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AI Is Dehumanization Technology

158 points by smartmic 1y ago

cheevly 1y ago
Down with data-driven decisions and probabilistic computing!!
- nh23423fefe 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    The larger concern is people treating function approximation as fact (especially in the models where it is technologically understood that what is happening is an estimation algorithm, or what is happening is semantically divorced from "understanding" the underlying fact-patterns and is instead a system building fact-like sentences from data that may or may not contain actual relevant facts). There is definitely a huge gap between what is happening right now and public perception (and, I'd argue, a few people with a lot of money to gain or lose going out of their way to increase, not decrease, that gap). In that context, the overall notion the post approaches (that Canada would do well to avoid basing decisions that could help or harm real people on the output of these unproven systems at this juncture) is a good notion.
cynicalsecurity 1y ago
This almost reads as AI is from devil.
- hatradiowigwam 1y ago
  ....Who can stand against AI? Who can make war against AI? The people ceded their power to AI, and worshiped it.
- DocTomoe 1y ago
  Whenever a new tech (or cultural phenomenon) appears, you have naysayers such as this one. Luddites fought against automatic weaving stools - by destroying the machines. Reasoning: It is stealing our jobs. Comics were sure to destroy our children's minds, because they wouldn't read real literature anymore (conveniently forgetting that only 100 years before that, reading was considered a plague of the youth and putting their minds into bad places). Rock music is of the devil. If you play "Stairway to heaven" backwards, and squint your ears just right ... Phones that memorise phone numbers? Surely it is brain rot if you are no longer forced to memorise phone numbers. Social media? Work of the devil! Manipulates the minds, causes addiction, bad elections, and warts on the nose! Cryptocurrency? Waste of energy, won't someone please think of the environment? Only used for crime! 3D printing? What if someone ghasp prints himself a gun? And now it is AI. And when AI is normalised, and something new shows up, it will be that.
  - nico_h 1y ago
    I think except for rock music and comic books and 3d printing the naysayers are proven to be right? The luddites went at it wrong , but the externalities are definitely terrible for all your examples.
  - yupitsme123 1y ago
    Most of the things in this list are pretty innocuous and were never weaponized. Two exceptions, social media and cell phones, have been weaponized and after a certain point, I would say that we'd be better off without them. I would put AI into that same group. It is and will continue to be weaponized against you by people with more power than you.
  - kmeisthax 1y ago
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  - skuxxlife 1y ago
    This is an extremely simplistic take that ironically ignores the human cultural context around these technologies. For one, you, like many, misunderstand the Luddite movement. They didn’t break weaving frames because they were against technology, they broke them because they were being used to grossly devalue the work weavers used to earn their livelihood. There was a mass consolidation of textile manufacturing from small groups of tradespeople into a few very wealthy factory owners who used easily exploitable labor (like children) in very poor working conditions and paid unlivable wages to make low quality but cheap garments. The luddites weren’t against technology, they were against the way it was being used. They even only targeted factories that they thought were particularly exploitative, leaving the ones with fairer business practices alone. But they get mischaracterized as anti-technology, anti-progress…but maybe they just wanted to be able to live their lives well and support their families. There’s really a lot to learn from the luddites and their historical context, and it really goes to show that history is truly cyclical.
- nico_h 1y ago
  All those LLMs are trained on stolen data, is pushed by ultra capitalist tech bro and billionaires, and eliminating jobs in creative industries. It’s heralded as a tool for increasing efficiency (a western capitalism favorite euphemism for cancerous exploitation of the environment and humans) while neglecting it’s externalities, which includes destroying the jobs of the very people it stole the work from, and making you more reliant upon it, possibly to the point you forget how to do the things you use it for. It’s a pretty devilish poisoned fruit.
suthakamal 1y ago
[flagged]
- giraffe_lady 1y ago
  > The idea that we could just reject the technology feels kind of like a Luddite reaction to it. The luddites were a labor movement protesting how a new technology was used by mill owners to attack collective worker power in exchange for producing a worse product. Their movement failed but they were right to fight it. The lesson we should take from them isn't to give up in the face of destabilizing technological change.
  - mouse_ 1y ago
    Preach!
  - suthakamal 1y ago
    They were wrong to believe that technological progress could be stopped. The viable path is policy which ensures the gains are fairly distributed, not try to break the machines. That tactic has never and will never work.
    - xg15 1y ago
      > The viable path is policy which ensures the gains are fairly distributed, not try to break the machines. This was exactly what the historical Luddite movement was trying to archive. The industrialists responded with "lol no". Then came the breaking of machines.
    - NegativeLatency 1y ago
      I don't want to start a snippy argument, so sorry if this sounds combative, but when you realize that there isn't a "policy which ensures the gains are fairly distributed", then what would you suggest? Unionization and collective action does work, it's why we have things like the concept of the weekend. It's also generally useful when advocating change to have a more extreme faction.
rolha-capoeira 1y ago
This presupposes that human value only exists in the things current AI tech can replace—pattern recognition/creation. I'd wager the same argument was made when hand-crafted things were being replaced with industrialized products. I'm not saying those things aren't valuable, or that humans can't express social and spiritual value in those ways, but that human value doesn't only exist there. And so, to give AI the power of complete dehumanization is to reduce humans to just pattern followers. I don't believe that is the case.
- danielbln 1y ago
  It kind of makes sense if following a particular pattern is your purpose and life, and maybe your identity.
  - MichaelZuo 1y ago
    How would this matter? People can self assign any value whatsoever… that doesn’t change. If they expect external validation then that’s obviously dependent on multiple other parties.
