There is a machine learning bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by machine learning. But it will probably be crappier, not better.
What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots.
AI is defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of AI are going to make the world worse. The AI revolution is here, and I don’t really like it.
You could have said the same for factories in the 18th century. But instead of the reactionary sentiment to just reject the new, we should be pushing for ways to have it work for everyone.
I don’t see how rejecting 18th century-style factories or exploitative neural networks is a bad thing. We should have the option of saying “no” to the ideas of capitalists looking for a quick buck. There was an insightful blog post about that but I can’t find it right now…
Lets not forget all the exploitation that happened in that period also. People, even children, working for endless hours for nearly no pay, losing limbs to machinery and simply getting discarded for it. Just as there is a history of technology, there is a history of it being used inequitably and even sociopathically, through greed that has no consideration for human well-being. It took a lot of fighting, often literally, to get to the point we have some dignity, and even that is being eroded.
I get your point, it’s not the tech, it’s the system, and while I lost all excitement for AI I don’t think that genie can’t be put back in the bottle. But if the whole system isn’t changing, we should at least regulate the tech.
But AI will eliminate so many jobs that it will affect a lot of people, and strain the whole system even more. There isn’t a “just become a programmer” solution to AI, because even intellectually-oriented jobs are now on the line for elimination. This won’t create more jobs than it takes away.
Which shows why people are so fearful of this tech. Freeing people from manual labor to go to intellectual work was overall good, though in retrospect even then it came at a cost of passionate artisans. But now people might be “freed” from being artists to having to become sweatshop workers, who can’t outperform machines so their only option is to undercut them. Who is being helped by this?
Yes, I know about the exploitation that happened during early industrialization, and it was horrible. But if people had just rejected and banned factories back then, we’d still be living in feudalism.
I know that I don’t want to work a job that can be easily automated, but intentionally isn’t just so I can “have a purpose”.
What will happen if AI were to automate all jobs? In the most extreme case, where literally everyone lost their job, then nobody would be able to buy stuff, but also, no company would be able to sell products and make profit. Then, either capitalism would collapse - or more likely, it will adapt by implementing some mechanism such as UBI. Of course, the real effect of AI will not be quite that extreme, but it may well destabilize things.
That said, if you want to change the system, it’s exactly in periods of instability that can be done. So I’m not going to try to stop progress and cling to the status quo out of fear what those changes might be - and instead join a movement that tries to shape them.
we should at least regulate the tech.
Maybe. But generally on Lemmy I see sooo many articles about “Oh, no, AI bad”. But no good suggestions on what exactly regulations should we want.
Movements that shape changes can also happen by resisting or by popular pressure. There is no lack of well-reasoned articles about the issues with AI and how they should be addressed, or even how they should have been addressed before AI engineers charged ahead not even asking for forgiveness after also not asking for permission. The thing is that AI proponents and the companies embracing them don’t care to listen, and governments are infamously slow to act.
For all that is said of “progress”, a word with a misleading connotation, once again this technology puts wealthy people, who can build data centers for it, at an advantage compared to regular people who at best can only use lesser versions of it, if even that, they might instead just receive the end result of whatever the technology owners want to offer. Like the article itself mentions, it has immense potential for advertising, scams and political propaganda. I haven’t seen AI proponents offering meaningful rebuttals to that.
At this point I’m bracing for the dystopian horrors that will come before it all comes to a head, and who knows how it might turn out this time around.
You could have said the same for factories in the 18th century.
Everyone who died as a result of their introduction probably would say the same, yes. If corpses could speak, anyway.
Well if you can find anyone who’s died because an AI wrote an article then I’ll concede you have a point.
Did you read the whole article including the “flame bait”? The author gives an example there of someone committing suicide because an AI encouraged them…
If the technology actually existed to replace human workers, the human workers could chip in and buy the means of production and replace the company owners as well.
Top quality luddite opinions right here. Plenty of fear and oprobium being directed against the technology, while taking the kleprocratic capitalism and kakistocracy as a given that can’t be challenged.
Extra spicy take: The Luddites were right. They were really always about opposing unethical use of technology, people who use their name as an insult were always all about “progress over people”, and you should never feel bad for being called a Luddite.
What are those people doing to you?
There are definitely people who are harmed by FUD like this. For example the current writers strike, which has 11,000 people putting down tools… indefinitely shutting down global movie productions that employ millions of people and leaving them unemployed for who knows how long.
Why are they so threatening?
