No thank you,
I’d be fine with some seizing tho
Tax them, fine, great. But this does absolutely nothing to address the fundamental exploration of intellectual labor of the creative class at the heart of the problem with generative AI.
I think Bernie is simply too old and out of touch to navigate this issue.
I think you missed the “hundreds of billions of dollars annually in direct payments to Americans and programs such as health care, education and housing,” at that point people can be creative on their own terms.
Living in government housing while my art and music is being exploited for the profit of the richest men in the world doesn’t sound like a good future to me.
And what good is subsidized higher education if there are no jobs left for human beings? Are they going to pay for our bread and circuses too, while they rob us blind and live on private islands?
Again, we need to address the root of the problem here: AI is built on the corporate exploitation of intellectual labor.
your thinking to much in terms of jobs. why do you work jobs. to get the housing. think about the fediverse and local spaces and how much easier it would be to get away from the corporate crap.
Controlling interest would be 51%, and it does nothing to save the environment.
Because Americans are the only people whose intellectual and cultural achievements were extracted and it were exclusively US clickworkers that suffered exploitation to train these financial black holes without real world value (LLMs specifically, not “AI” buzzworded tech in general)
Many issues with this.
- “Up to $7T” doing super heavy lifting. AI valuations are sketchier than WeWork at its peak.
- Companies that use AI today, such as SpaceX, would only have to transfer AI stocks to this fund. The profitable parts of the company would be split off and exempter.
- It would encourage government representatives to make the AI companies more profitable. This might mean more in-dealing and more lobbying than ever before.
- I don’t know if I trust either political party with AI right now*.
* Unfortunately, Bernie Sanders’ understanding of AI has been compromised by a guy who has no technological background and does Apocalypse cult stuff (he inspired the Zizians) and has a horrible track record with sexual abuse.
Thank you for bringing up Yudkowsky. I have been spamming Bernie with “Do not trust that guy!” for months.
Yudkowsky is perhaps the most dangerous man in the AI space at the moment, precisely because he pretends to be an opponent of the big tech firms but his “philosophy” (if you want to call it that) actually empowers them.
His presence in the debate implicitly frames it as “AI is either the ultimate gift to humanity or the ultimate threat”, which leaves very little space for the boring but realistic position that AI is simply a grift.
It’s a technology that, in any sane economy, would just be like “neat, okay I might use that once in a great while”. But because of the insane structure of VC, the stock market, and the complete capture of government by billionaires, it has become some kind of cosmic horror with infinite hunger.
His presence in the debate implicitly frames it as “AI is either the ultimate gift to humanity or the ultimate threat”, which leaves very little space for the boring but realistic position that AI is simply a grift.
Yudkowsky did not invent the concept of the AI singularity. You’ll find sci-fi authors and AI researchers (slash philosophers) have been writing about it for the better part of a century.
Whether current machine learning technologies end up realizing the singularity is an open question, but it is absolutely the case that the risk of that happening is now orders of magnitude greater than it has been with any prior AI boom (and yes, there’s been more than one before this). Not taking that possibility into account would be folly on the same order as ignoring climate change is. Actually, much worse than ignoring climate change, because even in the worst case climate change is a self-correcting problem (civilization collapses but humans as a species survive) whereas AI could well end all life on the planet.
Even if an AI singularity does not happen, even with already demonstrated capabilities AI will lead to a massive transformation in our society. The comparisons to the industrial revolution are not empty hype. What we already have in production right now has solved thousands of problems that only 15 years ago were thought to be pretty much intractable. 15 years ago you could not possibly hope to have a computer recognize a cat in an image, but now that is among the most trivial tasks for machine learning.
I see lots of people in progressive spaces make the same fallacy you are making, becoming blinded by cynicism because the economy is stupid and marketers are marketing. That’s a mistake. You are living through the second industrial revolution. The steam engines are here to stay and they will change everything you know. You can’t reject them. Your only hope of survival is to accept them on your terms.
Actually, much worse than ignoring climate change, because even in the worst case climate change is a self-correcting problem (civilization collapses but humans as a species survive) whereas AI could well end all life on the planet.
