It feels more like a name calling statement than it does like a reasoned critique. The idea that we could just reject the technology feels kind of like a Luddite reaction to it. Like, okay, let's say that Canadian politicians decide to reject AI. What then? There's no way the Canadian economy survives if it doesn't embrace the technology in the way that embracing the industrial revolution, the electrification, and the internet, and all of these things that came before it.
Now, that's not to say that there isn't legitimacy to the critique that's offered and that there isn't legitimacy to AI being perhaps the most powerful of power-consolidating technologies and there's a lot of control by bros and oligarchs, etc. which should raise genuine concern. But saying "therefore we should avoid the technology" and prompt our legislators not to use it and not use it in government just seems like naive folly and not a well-reasoned critical argument or an actionable plan.
yupitsme123 · 10m ago
Do you really feel that skipping LLMs would be like skipping the industrial revolution, electricity, or the internet? Twenty years from now where do you see societies that "embrace" this technology vs. ones that don't?
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.
suthakamal · 4m ago
LLMs aren’t the end all be all of anything. But they’re clearly a step towards augmenting human cognition and in giving machines the ability to perform cognitive tasks. And when Google says a quarter of its code is being written by LLMs, and DeepMind is making tremendous progress on protein folding and DNA understanding with fundamentally the same technology, it seems pretty clear that we’d miss out on a lot without this.
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.
mouse_ · 14m ago
> Any information processing technology can be argued to be a surveillance technology.
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.
danielbln · 7m ago
Any sources to back that up? All I can find is rising life expectancy across the board globally, with a dip during the pandemic that almost all countries have recovered from. The US has been a bit sluggish there, but still.
suthakamal · 2m ago
Yes. There has been a regression in these metrics for white folks in the US. This is the first generation of whites in America who can expect to earn less and live shorter lives than their parents. However, that doesn’t generalize to the rest of the population, or world, and in America the reasons are policy: healthcare and education. Not because AI or tech broadly is particularly pernicious.
giraffe_lady · 15m ago
> The idea that we could just reject the technology feels kind of like a Luddite reaction to it.
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.
shadowgovt · 2m ago
[delayed]
suthakamal · 7m ago
They were wrong to believe that technological progress could be stopped. The viable path is policy which ensures the gains are fairly distributed, not try to break the machines. That tactic has never and will never work.
xg15 · 2m ago
> The viable path is policy which ensures the gains are fairly distributed, not try to break the machines.
This was exactly what the historical Luddite movement was trying to archive. The industrialists responded with "lol no". Then came the breaking of machines.
I'm not saying those things aren't valuable, or that humans can't express social and spiritual value in those ways, but that human value doesn't only exist there. And so, to give AI the power of complete dehumanization is to reduce humans to just pattern followers. I don't believe that is the case.
It would but I don't think that's what they're saying. The agent of dehumanization isn't the technology, but the selection of what the technology is applied to. Or like the quip "we made an AI that creates, freeing up more time for you to work."
Wherever human value, however you define that, exists or is created by people, what does it look like to apply this technology such that human value increases? Does that look like how we're applying it? The article seems to me to be much more focused on how this is actually being used right now rather than how it could be.
Complaining about computation seems so insane to me. Literally we have people crying about function approximation. They are blind and they will lose. Their arguments will fail, their children will ignore them, they will die and be forgotten and the world will move on with 7000 IQ AI gods.
Now, that's not to say that there isn't legitimacy to the critique that's offered and that there isn't legitimacy to AI being perhaps the most powerful of power-consolidating technologies and there's a lot of control by bros and oligarchs, etc. which should raise genuine concern. But saying "therefore we should avoid the technology" and prompt our legislators not to use it and not use it in government just seems like naive folly and not a well-reasoned critical argument or an actionable plan.
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.
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 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.
This was exactly what the historical Luddite movement was trying to archive. The industrialists responded with "lol no". Then came the breaking of machines.