Simple example: A lot of artists would like that their images aren’t used for AI training and would like to have legislation to prevent that. Problem with that is that such legislation would grand a monopoly on AI to the Google’s, Facebook’s and Adobe’s of this world, as they are already sitting on mountains of data and have ToS that allows them to use it for training. Any Open Source project that doesn’t have the data and would need to web scraping would be illegal.
That’s the issue. A lot of criticism on AI is extremely short sighted and ignorant, often not even understanding the very basics how it all works.
Another more fundamental problem: What are you going to do? AI is just a collection of algorithms and math. Do you want to outlaw math? Force humans to use less efficient tools? Technological progress is not something you can easily control, especially not in advance when you don’t even know what changes it will bring.
Imagine if we had taken an extra five minutes before embracing Facebook and all the other social media that came to define “Web2.0.”
We did and nothing ever came of it. Projects like https://freenet.org/ or https://freedombox.org/ have been around for a decade or two. But the masses want convinience.
That seems to be the theme of the era.
Yes, it is incompatible with the status quo. That’s a good thing. The status quo is unsustainable. The status quo is on course to kill us all.
The only real danger AI brings is it will let our current corrupt leaders and corrupt institutions be more efficient in their corruption. The problem there is not the AI; it’s the corruption.
Improving human efficiency is essentially the purpose of technology after all. Any new invention will generally have this effect.
But there’s also real danger here today.
For example, ‘Life or Death:’ AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All Over Amazon
These are easily avoidable problems. There are always reputable authors on topics and why would a self published foraging book by some random person be better than an AI one? You buy books written by experts, especially when it’s about life or death.
“Easily avoidable” if you know to look for them or if they’re labelled appropriately. This was just an example of a danger that autocomplete AI is creating today. Unscrupulous people will continue to shit out AI generated nonsense to try to sell when the seller does zero vetting of the products in their store (one of the many reasons I no longer shop at Amazon).
Many people, especially beginners, are not going to take the time to fully investigate their sources of knowledge, and to be honest they probably shouldn’t have to. If you get a book about mushrooms from the library, you can probably assume it’s giving valid information as the library has people to vet books. People will see Amazon as being responsible for keeping them safe, for better or worse.
I agree that generally there is a bunch of nonsense about ChatGPT and LLM AIs that isn’t really valid, and we’re seeing some amount of AI bubble happening where it’s a self feeding thing. In the end it will shake out, but before that all happens you have some outright dangerous and harmful things occurring today.
I think the idea is that someone buying a basic book on foraging mushrooms isn’t going to know who the experts are.
They’re going to google it, and they’re going to find AI-generated reviews (with affiliate links!) of AI-generated foraging books.
Now, if said AI is generating foraging books more accurate than humans, that’s fine by me. Until that’s the case, we should be marking AI-generated books in some clear way.
taking the kleprocratic capitalism and kakistocracy as a given that can’t be challenged.
It’s literally baked into the models themselves. AI will reinforce kleptocratic capitalism and kakistocracy as you so aptly put it because the very data it’s trained on is a slice of the society it resembles. People on the internet share bad, racist opinions and the bots trained on this data do the same. When AI models are put in charge of systems because it’s cheaper than putting humans in place, the systems themselves become entrenched in status-quo. The problem isn’t so much the technology itself, but how the technology is being rolled out, driven by capitalistic incentives, and the consequences that brings.
snicker drewdevault is an avid critic of capitalism. thats entirely the point of this post actually.
I’m getting so so tired of these “AI/ML bad, world is doom” articles being posted multiple times a day. who is funding these narratives??
you have no idea who drew devault is clearly and you entirely missed the point of what he posted.
I also have no idea who he is and I also missed the point. It’s just another “AI bad” article, even if the message this time is “AI bad, but not as bad as you think.”
hes pointing out how the technology is going to be used realistically by corporations. hes not saying AI is bad inherently. hes saying the outcome will be bad for society. which is very true.
Sure, it’s all about capitalism. Nothing good like this could ever come from advances in technology:
ML is a tool and like most tools it has broad use cases. Some of them are very, very, good.
There is a name for this debating technique where you go “sure, there was nothing good about Hitler - except he cared about dogs!”. Can’t remember. Is it strawman?
I think we all understand that capitalism is mostly bad for humans, and really good for corporations and their owners. AI and robots will be exploited to replace people since they are massively more powerful and much cheaper.