Mmm yes so thats why we ship a bunch of people off to the desolate red planet so they can wait out either! /s
Please wake me up when some AI becomes more of a threat than A) the people using it Pentagon confirms grok usage for target selection, B) the people betting the economy on it NYTimes Anthropic+SpaceX+etc IPO (mind you, anthropic and openai have costed over 3 times their revenue yesr after year, you can find those numbers, but now are being rolled into index funds, ie 401K money), C) the already low bar for manipulating public discourse online (I think thats evident in itself)
AI Doomists will say anything to get you to believe it’s Roko’s Basilisk in the making, but its jist ELIZA Syndrome yet again. Wake me up when it does CAD without someone pretending I’m a child in CAD that doesn’t see that their bullshit AI workflow returned dogshit. And I’m the one who has to do it properly.
And sorry PS that quote has gotta be one of the most Musk coded verbal drivel. End of game for us is if civilization collapses, because if the people meant to rebuild have this few functioning neurons, we will end up all dead anyway. And if thats so, lets just stop making the computer want to be my girlfriend by liquidating these companies, because they are the largest threat to every functioning democracy.
Wake me up when it does CAD
What an idiotic statement. “Nothing will happen until it’s capable of automating MY job…!”
By the time you’re ready to wake up it’ll be too late.
To anti-AI folk the technology exists in this cognitively dissonant superposition of simultaneously being a useless nothingburger and an existential threat to all white-collar labour. The first position is the cynicism and the second reveals the fear.
Why are all the artists and some fraction of the programmers so upset about this if it’s a nothingburger?
End of game for us is if civilization collapses, because if the people meant to rebuild have this few functioning neurons, we will end up all dead anyway.
No it’s not. Human history is an endless cycle of collapse and trying to do better. Collapse of the modern global civilization could set humans back hundreds or thousands of years, but we are not capable of wiping ourselves out, and the humans after us would learn from our mistakes.
Also, we will all end up dead anyway no matter what, unless transhumanism levels of development happen to occur during our lifetimes.
To anti-AI folk the technology exists in this cognitively dissonant superposition of simultaneously being a useless nothingburger and an existential threat to all white-collar labour. The first position is the cynicism and the second reveals the fear.
No, I’m just, not at all concerned.
You did nothing to address my real larger threats than AI currently, which proves my point further.
You’re too wrapped up thinking about possible sci fi futures that you haven’t sat down and thought of how these things could work. I’ve watched ML cancer screening advance, then watched as these new age “AI” companies tried the same research I saw years ago and unequivically fail because they strapped a fn language model that’s been trained off Reddit to patient health records, thinking it would become smarter (it didn’t).
None of that will matter if these companies run out of money before they unveil the singularity, which is quite statedly their bets. It won’t happen. Why? Because the true labor utility of these models is already known, and its only benefit is that its cheaper than human labor, for everything but the slightest critical task. Even
2 years later after I was told I’d be replaced, by a boss that sounded just like you, he got fired for continuously failing to meet targets, because he really thought he could have AI catch him up on every meeting and never attend. If it can’t even summarize meetings properly, how long is skynet gonna take??
Now if you actually wanted to talk some real threat like AI powered state sponsored surveilance, I’m all ears, but I’m getting really tired of Kurgesat sci bros suddenly thinking “oh yeah the end of civilization is actually the good option, but we also want the transhuman ultra singularity” while they actively cheer the richest people to trash the economy, environment, and democracy to make it happen. Who do you think will control AI when it takes over the world. Or it’s just gonna call itself AM, right?
Why are… some fraction of the programmers so upset about this if it’s a nothingburger?
Because it’s being used as an excuse to fire people and overwork whoever’s left. Nobody wants to work in a sweatshop.
I’ve been using the new models ever since the initial release of GPT-3 at work. It’s been my job to find practical uses for it. There exist a few, but the biggest issue with these models (and with LLMs as a whole) is that they cannot be guaranteed to work 100%, or close to 100%, of the time. Naturally, that’s a high bar to hit, but it includes things like safeguards against generating offensive, discriminatory, or even defamatory material.
Your problem space is limited to places where either an informed human must review the output, or you accept the liability for when it fails. Most businesses do not want to accept that liability.
Now onto programming specifically: a human reviews the output and is expected to take ownership of it. Sure, you can use it in that way as a tool if you want, regardless of the quality of the output. However, when someone comes to me on a Friday and asks me to review their 700+ file AI-generated PR (true story), I’m sorry, but that’s going to take at least a week. By the time I’m done reviewing your PR, the demo we were rushing to prepare for will have already passed. Yet now I’m expected to review this slop (which I would not have, and didn’t, approve regardless of the author) in addition to doing the work I was doing before. Keep in mind, of course, that my job before included the rare 100hr work week to rush to meet a deadline. So all I can do with these gigantic PRs of actual garbage is either reject them, which looks bad on me because we’re rushing even harder now, or rubber stamp them because I know nobody cares if the code works anyway.
