gHeadphoneAI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/ai-will-be-met-with-violence-and
A lot of the magic of LLMs, I think, has been tarnished by these CEOs and other FAANG companies. It might have been a far more interesting world if they didn't bring "AI" or "AGI" into the conversation in such a politicized way.
It’s the inevitable result of valuations based on hype and future potential, not business fundamentals. It incentivizes companies to be as hyperbolic as possible with their pitches and marketing.
Cryptocurrency is an interesting technology with some niche use cases, but it was pitched as replacing the entire money system. LLMs are extremely useful for certain types of work, but are pitched as AGI ending all work. Etc.
Unfortunately, this is the only way to get enough venture capital to support the compute needs for this kind of technology. Who is going to spend hundreds on billions on a vague idea without regular claims that this will upend the existing economy in six to twelve months and whoever owns it will become unfathomably rich? And despite all the actual developments we have seen going against that idea, investors keep falling for it. This will continue until it crashes, one way or another. The question is how long it can build up and how deep the fall will be. LLMs will certainly change the economy in the end, but so did mortgage backed securities.
It's a sad indictment of our society that there is always a shortage of money for medical care, infrastructure, housing, food stamps and space exploration but always a surplus of cash for war and tools that purport to replace the workforce.
War accelerated evolution, it’s why it exists.
So did compassion, probably in a greater amount. And yet the greater amount of resources goes into war at the expense of compassion.
Humanity has taken control of its own evolution and no longer relyies on natural selection to be the driving force for change. Using evolution as an excuse to make bad and immoral choices is a poor argument and should be left back in the stone age.
> It's a sad indictment of our society that there is always a shortage of money for medical care...
It has nothing to do with society; there is infinite demand for medical care. The upper limit is whatever it takes to live until the universe's heat death in good health. That takes a lot of resources.
However much society spends on medical care, there is always more that could be spent. The modern era has the best, most affordable medical care in history and people are showing no signs of being satisfied at all.
While war spending generally just causes pain for no gain it doesn't change the fact that there will never be enough available to satisfy people's demand for medical care. Every single time people get what they want they just come up with a new aspirational minimum standard.
There isn’t really a shortage of money for those things, just rampant levels of fraud, corruption, and incompetence in the government to make those things artificially expensive. California spends so much money on high speed rail and gets 0 feet of track because they’re not paying for track; the whole thing is a scam where the politicians give taxpayer money to their political supporters in exchange for political support. Defense isn’t immune to this either; Boeing, which builds a shitty heavy lift rocket out of Space Shuttle spare parts and delivers it late and over budget, pulls the exact same bullshit with their defense contracts, and there’s always some shitty Senator siding with them against the American people whenever anyone gets upset.
It'd be nice if they didn't use the term at all because I don't think they're useful relevant or real.
If we thought of all of this as 'stochastic data systems' then our heads would be in the right place as we thought about it just as 'powerful software' that can be used for good or bad purposes, and the negative externalizes will be derived from our use of it, not some inherent property.
On the other hand, "magical new systems that provide almost unlimited capacity for intelligent work" is probably a more functional mental model. Genie can give you 1000 wishes till you reach your session limit.
Magic or no, ultimately "AI" leads to labour displacement and it's just a continuation of the much broader trend of automation driven by computers.
Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living and in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level.
It was always going to be met with violence once it became more than a curiosity for tinkerers.
> in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level.
I don't disagree that we tie purpose to work and severing that tie will have negative societal consequences, but it is far more impactful that we tie the ability to continue to exist to work (for anyone not lucky enough to already be wealthy).
If I suddenly became unemployable tomorrow I'm positive I could find alternate purpose in my life to fill that gap, I already volunteer for various causes and could happily do more of the same to fill in the gaps left by lack of work. What I couldn't do is feed myself, keep myself housed, and get medical care (especially in the US, where this is very directly tied to work).
The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist. We are creating the conditions for desperation that likely will result in increasing violence as outlined in the linked post.
If ai benefitted everyone and not just the billionaires we would be viewing it differently.
That's a truism. But it ignores The Iron Law of Oligarchy, Pareto Principle, and dozens more that remind us that power tends towards centralization. It's currently fashionable to call out the billionaires, but if you removed them, they'd just be replaced by corrupt government officials, or something else.
That's not to say we should just throw up our hands and accept every social injustice. But IMHO we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class.
I don't want to stir up the hornet's nest here, but in my humble opinion the entire problem rests on the unabated and unchecked modern and "late-stage" capitalism model, championed by the U.S. and since exported to and sprung good root everywhere else, even in Europe where it as of yet has a few more checks and balances (which unsurprisingly draws a lot of ire from its acolytes and priests across the Atlantic).
Soviet Union lost due to an inferior societal model, but this too is too much along what once was a relatively sustainable path. The American dream is now a parody of itself, as it takes more to end up with the rest of them, I could go on about the irony of wanting to escape the pit but not wanting to acknowledge the pit is the 99% of the U.S. -- Not Altmans, Bezos'es, Musks or Trumps or their hordes of peripheral elites.
