Comment by tern
5 hours ago
Sadly, I think this is true, and it's starting to seem like my own personal political imperative is to remind people that AI can be insanely personally empowering.
Many people around me are just missing the boat, or don't care, but many are also able to finally accomplish all kinds of things they've been barred from in the past.
LLMs are best seen, I think, as an imagination amplifier. If you're in the mindset of finding ways to improve society and help other people, there is no shortage of opportunity, and increasingly, capability.
This could be true, but I think it amounts to wishful thinking. The human empowerment phase of AI is transitory and brief. Once you get into RSI and AGI the human is increasingly left out and disenfranchised. The multiplier of your personal effectiveness directly proportional to how much the AI is doing relative to you. Being 2x more effective is great - AI does half the work. 5x, 10x, 100x? When the AI does 99% of the work you maybe start to worry - the bottleneck to 'your' productivity is now you and you are going up against much faster and more powerful entities than yourself. This mindset is rooted in a short term gain that risks a long term loss.
Yes, I agree, but the relevant debate isn't "pro vs anti-AI." That's a fight only one side can win.
The relevant debate is: "human empowerment vs disempowerment".
It's still a long-shot, but at least there's a specific target that a majority may be able to agree on.
(Not saying you were specifically saying either.)
I think his point is that “human empowerment vs disempowerment”, in the long term, is itself a fight that only one side can win.
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This is the exact same sentiment I felt at the dawn of the Internet. I felt it was going to empower individuals, tear down borders and barriers, and bring humanity together.
Instead we ended up with an ad fueled dopamine/outrage slot machine.
We're seeing the same thing happen with AI on a condensed timeframe. Yes, its useful. Yes, it lowers barriers and amplifies what individuals can do, just like the early internet did.
However, the same pattern will repeat itself because the exact same forces that bent the arc of the internet towards its current state haven't gone anywhere; if anything they've just become stronger.
I don't completely disagree, but that's not the entire story, and the efforts of those who fought for good outcomes matter profoundly.
For instance, we do in fact have global, effectively ad-free, E2E encrypted messaging. A lot of people put in a lot of work on many fronts to design that, prioritize it, and deliver it at world-scale (mostly) legally.
The fact that the ad model became completely dominant is a real tragedy, but I think the deeper mistake with that idea was that "connecting people" is more complicated than it seems and has had many unforeseen consequences.
As a Western well-to-do person, to the extent I can tune out the slot machine, the dream actually has come true in many ways. I have friends and colleagues all over the world, travel is easier, coordination is easier, and politically my voice matters in ways it never would have in the past.
I was reading mailing lists from the early 2000s the other day and it was wild to remember a time when you literally had no idea what was happening in other parts of the world—when nearly all information was mediated through centralized authorities. People were sharing 'suppressed' reports on grass-roots political action other countries with a sense of self-importance that would be cringe today.