Comment by simonask
3 days ago
> It will crash and burn anyway.
It's unclear from your comment whether you think this is good or bad. You certainly seem to think it is inevitable.
I just want to remind you that nothing here is inevitable - someone is making it happen, and it's only possible because we're not enforcing any of the laws we have about it for some reason, such as copyright. Well, the US isn't enforcing it. The EU is scrambling to come up with reasonable regulations. God knows what China is doing.
I agree that AI, like many other things, would have been an unambiguously great invention in a post-capitalist society, but that's not where we are. They are unbelievably powerful, impossible to control, and fully owned by powerful corporations, so the future looks pretty dystopic for humans who love freedom, art, and science.
But I hope you realize that we have the chance to fight back and get this right. But it does require that you do something.
> It's unclear from your comment whether you think this is good or bad. You certainly seem to think it is inevitable.
I think it is bad, but the consequences are manageable.
> someone is making it happen
We're past that point. Open weights plus local inference is already good enough for an awful lot of use cases. Even if we'd say we ban all AI training, we yeet China and the US from the Internet... it's too late.
> But I hope you realize that we have the chance to fight back and get this right.
The best chance we have is mitigate the consequences. That means first and foremost UBI, backed by actually useful corporate taxation. We need to prepare our economies for the shift towards an economy that requires fewer and fewer people to actually do work. For the moment, the only thing that is relatively safe from both automation and scale efficiencies is some trades (plumbers and electricians), some sections of healthcare and some sections of black collar work. Everything else is under massive threat from AI, automation (have you looked at precision farming?!) or both, and politicians seem like a deer frozen in the headlights.
This is the classic doomer take. Beware of dramatic but simple answers. UBI doesn’t really seem like a sustainable way forward, and at the same time there’s so much we don’t know about the limits.
Don’t play half-court tennis. Other people can read and write too, and social shifts are simultaneous slow, but then sudden.
For example, I’m not seeing a lot of trust in AI as a technology for things that are actually important. It takes one wrong diagnosis from an expensive AI doctor to erode all trust and make everyone prefer a human expert.
It is inevitable. You can ban it but that will only drive it underground. The technology is too good, it will never go away.