Just read 3514 words worth an article, thought you might be interested as well:
Edit: This wasn’t meant to be a reply to BEowen.
4 Likes
if this ai shit isnt a craze im personally destroying all artifical intelligence
4 Likes
3514 words and not once does it actually say anything meaningful about the dangers of AI on any level other than AI being misinformation farms and dazzlingly racist both of which are problems we already know about AI with one not even being a fault of AI itself or even the compiling algorithms. Nothing on the sociological impacts, the economic impacts or even cultural impacts of AI.
This is the sort of article written by somebody who sees a man reading “Don’t Make A Fucking Orphan Smasher” and will then see the man make the Orphan Smasher while writing puff pieces in HuffPost or Vox titled “Maybe Orphan Smashers Are Good? because he has never seen an orphan being smashed but thinks it is a neato burrito concept”
TL;DR: Sure AI is neat but can it write something as impactful, prescient and relevant as Industrial Society and Its Future? Check mate cyberpunks!
5 Likes
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some so-called AI wrote the thing.
3 Likes
Gonna buy a house in the hills, gonna learn how to type on a Smith-Corona, gonna track down a loose copy of the Anarchist’s Cook and I am gonna slowly stockpile sugar and fertilizer. Gonna send ticking packages to Silicon Valley until the AFP anti-terror people show up to drag me screaming from my house then they can read my manifesto.
4 Likes
Well a human was involved in its creation, she grew up in the valley, went to Berkeley and has run a start-up for two decades. There is a large chance (40%) that an AI was used at some point in the writing of this piece.
I wonder what Hunter S Thompson would have said about all of this…
4 Likes
Can you further explain this part, so we could have a topic to discuss even more?
4 Likes
Well for one thing there would be a lot of people that would be laid off from certain jobs like me. You could replace me in my role in both data verification and customer service with AI that is sufficiently advanced. That would cause whole job industries to collapse in on themselves as big companies adopt AI instead of people. Another thing is using AI to manipulate the markets across the board or use it to manipulate for desired trading outcomes You could even replace me as a writer, just us AI to write or create generic works and just let all mainstream art be crap written by machines.
Those are just what I can come up with off the top of my head. Also sorry this took two hours, I was out looking at cars for a bit and lost track of my notifications.
3 Likes
holy shit. you okay? any injuries?
7 Likes
Yeah as fine as you can be when your tow cost 200 dollars (half off because we scrapped the car), 1600 in insurance (I was three months away from no excess), the fine I got for not giving way (Three demerit points plus some amount of dosh I won’t know until I get the fine) and there is the cost of a new car. Oh and the fact that my boss saw me on the side of the road and so did a small number of my co-workers most likely including a member of my team.
Nah, she got me on my passenger side as I was turning and she was trying to avoid me. She saw me before I saw her, it makes sense because I swear up and down that she didn’t have her lights on but no fucking cop is going to see it that way and it is hard to prove so in my mind I had no option but to cop it for failing to give way.
Plus side this is the closest I have gotten to living out my dream of being a stuntman.
14 Likes
glad you’re okay, dude. i had nightmares about my crash for ages and it wasn’t even a big one.
7 Likes
Hey at least no one got hurt, cars can be replaced.
8 Likes
Woo my Alarm decided to not Alarm and instead wanted to vibrate. Arrived 30 minutes late for a work meeting that fortunately wasn’t entirely important. Life is good.
6 Likes
You’re the second person I know to say this happened to them. My colleague in California missed a super important breakfast meeting yesterday when their phone just magically didn’t use an audible alarm when it was set to do so.
iPhone? If so I may have to buy an old school back up alarm 
4 Likes
Yup my iPhone doing wonders.
3 Likes
So late, but it was the dawn of a new day and I had things to do.
The invention and popularization of printing machines destroyed the jobs of many hand-write copiers. The “invention” of electricity (note the quotations) and then the light bulbs destroyed the jobs of those who had to go turn on street lights by hand one by one. The invention and popularization of cars destroyed the jobs of coachmen and many other horse-related jobs.
Even your job you’re afraid of its abolishment utilizes digital computers, which their invention destroyed tons of older jobs. Popularization of any new and revolutionary technology destroys some and creates other jobs. “jobs” are defined by the era you’re in; You didn’t need server room administrators 500 hundred years ago, just like how you probably wouldn’t need pharmacy workers in 500 years.
2 Likes
Yeah and in all of those cases they exacerbated poverty at times when it was really bad to be poor or insolvent. My only safety net if I am replaced by an AI is that I am on an employment provider service thanks to my time on unemployment. I have absolutely no desire to be back on unemployment again either.
All a lightbulb does is light up, all a printing press does is print things easier, cars simply move from point A to point B at the very basic version. An AI can write, produce art, replicate voices (all from stuff that can be taken without reimbursement or even consent), it can make diagnosis in patients, make determinist outputs on legal cases, scrape the internet for sources in journalistic articles, AI can be used to automate other machines, it can drive cars on their own, they can determine and respond to people ordering food and more. You can be trained to change a lightbulb over lamplighting, you can be trained to maintain a press instead of transcription, you can learn to drive a car and you can taught how to use a computer rather than a switchboard. You can’t be trained to think better, faster or for longer than a computer can once that technology hits a certain point. Caring for and maintaining AI requires IT knowledge that takes time to learn if some people even get the hang of it at all.
AI won’t wipe out one form of labour and it won’t wipe out labour that will be judged as outdated. It can wipe out a lot of fields all at once all while having the capacity to be upgrade to the point where it supersedes human ability and us low level plebs will be the first on the bum with literally no safety net other than unemployment and if you live in a country with no or poor unemployment services then you are doubly fucked. The same people that advocate for AI in the workplace are the same people that look down on workers like us and will gladly toss us out on the street and replace us with AI robots who can work for free.
1 Like
We can’t do that now, nor can we ever. Computers don’t “think” the way we do.
Not until the point of singularity AIs will be totally independent of humans operators who train and control them in different ways, and at that point, the survival of humanity is the discussion not their jobs.
2 Likes
There is absolutely no society on this planet that can or ever will be able to foster the supposed Singularity event. Not a single one wants to put in the effort for people to live comfortably without work now let alone when it would be sociologically necessary to.
2 Likes
And that is in case we survive it, isn’t it? “Robots went wild and killed them all” is such a classic scenario, superbly possible at the point of singularity.
Feynman’s explanation is great though, I’d recommend watching it.
2 Likes