To grieve, or not to grieve?

(xenaproject.wordpress.com)

44 points | by stabbles 21 hours ago

7 comments

  • zaptheimpaler 48 minutes ago
    Most of these idealistic pieces about AI seem to come from senior, established or wealthy people who aren't very exposed to the labor market. In that view, the question of AI and its transformation is almost philosophical like this piece.

    It's more a question of survival if you're labor though. It's very transformative tech but it's coming at a time when the scales are heavily tilted in favor of capital over labor, the government is the most corrupt its ever been and AI is going to make that much more extreme. It doesn't matter how amazing the technology is if all the benefits are going to accrue to the same few people who already have everything and destroy everyone else's bargaining power.

    • simianwords 20 minutes ago
      Most people who oppose AI don’t oppose it because it’s so good it can replace us. They oppose it because, in their own words, they think it’s hype and it doesn’t work. The first step is to collectively agree that yes, AI is powerful and it can replace us at work. Then we can speak about how to protect livelihood. How does one even have a discussion when the other side doesn’t even believe in the capabilities of AI?
      • kakacik 11 minutes ago
        I 'oppose' Ai for exactly the reasons parent mentions, seems like most common folks over long term will lose much more than they could ever gain from it. Societal loss by definition, on massive scale.

        Don't reduce opposition to something you like to some primitive irrational luddites, thats cheap and doesn't represent reality.

  • sachaa 57 minutes ago
    I share the optimism here. Connecting dots across knowledge, lived experience and purpose remains, to me, a deeply human pursuit. The more AI discovers, the more possibilities we have to connect those discoveries to questions that matter to us.
    • simianwords 16 minutes ago
      Unfortunately I don’t see much evidence of AI connecting dots. What’s interesting to me is that this is more of a run time or inference problem, instead of emergent from training itself.

      For example, if there were hypothetically some dots to be connected between the world war and some geological event - you need to make AI brute force and do an O(N) scan at run time. But it wouldn’t have learned it during training. Why?

  • dang 1 hour ago
    Buzzard is such a good writer. Read it all the way to the end - it gets (even) better as it goes along.
    • schoen 1 hour ago
      You might say his prose is very lean.

      (Sorry (?))

  • tim333 8 hours ago
    As a non mathematician I think it could be kind of interesting to see what the AI can come up with.
  • simianwords 23 minutes ago
    The shape of five stages of grief is something I see recurring in AI discourse. It also happened with programmers - they are currently at bargaining.

    Some are still at denial. “It’s all hype like NFT and crypto, the bubble will pop soon”.

  • qre-qwou 12 hours ago
    [dead]
  • aaron695 45 minutes ago
    [dead]