Mastodawn

Fascinating story from a software dev Fedi friend, shared with permission to keep it anonymous:

❝A couple of days ago, I had an experience at work that made me understand one of the reasons why the chasm of opinion about LLMs is so deep and wide.

My department mostly does fiddly lowlevel work, [close to hardware]. A few of us don't use LLMs at all, a few use them sparingly, and one member is absolutely all-in. So during one of our morning meetings he suddenly started going off on a deeply disturbing diatribe about how we need to treat the LLMs “like slaves”.❞

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Paul Cantrell Dec 4

❝I said that I *absolutely in no way* want a slave, or a technology that simulates one. I want to do creative work using good tools. I *don't want* the experience of a slaver; in fact, I would go very far to never have that experience, because it is a demeaning and antihuman experience.❞

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Paul Cantrell Dec 4

❝He was completely unable to understand why. He kept arguing that since the LLM isn't an actual conscious person (which is correct), it ought to be treated like a slave, and that the arc of technology is to give everyone access to their own virtual slaves.❞

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Paul Cantrell Dec 4

❝It was *impossible* for me or anyone else present to get him to understand that *we don't want slaves, simulated or otherwise*.

I've thought about that a lot in the days since.❞

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Paul Cantrell Dec 4

I agree with the storyteller: the experience of having a slave is abhorrent, simulated or not, and this story is a window into something •deep• about the present moment. Even without having slaves, we are all in danger of having a •slaver mindset•. It’s a disease that’s running rampant now in billionaire-shaped techno-utopian circles.

I wrote this thread on the topic earlier:

https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/113295613785073188

…and even having written that, it’s still shocking — not surprising, exactly, but shocking — to hear those thoughts expressed so baldly by the colleague in the story above.

Paul Cantrell (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Guinan said it. This scene still gives me chills every time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T9TUeapBSQ What writers. What a pair of actors.

Hachyderm.io

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@inthehands Marx should be required reading in schools, not so much to make everyone Marxists but to understand how labor exists as an intrinsic human force in the world. to call a computer program a slave is distasteful on an aesthetic and "what does the rest of this person's mental furniture look like" level, but the human labor that is very deliberately disappeared into LLMs - to sunder that Product so fully from the humans who made it possible, and then call *that* a slave, is truly obscene.