Mastodawn

romulojales Feb 4

Something snapped into place in my mind. There is an anti-AI position that has absolutely nothing to do with luddism, or any other anti-tech position.

AI is cognitive suburbanization.

Think about it. Architecting everything so that I can't do even the most basic thing without gratuitously using a big, bloated, planet-destroying energy hog- one that *in theory* saves time, but actually just wastes it. Reducing all my options to the same generic, regurgitated, cookie cutter slop.

Eric McCorkle Feb 3

This isn't necessarily rejecting technology, anymore than rejecting the suburban lifestyle is anti-civ.

Plenty of people choose city life, the supposed inconvenience of "having" to walk everywhere, the surprise and unexpected experiences this brings over a generic, highly curated experience, the verisimilitude and variety we gain from that experience, quirky little corner shops and cafes over chain restaurants and malls.

That same reasoning is how I've answered every single AI booster

Eric McCorkle Feb 3

I want my skills sharp, kept sharp by looking things up and thinking for myself, the same way walking everywhere keeps me healthy.

I'm enriched by the random things I learn and random skills I pick up while doing so.

I don't want to be unable to do the simplest thing without relying on a bloated planet-killing monstrosity.

Most of all, I don't want my entire life, mind, and experience reduced to the cognitive equivalent of a strip-mall.

Eric McCorkle Feb 3

These reasons are *exactly* why I live exclusively in cities if at all possible, why I live in one now despite incurring a 1/2hr+ trip to the lab.

This is why I'm known to say things like "I have neither the self-loathing nor the masochism to live in the suburbs"

Alexandre B A Villares 🐍Feb 5

@emc2 agreed! Also, there are new takes on the meaning of luddism ... https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite/

I’m a Luddite (and So Can You!) | The Nib

What the Luddites can teach us about resisting an automated future.

The Nib

Alan Campbell Feb 12

@emc2 indeed, I think this should not go underreported. From the young to the old, cognitive offloading will have damaging effects.

kami_kadse Feb 4

research into luddism. you'll discover that it's much more akin to most Anti-AI-positions than a general "anti-tech" position

Dying World 🔥🌎🔥Feb 4

@emc2 Stripping away our humanity and destroying the environment to use an artificial version of artificial intelligence.

All wrapped in the guise of making life easier, making us more productive. "AI" is being pushed on us to enrich people who already have too much money. No thanks

@emc2 my dad does everything using ChatGPT to the extent that's he's proud of it. He even asks me to use it.

He even wanted to gift me Claude Code, saying "amazing apps" were built with it.

Eric McCorkle Feb 4

@blackbird someone I know kept trying to push me to use Google's AI.

I finally started saying "fine, I accept gemini as my personal lord and savior" everytime he starts up. (He's fairly hard line skeptic) That seems to have worked.

@emc2 for me I used to only use Google maps for navigating NYC.

More recently I curbed its use for certain destinations I frequent and just use myself.

No regrets.

Diane Bruce Feb 4

@emc2 And the unfortunate part is some aspects of so-called AI are actually useful. The pattern matching finding disease quicker for example. (Not so much the flock aspect) AI is a marketing buzzword not a technology.

Eric McCorkle Feb 4

@DianeBruce yes definitely.

The open source movement can and should develop its own directions for AI/ML, in service to its own values (not what Mozilla is doing though).

Diane Bruce Feb 4

@emc2 At least Firefox got forked. No AI in Librefox

Eric McCorkle Feb 4

@DianeBruce yup! I'm switching to Libre Wolf myself.

I've also heard talk of building a browser around servo.

Fazal Majid Feb 4

@emc2 The luddites were proto socialists, not opposed to technology per se (mechanized weaving looms), but insisting the profits be shared with the displaced workers. They were ferociously repressed by the British establishment, with more soldiers quelling them than were fighting Napoleon, and sabotaging looms was made a capital offense, people were hanged for it.

It's a measure of how big a threat they were perceived to be, and how effective the counter propaganda was, that you use the term as a pejorative.

Eric McCorkle Feb 4

@fazalmajid I'm familiar with both the reality and the mythology surrounding the luddites. I don't need to have this debate again.

What's it to you?Feb 4

@emc2 It also scales to entire cultures -- whatever the dominant training source is will reduce the influence of any smaller cultural contributions even if the prompt is specifically tailored to that culture. It can't do otherwise, since they're designed to 'fill in the gaps' with whatever is laying around in the model's latent space.

Eric McCorkle Feb 4

@alltherum Yep, absolutely.

I only had so much space to type, but wiping away all the "ugly" margins and turning everything into a whitewashed, homogenized, picket fenced (white, straight, protestant, etc.) Stepford suburb? Definitely a thing.

@emc2 Nice.

@emc2 I don’t disagree with your analogy, but in practice I think the vast majority of anti-AI positions are already not ‘anti-tech’. The fact is that rejecting harmful technology is not the same thing as rejecting technology.

CFCs or asbestos come to mind, for example: things where the harm outweighs the benefit.

Eric McCorkle Feb 4

@benjamineskola yeah that's what I'm trying to do: find the words to differentiate the anti-tech positions from the more considered technoprogressive ones.

@emc2 apologies if I’ve focused on an irrelevant detail of your initial post, but the way you said “there is an argument that isn’t anti-tech” made it seem as if this was novel/unique. But actually I think the vast majority of anti-AI arguments aren’t anti-tech, and the anti-tech ones are extremely niche.

Kevin Granade Feb 4

@emc2 the heck, there are SO MANY anti-ai positions that don't have the slightest trace of luddism, starting at the incredibly basic, "this shit demonstrably does not work but a whole lot of people are being paid a whole lot of money to say it does".

One of the truly impressive things about LLMs are how they fail from absolutely any direction you come at them.