Yep.

So many have been over focused, IMO, on the question of how good AI is or isn’t, when that’s only part and arguably a small part of “the problem”. It’s the massive shift in where we belong in our own world and how much that world belongs to people or people who own big machines or just the machines themselves.

My personal bet would be no. They’ll automate themselves away and slovenly play the corporate game before unionising. As a collective that is. Perhaps there’s lots to say about the culture of the profession, but I suspect it’s just too childish and spoilt.

Great frickin episode thoigh! O never liked the last two seasons, though I did like the Farscape remix. But I always thought that was a cool episode to go out on.

I hear you, but I’ve started to wonder about what things are wrong intrinsically in digital tech, or at least that are hard to fight.

With a desktop computer that’s supposed to help you with everyday things, you’ve got to have an OS and software. I think that naturally leads to vendor lock in, but not just for replacement parts as it would be with a car but your personal information and artefacts.

I suspect it’s in the nature of building up a software stack that’s user friendly enough for mass consumption: there are just too many choices the developers need to make, and too many layers, and so too many opportunities a company has to make their software incompatible with someone else’s.

I suspect with desktop computing every day mental work was colonised by monopolies and monopolistic structures. Which then sent us down a problematic path which may very well strongly resemble cyber punk dystopias.

That big social media and then this AI surrender followed, is to me, not a coincidence at all.

There’s something funny about software that betrays its promise, a dangerous magic if you will.

Yep.

The era of Google and big social media did real harm IMO. I suspect we used to have more scepticism around this sort of thing (dunno though). But getting addicted to things sure as hell is a good way to get you to ignore their problems.

The era of desktop computing really is gross in so many ways once you take a step back.

Oh I didn’t know that! Thank you!

So the mathematicians were using ChatGPT in their work and that’s how they think it was scooped?

Thoigh to be fair, this doesn’t change my tune. That we aren’t all presuming every interaction will be part of future training data is bonkers to me.

That’s exactly the kind of data that turned LLMs into chat interfaces. And where else are AI companies going to get human generated text and feedback?

The extent to which the keys of the world have been handed over to a skynet system is fucking crazy!

While this general story has its shape. The line at the end here…

AI is stealing human discovery.

Is striking in just how obviously true it’s been the whole time. It’s the business model, plain and simple.

I hope this story highlights this better for some. But also, it’s frustrating that any of this is new or surprising to anyone.

Fair! But to clarify, I’d happily say that “boomer” is a state of mind we’re all vulnerable too. I’m a millennial and openly describe as a boomer when I’m being such.

Which doesn’t counter your point or anything, I’m just explaining that I really wasn’t thinking about the specific demographic but the mentality that I saw at the time (and see today from non-boomers).

Some economic analysis that seems right. Great.

But what about a more philosophical approach? What does it mean to turn anything and everything into an investment market? Why do it at all and what are the basic trade offs and implications?

Turning our homes into a stock market on the face of it sounds outright dystopian to me. Stability, mobility, independence, basic welfare, private property incentives and even Australian nationalism against being bought out by foreigners. All of these values seem both to fly in the face of the idea of hot housing markets and to be obvious values worth caring about.

So what happened? Apart from corrupt politics, a good amount is boomer psychosis was at play I think … ‘all about “me” getting rich’.

I still find it hard to believe that a conversation or two didn’t happen about the fundamentals here!

I mean surely it’s because it’s about buying a part of “the future” and leaving everyone else behind. For such a belief, going all in may be the only option. Which is, of course, kinda death culty.

Yea, this.

I’d say that whether it’s a big deal is up to what people expect and want. The issue I was citing is that Fedi drama often involves, IMO, a disconnect between what the Fedi offers and what people expect.

Fediverse drama! Even if there is a kernel of truth behind it, the drama around it is always dumber than it should be. IMO a symptom of people wanting control over things as consumers that they simply don’t and never will if they remain consumers. A bit of an insidious trap the Fedi lays for people.

straightup kleptocratic wealth transfer

Yea. That’s AI. And frankly the Internet since it became Facebook and Google.

And the bailout will just be a continuation of the process. Which is why talking about it matters, I think.

We may be on the precipice of a massive shift in human social organisation. It won’t be the advance of AI as intelligent tech. It will be the gaining of control of information and how society at large relates to the information machine. The Internet was the start, by promising mass decentralisation it merely facilitated mass centralisation.

AI will do the same. But not at the distribution layer. At the content and ownership layer.

no great use case for it.

Owning a piece of the new information age sounds like a use case to me.

I hate to be a harsh asshole about this … but having no valid justification doesn’t really mean anything anymore. That’s where our world is or is quickly going. And highlighting such a “truth” on the internet isn’t some magic spell like we believed it was in a fleeting moment of Twitter empowerment. Highlighting and knowing such a truth is just the beginning. It’s the minimum. And the powers that be are already playing many moves ahead.

Without knowing any of these details, I’m surprised it’s taken this long for me to hear about the likelihood of a Bailout.

So many are waiting for the Bible to pop or whatever. But let’s be serious, there’ll be a bailout of some kind. If the tech companies haven’t already made their political moves, there’s surely enough political interest in keeping this tech going if not taking control of it.

I can’t see how the power players won’t buy into the overarching sales pitch that this is what the future is and that one is either apart of it or not. Then there’s the military angle and staying competitive with China etc.

Sighs … writes like a bad AI apocalypse sci fi.

Yea I hear. We’ll see I guess.

Personally, I’m seeing much more falling in line instincts than anything else and fear that any “shock” and reaction is confined to bubbles without any solid culture and infrastructure to break out into any sort of effective movement.

It’s about the trend and the motives of those with power.

Ten years ago everyone was very surprised that an AI managed to beat the best human at Go, a board game. I don’t think anyone really saw that coming. There’s evidence that some with insight didn’t see it coming at all.

At that time, no one was talking about the current state that we’re in now. So what happens in 2036. And the next generation?

Unless you presume that the human mind is special and impossible to duplicate in important ways, I think there’s a clear set of possibilities here that need to be taken seriously. Sci-fi has been for decades, because they’re that obvious frankly. That the current AI is being over-sold and promised by its backers is basically meaningless. That an AI can write convincingly, even if only for a few pages, and couldn’t do so 5-10 years ago. That’s huge.

I don’t entirely disagree. I’d add that whatever other options there are, they involve skills, values and perspectives that are unpracticed and atrophied in modern western culture (and likely globally) to the point that that is its own problem.

What strikes me about the present moment is that it feels like particularly bad timing.

I’m not so sure that technological developments follow a well defined path and like to think about what alternative timelines would look like, especially with humanity being better prepared for them.

For instance, I’ve figured for a long time that the internet was a few decades earlier than it should have been for our social and political development. Probably TV too.

AI just feels 100s of years too early. Like we’re only just getting to grips with post-capitalism and climate change as ideas let alone problems we can solve.

To be honest, this moment was always coming or is yet to come for anti-AI folks.

The real issue isn’t whether it’s good or bad. The reason it’s such a hot thing is because generally it’s good enough to get people interested. And that’s very unlikely to go away.

Too interested? Sure.

But machines that are better than people at something people value about themselves. That’s where we’re heading if we’re not there already.

Which unlocks a massive question: What kind of world do you want to live in and how much are you willing to do to maintain it? Just about everything else is no longer a given. Not our value or importance, not our position at the top of the food chain, not our democracy or wealth, or the continuous growth of capitalism, or even our continued existence.

We’re basically at the beginning of an AI apocalypse movie. You can’t presume that you know the ending. You have to figure out how you want it to end. And not just for you, but your children and grandchildren children. Cuz it’s all at stake now.