More “Software brain” BS. Sure, many/most people are unthinkingly consumeristic. But it’s been a weird few decades for the tech industry where a lot of its ideas have been taken up as “the inevitable future”. There’s no guarantee that that relationship between the population and the industry holds, and the industry sure is full of people that have only lived in that bubble in time.

Cue the pirates of the Caribbean scene/ where captain Barbosa tells you you’re “in one”

You best start believing dystopian sci-fi stories, you’re in one

My hot take is that mainstream software technology hasn’t worked out how to be useful enough to be good in education and is now currupyrd by get rich quick start up mentalities, when really it needs the kind of open ended research that created the PC in the 60s & 70s.

Generally speaking, in a Bret Victor kind of way, enhancing human thinking behaviours and practices just feels like a purpose that has been left behind, probably since web and big data took over.

Funny, I hadn’t really noticed.

Is lemmy dead?

Yea, call me a cynical shit, but I’m happily going around calling the Internet dead now. Arguably inevitable, and certainly not surprising.

A better analogy might be a forest full of large predators in which individuals are small prey trying to survive. Thus, hidden crevices and niches can become havens.

What do you think has changed in a year?

My take would be that many average office workers are pretty accepting of being told what to do, and are being told to use AI, and that the technology is more or less sticking the landing, at least enough to get used.

Yea, it’s the thing I find myself repeating to anti-AI peeps (of which I count myself) … you don’t realise how behind you are.

Not behind on missing out on knowing how to use AI, but on how much things have shifted and the world turned and how much heavy momentum is involved and far back the facilitating patterns go.

Same with the fediverse to be honest. It’s a reaction to the state of social media in ~2010.

I think the threat is greater still.

Without jobs, and living off of whatever state based support, what leverage will the jobless have in society? How easy will it be to simply dismiss and ignore this economically disenfranchised cohort? To forcefully abuse them if it’s politically convenient? To completely prevent them from moving economic class. It certainly won’t be a clean jump to Star Trek “utopia”.

And beyond that of course are AI apocalypse scenarios. With machines increasingly running the world, what leverage will humanity have over it?

Hmmm … what would be the evolutionary perspective on this? A Lamarckian process overlaid on a Mendelian/genetic process through epigenetic modulation, passing on modifications based on parents’ local experiences of the current environment?

To us expecting to live 80 years, it might seem silly. But for mammals hoping to just survive, it may make lots of sense.

Interestingly, I don’t think I share this sentiment.

I’m no fan and personally don’t use AI (I barely touched it early ChatGPT days). But people use it to do things in successful fulfilment of their initial purpose.

I’ve seen it. Maybe I’ve seen the successes and not the failures in some cases. And I’ve certainly seen badly failed attempts to use it, but in those cases I’m happy to ascribe the failure substantially to a misapplication of the tool (which to be fair certainly invites gross misapplication).

My point though is that I don’t think an absolutist “AI is never useful” position is persuasive any more nor absolutely accurate.

Which, in my view, makes addressing the “rest of the situation” all the more fundamental. Indeed, I think everything g other than its efficacy was always the important part.

Part of the problem is that ethical arguments are difficult for people and many just switch off when it comes to the common good. Which is all of course part of the problem too.

But I think that’s gravity of the situation right now: our collective instincts may be misaligned for the moment. Our personal habits vulnerable from our prior corruptions. And our societal architectures already mutated, perhaps beyond repair, and therefore ill equipped for this.

Doomy, yes, but you’ve got to fight the fight you’re in, not the one you’d wish you’d won.

Another way I could put this counter, is that I feel like so much of what’s bad about AI was bad before AI, and that society from 2005-2020 badly mishandled technology. Whether AI “works” or not doesn’t matter. So long as it can fit into the same shape and meet the same urges that tech did 2005-2020, it will be adopted. But if the consequences of its adoption are graver than what came before, then the whole stack of that history needs to be addressed.

And with how this particular AI technology only works by consuming all of the internet’s and our libraries’ data … it’s not just a transfer, it’s pretty much theft.

Oh I think this is for sure the case. And it’s very interesting to see Darwin appreciated that too.

Ah! Yea, resonates strongly with where I was coming from.

Something, I suppose, like “not all good things can be scaled and mechanised, and not all scaled and mechanised things are good”.

I don’t know anything about this, actually! What’s the controversy?

Education system

Maybe a bit more spicy. And I’m not against education itself. Just seems like an obviously contingent system that’s got a monopolistic lock on “demand” while having glaring issues around its quality.

Yea … it’s the bit I don’t get why people don’t care about this more.

If we’re replaced, there’s nothing really left for us in the terms of the way we’ve conceived our whole world for centuries. Sure maybe we go native again or something, but let’s be real, that is a massively tough transition even if it’s viable.

Ha yes … on the other hand, it was easy to forget how good damn expansive non-internet information is: the whole world ran on that shit for millennia.

Oh I hear you (and appreciate the response).

For me, I can’t help but think of another alternative, which I’m surprised I haven’t heard of yet …

stripping down one’s personal technological cognitive load to a stack of systems that can fit into one’s brain (like the Python mantra), focusing on learning that stack well building sustainable and stable systems, and then just detoxing from the increasingly polluted digital information stream (protected commons, traditional formats such as books and in person engagement … dunno).

Depends on what the end goal is, but AIs seem to be about using tech more or just opting out of sovereignty. Something like the above seems to me to be about using tech less (in the end) and pushing toward being a secondary tool rather than an end of its own.

Probably a shallow response …

But I always figured AI/LLMs are basically apocalyptic for all sorts of individualistic values in computing (including privacy but also independence and diversity).

Whether they’re good or useful etc, I just struggle to see how they will ever be justifiable against these sorts of values.

Sure, local models and our hardware will get better … but better than the state of the art from the big labs and providers? Given that data and training are the big bottlenecks on quality … I struggle to see how AI isn’t a complete feudal capturing of information computing and processing. Not to mention what happens to the pipeline that produces information content if everyone is only consuming it through the models that train on it.

So for me the big question is, what’s our call on a possible (likely even?) future where we are forever stuck using cloud provided AI along with all of its negatives, in the same way that basically all of us has been and still is stuck using MS windows, Google and the big-social-media hellscape?

For me, I baulk at this.