As an open source contributor and musician who is not rich, I am pretty stoked about the engineering, scientific and mathematical advancements being made in my lifetime.
I have only become more creatively enabled when adopting these tools, and while I share the existential dread of becoming unemployable, I also am wearing machine-fabricated clothing and enjoying a host of other products of automation.
I do not have selective guilt over modern generative tools because I understand that one day this era will be history and society will be as integrated with AI as we are with other transformative technologies.
> I also am wearing machine-fabricated clothing and enjoying a host of other products of automation.
I'm not really a fan of the "you criticize society yet you participate in it" argument.
>I understand that one day this era will be history and society will be as integrated with AI as we are with other transformative technologies.
You seem to forget the blood shed over the history that allowed that tech to benefit the people over just the robber barons. Unimaginable amounts of people died just so we could get a 5 day workweek and minimum wage.
We don't get a benficial future by just laying down and letting the people with the most perverse incentives decide the terms. The very least you can do is not impede those trying to fight for those futures if you can't/don't want to fight yourself.
>> I also am wearing machine-fabricated clothing and enjoying a host of other products of automation.
> I'm not really a fan of the "you criticize society yet you participate in it" argument.
It seems to me that GP is merely recognizing the parts of technological advance that they do find enjoyable. That's rather far from the "I am very intelligent" comic you're referencing.
> The very least you can do is not impede those trying to fight for those futures if you can't/don't want to fight yourself.
Just noting that GP simply voiced their opinion, which IMHO does not constitute "impedance" of those trying to fight for those futures.
>GP is merely recognizing the parts of technological advance that they do find enjoyable.
Machine fabrication is nice. Machine fabrication from sweatshop children in another country is not enjoyable. That's the exact nuance missing from their comment.
>GP simply voiced their opinion, which IMHO does not constitute "impedance" of those trying to fight for those futures.
I'd hope we'd understand since 2024 that we're in an attention society, and this is a very common tactic used to disenfranchise people from engaging in action against what they find unfair. Enforcing a feeling of inevitability is but one of many methods.
Intentionally or not, language like this does impede the efforts.
> I'm not really a fan of the "you criticize society yet you participate in it" argument.
Me neither, and I didn't make such an argument.
> You seem to forget the blood shed over the history that allowed that tech to benefit the people over just the robber barons. Unimaginable amounts of people died just so we could get a 5 day workweek and minimum wage.
What does that have to do with my argument? What about my argument suggested ignorance of this fact? This is just another straw man.
> We don't get a benficial future by just laying down and letting the people with the most perverse incentives decide the terms. The very least you can do is not impede those trying to fight for those futures if you can't/don't want to fight yourself.
What an incredible characterization. Nothing about my argument is "laying down", perhaps it seems that way because you do not share my ideals, but I fight for my ideals, I debate them in public as I do now, and that is the furthest thing from "laying down" and "not fighting myself". You seem to be projecting several assumptions about my politics and historical knowledge. Did you have a point to make or was this just a bunch of wanking?
>Did you have a point to make or was this just a bunch of wanking?
The way you "debate" is exactly a patt of the problem. You come in deflecting and attacking instead of understanding and clarifying.
You didn't even give me a point to respond to that doesn't derail go way off topic. If you can't see it then I hope someone with more patience can help you out. But no point having a conversation with someone who approaches it like this (against site guidelines Good luck out there.
2. You decided to leave a comment on one of my comments, except it contained multiple straw man arguments and a gross mischaracterization, arguing in bad faith from the start.
3. I pointed out the issues with your comment, and asked if you had an actual point to make, or if it was just straw man arguments. I had no intention of continuing a discussion with you and do not need to provide you "points to respond to". I agree, when I have to stop and explain why your argument has issues, it derails the thread. That's the problem with straw man arguments.
4. It is your problem if you take issue with criticism and think it means I need to be "helped out" by "someone with more patience". That's quite a condescending response.
I can see that you didn't have a point to make, and instead elected to just take a bunch of negative jabs at me as retaliation for pointing out the errors in your argument.
So yes, let's end the conversation. It's quite ridiculous.
Well, if you consider Maslow's hierarchy of needs, "creatively enabled" would be a luxury at the top of the pyramid with "self actualization". Luxuries don't matter if the things at the bottom of the pyramid aren't there -- i.e. you can't eat or put a shelter over your head. I think the big AI players really need a coherent plan for this if they don't want a lot of mainstream and eventually legislative pushback. Not to mention it's bad business if nobody can afford to use AI because they're unemployed. (I'm not anti-AI, it's an interesting tool, but I think the way it's being developed is inviting a lot of danger for very marginal returns so far)
You can be poor and creative at the same time. Creativity is not a luxury. For many, including myself, it's a means of survival. Creating gives me purpose and connection to the world around me.
I grew up very poor and was homeless as a teenager and in my early 20s. I still studied and practiced engineering and machine learning then, I still made art, and I do it now. The fact that Big Tech is the new Big Oil is besides the point. Plenty of companies are using open training sets and producing open, permissively licensed models.
> I think the big AI players really need a coherent plan for this if they don't want a lot of mainstream and eventually legislative pushback.
That's by far not the worst that could happen. There could very well be an axe attached to the pendulum when it swings back.
> Not to mention it's bad business if nobody can afford to use AI because they're unemployed.
In that sense this is the opposite of the Ford story: the value of your contribution to the process will approach zero so that you won't be able to afford the product of your work.
We were going to have to reckon with these problems eventually as science and technology inevitably progressed. The problem is the world is plunged in chaos at the moment and being faced with a technology that has the potential to completely and rapidly transform society really isn't helping.
Hatred of the technology itself is misplaced, and it is difficult sometimes debating these topics because anti-AI folk conflate many issues at once and expect you to have answers for all of them as if everyone working in the field is on the same agenda. We can defend and highlight the positives of the technology without condoning the negatives.
