3 ms·

I mean if the tech industry wanted people to like it, maybe it should treat them better? We live in the smoking ruins of the world of our grandparents, and tha

by advael 3y ago

I mean if the tech industry wanted people to like it, maybe it should treat them better? We live in the smoking ruins of the world of our grandparents, and that is because, unambiguously, of industry and policy shaped by industry. Wages have stagnated. Cities have become places that are great if you have lots of money to spend and pretty hostile otherwise. Medicine has increasingly become a luxury, as has healthy food and a roof over your head. Meanwhile, in tech, the goodwill of the userbase has very rapidly and repeatedly been betrayed because capital wanted constant growth. News and media have been subsumed into a slog of ad-suffused "content" optimized to hook your attention. You are spied on in everything you do, supposedly to target more ads. Many new horrendous ways of abusing the labor force have been invented and then legalized by this industry Now I hate telling people I study AI because SV people made a really interesting methodology into an apocalyptic cult whose adherents are often smugly dismissive of most recognizable human values in favor of a vague future that sounds like living in a video game made of vibes, and the main use case the optimization-obsessed finance-twiddlers that run the show can imagine is replacing workers in every domain, starting with artists. Why should they like this? Technology for technology's sake is not what most people care about, and why should they when the last ten years of "innovation" has on balance mostly been against their interests?

akira2501 3y ago
> and that is because, unambiguously Monopoly empires driven by tax revenues. > new horrendous ways of abusing the labor force It's a labor market. Monopolization destroys this too. Judges never include this market in their rulings. > and why should they when the last ten years of "innovation" has on balance mostly been against their interests? What innovation? The last ten years have been incredibly stagnant. GPT itself is the product of "what if we just throw stupid resources at this old algorithm?" The desire for AI, is to me, a supply and demand problem, and represents a state of extreme artificial inefficiency in the system. Perhaps that's what AI should really stand for.
- advael 3y ago
  Man I never seen someone do agreegument better. We basically are in accord on most matters of substance here I find nitpicking silly, but it is traditional in the agreegument format. I will only nitpick two things: 1. While I did put scarequotes on "innovation" for a reason (it is SV's favorite euphemism of course), it is worth noting that things like funneling money into a ridesharing app to create an entire fiefdom of "gig workers" to misclassify and then try to codify anti-labor policies into law by pretending to go to bat for them, or selling massive troves of data to a british analytics firm in order to steer elections toward "business-friendly" fascist demagogues, or creating a "non-profit" to make "safe and open" AI then partnering up with one of the most consumer-hostile and closed-source companies to ever walk the earth once a good opportunity to make bank popped up are certainly uh... creative 2. While a lot of progress in AI recently can definitely be summarized at a high level as throwing massive datasets and parallel processors at neural networks, if you zoom in there are definitely different algorithms coming through the noise, new kinds of network layers, training protocols, and objectives that we didn't have when ANNs first showed up. Like most actual real world science, it was a world of incremental progress that occasionally spawned a really useful application. I still think some advances in machine learning that have come out of all this nonsense have been meaningful and potentially useful, but it's difficult to separate signal from noise when the industry brain-drains academia to do research behind closed doors on whatever sci-fi shows up in the molochian wet dreams of the capitalist investor class
skrebbel 3y ago
> We live in the smoking ruins of the world of our grandparents Wait, what? My grandparents lived through a war and a famine, and came of age when over half the world lived in extreme poverty. I don't think you fully appreciate how little of the world population could poo into a toilet not that many decades ago.
- advael 3y ago
  Many commenters here are older than me and have older parents. I forget because many are also younger than me and my parents are now grandparents. I'll be more specific: The post-WW2 economic boom (That is, roughly 75-80 years ago) was full of promise and prosperity for a growing middle class. We got a lot of technological progress and even political will toward egalitarian attitudes out of that, but the economic situation has taken a turn toward oligarchy since about the 70s (That is, 50ish years ago), and this has essentially destroyed this middle-class prosperity, while also capturing technological progress and grinding a lot of it to a crawl, focusing mostly on dystopian applications. That's why the crowd at sxsw boos at tech people talking about AI
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    You said “smoking ruins” and you said “world”. Actually you meant “in my super rich country, the middle class used to have better future prospects than now”. Meanwhile, most of the world has substantially better prospects now than in the 60s. And, depending on where you live, the same may well hold for a large lower class as well (eg black people in the US, who now get to pick any bus seat they want). Things only got worse if you exclude everybody who didn’t already have it super good.
    - advael 3y ago
      Yea, "world" is often used in pretty drastically different senses, like we might mean an everett branch, the continuity of a fictional universe, or, as here, the experiential reality of a person or group of people. Their context. I have little granular information about the economic and political policies of most of the world, and will not claim to. I can mostly only talk about the US, where I live, though to be fair, this article is about a US festival wherein US industries got booed. Also, while it's great that we have ended the most obvious forms of nominal discrimination against racial minorities, there are a lot of thinly-veiled ways in which discrimination is still rampant, and trends like the decline of labor power and the automation of various decisions actually exacerbate these

