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AI crap - Why ML will make the world worse, not better (drewdevault.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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There is a machine learning bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by machine learning. But it will probably be crappier, not better.

What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots.

AI is defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of AI are going to make the world worse. The AI revolution is here, and I don’t really like it.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sure, it's all about capitalism. Nothing good like this could ever come from advances in technology:

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/08/425986/how-artificial-intelligence-gave-paralyzed-woman-her-voice-back

ML is a tool and like most tools it has broad use cases. Some of them are very, very, good.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

There is a name for this debating technique where you go "sure, there was nothing good about Hitler - except he cared about dogs!". Can't remember. Is it strawman?

I think we all understand that capitalism is mostly bad for humans, and really good for corporations and their owners. AI and robots will be exploited to replace people since they are massively more powerful and much cheaper.

A few things will be better I guess, but most will be worse. People already are not actually needed to work this much anymore, and as soon as they can be replaced with something cheaper and more efficient they will. That is capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A strawman argument is where you ignore what was said by the other person and instead respond with something distorted. That's not what I did - the core premise of Drew's argument is that AI will not "make the world better" and I provided a crystal clear example of how it makes the world better.

It was just one example, and obviously not the complete picture, but what choice do I have? It's such a broad topic I couldn't possibly list everything AI will impact without writing an entire book.

I think we all understand that capitalism is mostly bad for humans, and really good for corporations and their owners.

No I disagree. Corporations exist exclusively to benefit their human owners them. Which means anything that's "good for corporations" is good for a select small number of humans.

Don't blame "capitalism" for wealth inequality. Blame the actual humans (e.g. Donald Trump, Elon Musk) who have made it their life's work to drive the global economy even harder into a world that benefits the fiew and ignores the struggles of the many.

Also - not all corporations are bad. Some of them do great work that truly benefits the world and I would personally put OpenAI in that category. Their mandate is not to make a profit - and in fact the amount of profit they can legally make has been limited. Their mission is literally "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity". I hope they succeed, and I think they will. Drew is wrong.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Who buys the stuff if everyone is replaced?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Eventually nobody.

Capitalism isn't about sustainability, it's about making the most amount of profit in the shortest amount of time.

Eventuall you bleed everyone dry and nobody has a job. But for a short amount of time the shareholders will have had a huge number of 0's and 1's in a database somewhere equating to their "worth"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Humans are consumers, they will buy stuff. But most won't work for corporations anymore since robots and AI are far more effective at most jobs.

Humans will still buy the stuff robots produce. Maybe the money will come from governments as some kind of citizen coins, distributed differently based on some criteria. Not sure.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That would be UBI and that’s seen as an improvement by a lot of people so why stand in the way of that? Robots do the work, people get a budget they can spend on that work while they don’t have to do it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That would be UBI and that’s seen as an improvement by a lot of people so why stand in the way of that?

Because none of those people have policy changing influence. Nobody here is standing in the way of it, most people here are advocates for it. But we don't write the laws, and we only get to vote on a very small percentage of them.