A few things will be better I guess, but most will be worse. People already are not actually needed to work this much anymore, and as soon as they can be replaced with something cheaper and more efficient they will. That is capitalism.
A strawman argument is where you ignore what was said by the other person and instead respond with something distorted. That’s not what I did - the core premise of Drew’s argument is that AI will not “make the world better” and I provided a crystal clear example of how it makes the world better.
It was just one example, and obviously not the complete picture, but what choice do I have? It’s such a broad topic I couldn’t possibly list everything AI will impact without writing an entire book.
I think we all understand that capitalism is mostly bad for humans, and really good for corporations and their owners.
No I disagree. Corporations exist exclusively to benefit their human owners them. Which means anything that’s “good for corporations” is good for a select small number of humans.
Don’t blame “capitalism” for wealth inequality. Blame the actual humans (e.g. Donald Trump, Elon Musk) who have made it their life’s work to drive the global economy even harder into a world that benefits the fiew and ignores the struggles of the many.
Also - not all corporations are bad. Some of them do great work that truly benefits the world and I would personally put OpenAI in that category. Their mandate is not to make a profit - and in fact the amount of profit they can legally make has been limited. Their mission is literally “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity”. I hope they succeed, and I think they will. Drew is wrong.
Eventually nobody.
Capitalism isn’t about sustainability, it’s about making the most amount of profit in the shortest amount of time.
Eventuall you bleed everyone dry and nobody has a job. But for a short amount of time the shareholders will have had a huge number of 0’s and 1’s in a database somewhere equating to their “worth”
Humans are consumers, they will buy stuff. But most won’t work for corporations anymore since robots and AI are far more effective at most jobs.
Humans will still buy the stuff robots produce. Maybe the money will come from governments as some kind of citizen coins, distributed differently based on some criteria. Not sure.
This is a very one sided way to look at things. Yes, people will use AI to generate spam and stuff. What it is missing is that people will also use AI to filter it all away. The nice thing about ChatGPT and friends is that it gives me access to information in whatever format I desire. I don’t have to visit dozens of websites to find what I am looking for, the AI will do that for me and report back with what it has found.
Simply put, AI is a possible path to the Semantic Web, which previously failed since ads and SoC were the driver of the Web, not information.
Sometimes I really wonder in what magical wonderland those people complaining about AI live, since as far as I am concerned, the Web and a lot of other stuff went to shit a long while ago, long before AI got any mass traction. AI is our best hope to drag ourselves out of the mud.
The real problem is that AI isn’t good enough yet. It can handle Wikipedia-like questions quite well. But try to use it for product and price information and all you get is garbage.
which previously failed since ads and SoC were the driver of the Web, not information.
Can you elaborate on why you think the ads wouldn’t sneak in again? The semantic web is a fantastic concept, but I don’t immediately see the AI connection. AI doesn’t magically pay for authored content and there is still an incentive to somehow get ads into LLM answers.
Can you elaborate on why you think the ads wouldn’t sneak in again?
You can run a LLM at home on your own PC. Think of it less as a replacement for Google and more like the computer from StarTrek. You tell it what you want and it goes to search the net for you. What you see is just the answer, in a format specified by you, not the websites they came from.
Google, Bing and Co. will of course add ads into their services, but that’s a short issue. AI will fundamentally reshape how we interact with computers and information in the long run.
The semantic web is a fantastic concept, but I don’t immediately see the AI connection.
The semantic web relies on human doing the markup, that’s doomed to fail, nobody has the time for that and even if they spend the effort, they would miss a whole lot of information that is in the text. A LLM can extract semantic information directly from the text without any markup and you can query that information with natural language. That’s not only way easier on the creators side, but also way more powerful on the users end.
You can run a LLM at home on your own PC. You tell it what you want and it goes to search the net for you.
Unless it’s open-source and connected to a proper crownsourced dataset, hosted on a paid server managed by a community instead of a big corporation, I don’t see how ads are NOT getting in.
Thank you very much. My concern is rather in the direction of inserting ads or “promotional information” into the training material, much like SEO plagues search today. If the info is from the web it can still be malicious, even if you run your own LLM.
You never wanted to have the computer from StarTrek, the Holodeck or the Universal Translator? Modern AI provides a fundamental shift in how we can interact with data and allows us to do things that would have been impossible by classic means.
And it’s not like you can escape it anyway, phone cameras use AI, spell checkers use AI, mobile phone keyboards use AI, it’s already everywhere and we have barely started.
