Comment by chasd00
1 month ago
> AI technology has not been developed to make any regular person's life better or help humanity in any way
What are some examples of technology that did make regular people's life better or help humanity? I think of AI as like the invention of the loom. It made textiles a lot faster but idk about making lives better by itself. It made more clothes but you still had to buy them. I can't really think of a technology that made lives better only because of its existence.
>What are some examples of technology that did make regular people's life better or help humanity?
Washing machine, fridge, indoor plumbing, penicillin
If you didn’t have the money to buy any of those then they may as well didn’t exist. Those inventions helped no one who couldn’t spend the money to attain them.
Edit: partial credit on indoor plumbing because it helped prevent disease spread to even those who didn’t have indoor plumbing.
What I meant is that it's not being built to solve any problem most people actually have. It's not like a building that's being built become some person needs shelter. It's more like some guy building a howitzer and just firing it randomly (hitting homes and people), just because he can and thinks it's cool and maybe can make some money selling tickets. After all, it was inevitable someone was going to built a howitzer and start firing it, so it might as well be him doing it.
AI is more like social media, something no one actually needs and no one was really clamoring for, which was made without with any care about how it would affect people. It got built, caused all kinds of malign consequences disproportionate to whatever meager benefits it provided, and Mark Zuckerberg got rich from all that.
Ultimately, many of problems of AI stem from the kind of capitalism we have now, AI just magnifies them to extreme and potentially accelerating degree.
> What I meant is that it's not being built to solve any problem most people actually have.
How confident are you in that? ChatGPT has over a billion monthly active users now (https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-app-hits-1-billio...), I expect at least some of those users are using it to help solve problems they have.
> How confident are you in that? ChatGPT has over a billion monthly active users now (https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-app-hits-1-billio...), I expect at least some of those users are using it to help solve problems they have.
Very, because you missed my point entirely. I said built not used. Analogies could be made to social media and tobacco, which have also been very popular.
7 replies →
This is so wild to me. Would you really have rather been born in 1790 than 1990?