General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAI machines aren't 'hallucinating'. But their makers are (Naomi Klein in the Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-kleinThere is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.
And as those of us who are not currently tripping well understand, our current system is nothing like that. Rather, it is built to maximize the extraction of wealth and profit from both humans and the natural world a reality that has brought us to what we might think of it as capitalisms techno-necro stage. In that reality of hyper-concentrated power and wealth, AI far from living up to all those utopian hallucinations is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further dispossession and despoilation.
Ill dig into why that is so. But first, its helpful to think about the purpose the utopian hallucinations about AI are serving. What work are these benevolent stories doing in the culture as we encounter these strange new tools? Here is one hypothesis: they are the powerful and enticing cover stories for what may turn out to be the largest and most consequential theft in human history. Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon ) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent.
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Because we do not live in the Star Trek-inspired rational, humanist world that Altman seems to be hallucinating. We live under capitalism, and under that system, the effects of flooding the market with technologies that can plausibly perform the economic tasks of countless working people is not that those people are suddenly free to become philosophers and artists. It means that those people will find themselves staring into the abyss with actual artists among the first to fall.
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Much more at the link.
cbabe
(3,560 posts)hunter
(38,354 posts)... like Henry Ford or Elon Musk have convinced us that we have to work for them.
(I'll leave the political tyrants out of this discussion. They are obviously worse, appealing to god and/or nation...)
In the short term the society with the best worker bees "wins," especially in societies that frequently go to war like ants or humans.
That's not the way humans ought to live.
I don't have any automatic respect for the "plight of the worker." Let the coal mines close. Send the commercial artists home. In the long run the world will be a better place.
Alas, most of us suffer jobs that are not making the world a better place and we don't feel like we can quit.
Twenty first century humanity has all the tools and technologies we need to build a "Star Trek" economy now -- a world where anyone can tell an abusive employer to "take this job and shove it!" without fearing for their very lives.
It's our primitive religions, ideologies, economic systems, our racism and nationalism, just plain old greed and avarice, that are getting in the way of that progress.
In the long run this large language model "Artificial Intelligence" won't change a damned thing, it's just more automation, same as it ever was.
Most of the "work" it replaces wasn't making the world a better place anyways.
Rather than protesting this automation Luddite-style it would be better to build a society where becoming a displaced worker isn't a life-shattering and potentially life-threatening event.
Progressive dog
(6,934 posts)Like all the other animals in that world, we have evolved to compete for resources with other species and with each other. We have to look at all new technologies with the understanding of what we are, not what we wish we were.
AI is just an extension of computing. A new life form is not being created. Humans are still going to be running the economy and trying to accumulate wealth no matter what we call the economic system. Humans will still be the ones who decide what art and philosophy they support with their wallets.
In spite of all our automation, the developed world has many more jobs than before and that developed world did this using free enterprise. Capitalism is the product of free enterprise.
I want a vast library of knowledge that anyone can access.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/16/ai_art_copyright_usco/