So yeah, wake me up when it’s actually capable of automating my job and not just an excuse for some idiotic management to fire their programmers who, according to the garbage they’re saying about AI, should be the most productive people in the company by a huge margin and therefore more valuable than any of their other employees, at least according to their claims about AI.
Because it’s being used as an excuse to fire people and overwork whoever’s left. Nobody wants to work in a sweatshop.
If this was all it is, there would be no real reason for anyone to be complaining. If the technology really were a dead end and all the managers were just deluded by marketing, then the situation will self-correct sooner rather than later when companies run into trouble when AI fails to produce results after they fired most of their developers.
We’re currently into year 2 (or more, depending on how you count) of this shift happening and I’m not seeing many signs of such a correction on the horizon.
So yeah, wake me up when it’s actually capable of automating my job
Automation does not need to replace every human to have an impact on the labour economy. It’s enough for it to increase efficiency to make some portion of the workforce redundant. AI doesn’t need to automate your job to put you out of a job. All it has to do is enable a colleague of yours to do both their job and yours.
This is factually happening particularly to entry level programming jobs. Rejecting AI is not going to change this reality. The only sane choice is to accept it on our terms and fight to ensure the change works in our favour and not against us.
We’re currently into year 2 (or more, depending on how you count) of this shift happening and I’m not seeing many signs of such a correction on the horizon.
The entire stock market is in a bubble. You don’t need me to explain why - there are so many articles and videos online covering it, from well-known video journalists like GamersNexus to written articles by Financial Times. This Wikipedia article covers both sides, though you’ll notice that the oppositions on that page come from people with a financial interest in it. The correction to this bubble would cripple the economy (which seems to be a recurring phenomenon these days).
This is factually happening particularly to entry level programming jobs.
Entry level jobs were never about productivity. They were about investment. Weird to say that AI is “replacing” them when it was never about them being super productive.
The rest makes no sense. You’d hire more people if their output is so high because every programmer would be worth way more than what you’re paying them.
Yudkowsky is a kind of a crackpot but not a completely lost cause – that video you linked of him speaking to Sanders is completely reasonable, for example. I also wouldn’t count being an inspiration to nutjobs against anyone’s character. That applies to pretty much any public figure.
Also your citation for his “sexual abuse” is about a fictional story he wrote in 2009, rather than actual sexual abuse. I can’t help but get the impression that you’re trying to push some kind of a narrative here that isn’t entirely motivated by facts.
Eliezer Yudkowsky disgusts me because I learned the facts about him.
Eliezer Yudkowsky makes the rape advocate the rational one. Explain the harmlessness of that please.
Especially when sexual (and other!) abuse is rife in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Rationalist
cultcommunity and its sects.The rationalist community has hosted perhaps half a dozen small groups with very strange beliefs (including two separate groups that wound up interacting with demons). Some — which I won’t name in this article for privacy reasons — seem to have caused no harm but bad takes. But the most famous, a loose group of vegan anarchist transhumanists nicknamed the Zizians, have been linked to six violent deaths. Other groups, while less violent, have left a trail of trauma in their wake. One is Black Lotus, a Burning Man camp led by alleged rapist Brent Dill, which developed a metaphysical system based on the tabletop roleplaying game Mage the Ascension. Another is Leverage Research, an independent research organization that became sucked into the occult and wound up as Workplace Harassment With New Age Characteristics.
And he is preaching a watered-down version of his true beliefs to people like Bernie Sanders, like every other cult leader does.
He preaches that we will create AI God.
And he spread that belief through fanfic based on children’s literature.
Yudkowsky thinks that there is a very large risk that we will create God by accident, in which case He might be Evil because there are more value systems that we might build Him with that we would come to see as “evil” than value systems that we would come to see as “good”. And his reason for posting those original blog posts on Overcoming Bias, and later founding the Less Wrong website, was to get a bunch of people together to figure out how to Build God so that He would be Good instead.
He wrote Harry Potter fanfiction so that more people would help him build God.