I think hatred is the wrong word. Concern is probably a better one and there are many things that are technology and that it is perfectly ok to be concerned about. If you're not somewhat concerned about AI then probably you have not yet thought about the possible futures that can stem from this particular invention and not all of those are good. See also: Atomic bombs, the machine gun, and the invention of gunpowder, each of which I'm sure may have some kind of contrived positive angle but whose net contribution to the world we live in was not necessarily a positive one. And I can see quite a few ways in which AI could very well be worse than all of those combined (as well as some ways in which it could be better, but for that to be the case humanity would first have to grow up a lot).
I'm extremely concerned about the implications. We are going to have to restructure a lot of things about society and the software we use.
And like anything else, it will be a tool in the elite's toolbox of oppression. But it will also be a tool in the hands of the people. Unless anti-AI sentiment gets compromised and redirected such that support for limiting access to capable generative models to the State and research facilities.
The hate I am referring to is often more ideological, about the usage of these models from a purity standpoint. That only bad engineers use them, or that their utility is completely overblown, etc. etc.
It's just bad timing, but the ball is already rolling downhill, the cat's already out of the bag, etc. Best we can do at the moment is fight for open research and access.
As an open source maintainer, I'm not stoked and I feel pretty much the opposite way. I've only become more annoyed when trying to adopt these tools, and felt more creative and more enabled by reducing their usage and going back to writing code by hand the old fashioned way. AI's only been useful to me as a commit message writer and a rubber duck.
> I do not have selective guilt over modern generative tools because I understand that one day this era will be history and society will be as integrated with AI as we are with other transformative technologies.
This seems overly optimistic, but also quite dystopian. I hope that society doesn't become as integrated with these shitty AIs as we are with other technologies.
There is a way for us to both get what we want out of software development without ideologically crusading against each other's ideals. We can each have these valid opinions about how generative technology personally integrates into our lives.
Of course, that might be less and less true about our work as time goes on. At some point in the future, hiring an engineer who refuses to use generative coding tools will be the equivalent of hiring someone today who refuses to use an IDE or even a tricked out emacs/vim and just programs everything in Notepad. That's cool if they enjoy it, but it's unproductive in an increasingly competitive industry.
Perhaps so, but again I find your vision of the future overly optimistic. Luckily I'm self employed and don't have to worry about AI usage quotas and "being unproductive" in an increasingly unproductive and non-deterministic industry.
You can say the same thing as we invented the atomic bomb.
Cool science and engineering, no doubt.
Not paying any attention to societal effects is not cool.
Plus, presenting things as inevitabilities is just plain confidently trying to predict the future. Anyone can san “I understand one day this era will be history and X will have happened”. Nobody knows how the future will play out. Anyone who says they do is a liar. If they actually knew then go ahead and bet all your savings on it.
I do say the same thing about the bomb. It was very cool science and engineering. I've studied many of the scientists behind the Manhattan Project, and the work that got us there.
That doesn't mean I also must condone our use of the bomb, or condone US imperialism. I recognize the inevitability of atomic science; unless you halt all scientific progress forever under threat of violence, it is inevitable that a society will have to reckon with atomic science and its implications. It's still fascinating, dude. It's literally physics, it's nature, it's humbling and awesome and fearsome and invaluable all at the same time.
> Not paying any attention to societal effects is not cool.
This fails to properly contextualize the historical facts. The Nazis and Soviets were also racing to create an atomic bomb, and the world was in a crisis. Again, this isn't ignorant of US imperialism before, during or after the war and creation of the bomb. But it's important to properly contextualize history.
> Plus, presenting things as inevitabilities is just plain confidently trying to predict the future.
That's like trying to admonish someone for watching the Wright Brothers continually iterate on aviation, witnessing prototype heavier-than-air aircraft flying, and suggesting that one day flight will be an inevitable part of society.
The steady march of automation is an inevitability my friend, it's a universal fact stemming from entropy, and it's a fallacy to assume that anything presented as an inevitability is automatically a bad prediction. You can make claims about the limits of technology, but even if today's frontier models stop improving, we've already crossed a threshold.
> Anyone who says they do is a liar.
That's like calling me a liar for claiming that the sun will rise tomorrow. You're right; maybe it won't! Of course, we will have much, much bigger problems at that point. But any rational person would take my bet.
well if all the talent is stolen and put into our water destruction machine we can make significantly worse and more expensive versions of just giving the job to a wagey
What are you talking about? He goes into plenty of data, domain relevant definitions, specific cases, etc? Links to reliable sources for every numbers claim, of which there's several per paragraph, shows graphs, pictures, and does a lot of math (all of which I manually checked myself on paper as I went through). Also, the writing style is very much not ChatGPT-like, especially with all of the very honest corrections and edits he's added over time, which an AI slop purveyor wouldn't do.
Wow 34c3, what a blast from the past! I still don't fully understand what "tuwat" meant ha ha. The best I could come up with was "Do something. Don't ask for permission".
I'm more concerned with the wisdom of downloading a document in a format known to be exploitable hosted by an intelligence agency of a government known for a recent uptick in aggressive domestic policing?
People like... Donald Trump, prominent employer of illegal labor for decades?
If you want to go after prominent employers of illegal labor (and others who profit from it) I shan't shed a tear. But that doesn't seem to be what's happening.
It doesn't. Different rules de facto for the ruling class and the peons. That's one of the failures in American society Trump has been exploiting his whole life.
After a decade of national politics, and many decades of his "business", too many people still take "Trump says" as anything more than a piece of a con.
Brand damage; The big players have more to loose from being caught installing backdoors on devices sold to the general public, and will probably put in something in the T&Cs to deflect their responsibilities.
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