Point being, the model doesn't work _today_ with its cancerous appetite and correspondingly absurd neglect of the human, _any_ human. We can't have humanism and the kind of AI we're about to "enjoy".
The acceleration of wealth disparity may prove to be nearly geometrical, as the common man is further stripped of any capacity to inflict change on the "system". I hope I am wrong, but for all their crimes, anarchy and in a twist of irony -- inhumane treatment of opponent -- the October revolutionaries in Russia, yes bolsheviks, were merely a natural response to a similar atmosphere in Russia at the turn of the previous century. It's just that they didn't have mass surveillance used against them in the same capacity our gadgets allow the "governments" today, nor were they aided by AI which is _also_ something that can be used against an entire slice of populace (a perfect application of general principles put in action). So although the situation may become similar, we're increasingly in no position to change it. The difference may be counted in _generations_, as in it will take multiple generations to dismantle the power structures we allow be put in place now, with Altmans etc. These people may not be evil, but history proves they only have to be short-sighted enough for evil to take root and thrive.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I do agree with the point of the blog post in a way -- demanding people become civilised and refrain from throwing eggs (or Molotovs) on celebrities that are about to swing _entire governments_, is not seeing the forest for the trees.
There's also no precedent in a way -- our historical cataclysms we have created ourselves, have been on a smaller scale, so we're spiraling outwards and not all of the tools we think we have, are going to have the effect required in order to enact the change we want. In the worst case, of course.
> People hate AI so much that they are prone to attribute to it everything that’s going wrong in their lives, regardless of the truth. That’s why they mix real arguments, like data theft, with fake ones, like the water stuff. Employers do it, too. Most layoffs are not caused by AI, but it’s the perfect excuse to do something that’s otherwise socially reprehensible.
Pertinent quote. A lot of AI discourse goes in circles trying to evaluate the truthiness of every individual complaint about AI. Obviously it's good to ensure claims are factual! But I believe it misses a broader point that people are resistant to AI, often out of fear, and are grasping for strategies to exert control. Or at least that's my read of it.
Refuting individual claims won't make a difference if the underlying anxieties aren't addressed (e.g., if I lose my job will I be compensated, will we protect ourselves against x-risk, etc).
I doubt there is a single profile about "not accelerate blindly on adoption everywhere".
On my side the biggest concern is the lake of transparency of ecological impact. This is not strictly related to LLMs though, data centers are not new, and all the concerns about people keeping a leverageable level of control through distributed power is not new.
> But this is not the way. This is how things devolve into chaos.
Meanwhile
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-people-ha...
> U.S.-based rights group HRANA said 3,636 people have been killed since the war erupted. It said 1,701 of those were civilians, including at least 254 children.
(Mentioning this specifically because we know the DoD is using AI)
> It hit Horsfall in the groin, who, nominative-deterministically, fell from his horse.
Lovely writing. I once knew someone who's surname was HorsFELL and now I wonder if they were related
A bit tangent, but is there anyone working on something for “what if AI pans out?” world? I’m not sure how to explain it, but if in the next 5 years a lot of jobs get displaced because of AI, obviously we’ll have big problems. Is there anyone working on analysis, outcomes, strategies and etc.? I think about it a lot, and would be cool to help and contribute.
The most important question is how to prevent the starving workers from banding together and attacking the dragon hoards of food and other wealth. I think the plan is automated drones with machine guns, and mass surveillance from Flock and Ring to determine who to target. Requiring ID for all online interaction will also improve targeting accuracy as we'll be able to target them based on their social media posts. Robot dogs from Boston Dynamics (armed with machine guns) are a secondary enforcement mechanism indoors in places drones can't reach. So they're working on it, and they have been for a while.
Many.
80,000 hours has been on the topic for a long while. Agree with the EA crowd or not, they have some thought provoking analyses and a decent newsletter.
The future of humanity institute has also been vocal on the topic for some time.
Both have a lot of material you could get acquainted with.
I know of at least one professional union in my country that is dedicating time and talking to political figures. I'm sure there is one you could contribute to. Or try start one.
Plus the labs themselves, of course.
Effective Altruism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
Thank you. I’ve seen/read a bunch from the EA crowd, and think pieces from different contributors/labs, but most I’ve seen sounded very hypothetical with “yeah big bad stuff might happen, we don’t have a solution yet”.
And the other side, “pause/ban AI” crowd, also sounded impractical, as the vested interests from governments and private industries will not really let it happen.
Sorry for yapping, it might be that I’m looking at the wrong sources.
Exploring The Ultimate Hidden House: A Luxury Bunker in New Zealand Concealed in Nature
It's not complicated. Just tax the corporations and billionaires a fair share and setup UBI.
It is very much so complicated though. The conversations about UBI in the internet has been around since I’ve been online. And since then, there hasn’t been a single large scale test of the system to see if it can be compatible with the current version of capitalism that’s ran in the most of the world.
Even if I support UBI morally, there isn’t even local appetite for it, yet alone global one. And you’ll run into quick questions about inflations, every chart from UBI-lite era of COVID, and so on.