by advael 3y ago

akira2501 3y ago

> and that is because, unambiguously Monopoly empires driven by tax revenues. > new horrendous ways of abusing the labor force It's a labor market. Monopolization destroys this too. Judges never include this market in their rulings. > and why should they when the last ten years of "innovation" has on balance mostly been against their interests? What innovation? The last ten years have been incredibly stagnant. GPT itself is the product of "what if we just throw stupid resources at this old algorithm?" The desire for AI, is to me, a supply and demand problem, and represents a state of extreme artificial inefficiency in the system. Perhaps that's what AI should really stand for.

advael 3y ago
Man I never seen someone do agreegument better. We basically are in accord on most matters of substance here I find nitpicking silly, but it is traditional in the agreegument format. I will only nitpick two things: 1. While I did put scarequotes on "innovation" for a reason (it is SV's favorite euphemism of course), it is worth noting that things like funneling money into a ridesharing app to create an entire fiefdom of "gig workers" to misclassify and then try to codify anti-labor policies into law by pretending to go to bat for them, or selling massive troves of data to a british analytics firm in order to steer elections toward "business-friendly" fascist demagogues, or creating a "non-profit" to make "safe and open" AI then partnering up with one of the most consumer-hostile and closed-source companies to ever walk the earth once a good opportunity to make bank popped up are certainly uh... creative 2. While a lot of progress in AI recently can definitely be summarized at a high level as throwing massive datasets and parallel processors at neural networks, if you zoom in there are definitely different algorithms coming through the noise, new kinds of network layers, training protocols, and objectives that we didn't have when ANNs first showed up. Like most actual real world science, it was a world of incremental progress that occasionally spawned a really useful application. I still think some advances in machine learning that have come out of all this nonsense have been meaningful and potentially useful, but it's difficult to separate signal from noise when the industry brain-drains academia to do research behind closed doors on whatever sci-fi shows up in the molochian wet dreams of the capitalist investor class

skrebbel 3y ago

> We live in the smoking ruins of the world of our grandparents Wait, what? My grandparents lived through a war and a famine, and came of age when over half the world lived in extreme poverty. I don't think you fully appreciate how little of the world population could poo into a toilet not that many decades ago.

advael 3y ago
Many commenters here are older than me and have older parents. I forget because many are also younger than me and my parents are now grandparents. I'll be more specific: The post-WW2 economic boom (That is, roughly 75-80 years ago) was full of promise and prosperity for a growing middle class. We got a lot of technological progress and even political will toward egalitarian attitudes out of that, but the economic situation has taken a turn toward oligarchy since about the 70s (That is, 50ish years ago), and this has essentially destroyed this middle-class prosperity, while also capturing technological progress and grinding a lot of it to a crawl, focusing mostly on dystopian applications. That's why the crowd at sxsw boos at tech people talking about AI
- skrebbel 3y ago
  You said “smoking ruins” and you said “world”. Actually you meant “in my super rich country, the middle class used to have better future prospects than now”. Meanwhile, most of the world has substantially better prospects now than in the 60s. And, depending on where you live, the same may well hold for a large lower class as well (eg black people in the US, who now get to pick any bus seat they want). Things only got worse if you exclude everybody who didn’t already have it super good.
  - advael 3y ago
    Yea, "world" is often used in pretty drastically different senses, like we might mean an everett branch, the continuity of a fictional universe, or, as here, the experiential reality of a person or group of people. Their context. I have little granular information about the economic and political policies of most of the world, and will not claim to. I can mostly only talk about the US, where I live, though to be fair, this article is about a US festival wherein US industries got booed. Also, while it's great that we have ended the most obvious forms of nominal discrimination against racial minorities, there are a lot of thinly-veiled ways in which discrimination is still rampant, and trends like the decline of labor power and the automation of various decisions actually exacerbate these