sriram_malhar

I hope India goes the same way.

No. Quite the contrary. We are the 'tools' and we have been used skillfully.

The few AI companies have slurped up so much of human textual and artistic creation without attribution. They have taken enormous amounts of money from the public directly or indirectly and funneled it upwards to a few dangerous individuals.

When you say AI, learn to say "AI companies".

"Fame only has utility so long as it gets you paid"

Fame can have many good reasons. Just feeling the warm glow of adulation is plenty enough for some.

Beautiful presentation!

There was a level of patent/copyright protection, there was a level of awareness of stealing, a company could be taken to a court of law. A writer of a PhD thesis could show that someone lifted huge parts of a dissertation without attribution. All that is gone.

Why do we need more? Why is that not a big enough reason.

If a modern-day Beethoven were told that his work will be slurped in by a machine and he will remain unknown to the world, would it be acceptable to him? To you?

I just did this for the first time.

<aside/>I lost interest in programming for pleasure (thank you LLMs), so decided to spend a few years learning all the prerequisites to understand the General Theory of Relativity.

It is so nice to get back to learning from printed matter. The contrast is great. The ability to flip pages back and forth to scan past material is much better than an ebook experience (like referring to a figure on a different page). Best of all, I don't get distracted or tempted to open up a browser window and start doomscrolling. The heft is oddly reassuring too.

C'mon, you know better than to invoke a slippery slope.

My best move is to influence the people I care about to reduce dependence on these things and seek happiness in non-tech things (where tech is defined as those controlled by corporations), from community, live life from first principles. You are forcing me to answer a strange binary ... propose a fix for the world at large, or let me continue with all this shit. The world isn't as black and white.

Anyway, I'm done with this thread.

Constraints are a good thing. I'll get creative with what I have, instead of having to rely on a supply chain that makes everything available to everybody all the time. I don't have to have apples grown on the other side of the planet.

It isn't just AI. I would like a world without the poison of social media, without guns & bombs, without dangerous chemicals. Yes, in many many ways we'd be better off. We are accelerating the destruction of our planet.

I don't have a better plan for humanity. I only have fear.

You can look up laws all night long. Check out all the laws broken by Potus, ICE (just to name a few) on a daily basis.

The peasantry is not on the side that enforces the law. AI is. AI is a force multiplier. The more force you have, the more multiples of it you en up with. Flock uses AI to do surveillance at scale. Every cloud service has NSA backdoors.

You do realize that the same powers that have bred fascism and mandatory id requirement are hand in glove with the AI oligarchs, no? They gain with rampant use of AI disproportionately more than the peasant.

The peasantry stands no chance. Unless there is a French Revolution style uprising

> Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle? Does your ability to cook good food ...

Pushing that analogy, AI is the equivalent of automating everything from tilling, growing, all the way to cooking. It is as if the human is involved at the beginning in specifying what they want, and at the end, in plating up the food and consuming the product. The next generation will have no clue about the entire farm-to-table chain.

It's not there yet, but rapidly making it a reality.

Also, there is no one "tech". Different pieces of technology have different levels of effect on the world, and different timelines in which the world can come to terms with it. AI is the thermonuclear weapon introduced to a musket world ... it came upon us suddenly, and instantly flattened the talent/merit based economy. Now everyone has access to the same exoskeleton; the difference between muscles is not important.

The second huge difference between AI (and ordinary tech) is that a literal handful of people are in control of its economics. That kind of power breeds fascism.

> That's a problem with society, not technology.

Semantics. The tech directly enables the incredible power imbalance, and helps seize the means of consensus and debate and reporting. There is no incentive/mechanism left to fix society. An advanced society like the US is weaponized against vaccines, and social media and AI are to blame.

Everyone who writes enthusiastically about AI already has the benefit of having worked without AI. They have been schooled in the basics. Enough of us know about data structures, concurrency, networks, language design etc. from the ground up that the knowledge is passed on. I worry about the world that we will be living in when a whole generation has skipped learning the basics the hard way. Given the attendance rates at various educational institutions, I fear that day is already here.

Can it scale without pixelating?