  - malux85 1y ago
    We should actively encourage fluidity in purpose, too much rigidity or militant clinging to ideas is insecurity or attempts at absolving personal responsibility. Resilience and strength in our civilisation comes from confidence in our competence, not sanctifying patterns so we don’t have to think. We need to encourage and support fluidity, domain knowledge is commoditised, the future is fluid composition.
    - danielbln 1y ago
      Absolutely, I agree with that.
    - asciimov 1y ago
      Great, tell that to someone who spent years honing their skills that it's too bad the rug was pulled out from beneath you, time to start over from the bottom again. Maybe there would be merit to this notion if society provided the necessary safety net for this person to start over.
wagwang 1y ago
This blog post basically reads as, AI doesn't always adhere to my leftist values.
- DowsingSpoon 1y ago
  Murder also doesn’t adhere to my leftist values, which is to say, your statement is useless without being specific about which values AI doesn’t adhere to, and why you think that’s not a problem at all. The article explicitly calls out the “deeply-held values of justice, fairness, and duty toward one another.” Are these the specific leftist values you’re so dismissive of?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    Or to invert it, what "non-leftist values" does grandparent poster believe are lacking? (Hopefully the answer isn't "...You know the ones.")
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    For example: >What happens to people's monthly premiums when a US health insurance company's AI finds a correlation between high asthma rates and home addresses in a certain Memphis zip code? In the tradition of skull-measuring eugenicists, AI provides a way to naturalize and reinforce existing social hierarchies, and automates their reproduction. This sentence is about how AI may be able to more effectively apply the current values of society as opposed to the author's own values. It also fails to recognize that for things like insurance there are incentives to reduce bias to avoid mispricing policies. >The logical answer is that they want an excuse to fire workers, and don't care about the quality of work being done. This sentence shows that the author perceives that AI may harm workers. Harming workers appears to be against her values. >This doesn't inescapably lead to a technological totalitarianism. But adopting these systems clearly hands a lot of power to whoever builds, controls, and maintains them. For the most part, that means handing power to a handful of tech oligarchs. To at least some degree, this represents a seizure of the 'means of production' from public sector workers, as well as a reduction in democratic oversight. >Lastly, it may come as no surprise that so far, AI systems have found their best product-market fit in police and military applications, where short-circuiting people's critical thinking and decision-making processes is incredibly useful, at least for those who want to turn people into unhesitatingly brutal and lethal instruments of authority. These sentences shows that the author values people being able to break the law.
perching_aix 1y ago
> Rather than enhancing our human qualities, these systems degrade our social relations, and undermine our capacity for empathy and care. I don't genuinely expect the author of a blogpost who titles their writing "AI is Dehumanization Technology" to be particularly receptive of a counterargument, but hear me out. I can think of few things as intellectually miserable as the #help channels of the many open source projects on Discord, for example. Should I wager a guess, if these projects all integrated LLMs into their chatbots for just a few bucks and let them take on the brunt of the interactions, all participants on either side would be left with much more capacity to maintain and express empathy and care, or to nurture social connections. This extends beyond these noncommercial contexts of course, to stuff like customer service for example.
- tines 1y ago
  > I can think of few things as intellectually miserable as the #help channels of the many open source projects on Discord, for example. Should I wager a guess, if these projects all integrated LLMs into their chatbots for just a few bucks and let them take on the brunt of the interactions, all participants on either side would be left with much more capacity to maintain and express empathy and care, or to nurture social connections. This extends beyond these noncommercial contexts of course, to stuff like customer service for example. This would be a good counter if this were all that this technology is being used for.
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    I don't think it's necessary for me to counter everything they're saying. They're making a unilateral judgement - as long as I can demonstrate a good counter for one part of it, the unilateral judgement will fail to hold. They can of course still argue that it's majority-bad for whatever list of reasons, but that's not what bugs me. What bugs me is the absolute tunnel vision of "for principled reasons I must find this thing completely and utterly bad, no matter what". Because this is what the title, and the tone, and just about everything else in this article comes across as to me, and I find it equal parts terrifying and disagreeable.
RS-232 1y ago
Were water mills, spinning jennies, and printing presses dehumanizing too?
- tines 1y ago
  No, because they aren't the same. Those things are tools that reallocate cognitive burden. LLMs destroy cognitive burden. LLMs cause cognitive decline, a spinning jenny doesn't.
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    I don't know man? Gonna have to disagree there. A lot of models are being used to reallocate cognitive burden. A phd level biologist with access to the models we can envision in the future will probably be exponentially more valuable than entire bio startups are today. This is because s/he will be using the model to reallocate cognitive burden. At the same time, I'm not naive. I know that there will be many, many non phd level biologist wannabes that attempt to use models to remove entirely cognitive burden. But what they will discover is that they are unable to hold a candle to the domain expert reallocating cognitive burden. Models don't cause cognitive decline. They make cognitive labor exponentially more valuable than it is today. With the problem being that it creates an even more extreme "winner take all" economic environment that a growing population has to live in. What happens when a startup really only needs a few business types and a small team of domain experts? Today, a successful startup might be hundreds of jobs. What happens when it's just a couple dozen? Or not even a dozen? (Other than the founders and investors capturing even more wealth than they do presently.)
    - tines 1y ago
      It doesn't really matter what something can be used for, it matters what it will be used for most of the time. Television can be used for reading books, but people mostly don't use it that way. Smartphones can be used for creation, but people mostly don't use them that way. You've got Satya Nadella on a stage saying AI makes you a better friend because it can reply to messages from your friends for you. We are creating, and to a large extent have created, a world that we will not want to live in, as evidenced by skyrocketing depression and the loneliness epidemic. Read Neil Postman or Daniel Boorstin or Marshall McLuhan or Sherry Turkle. The medium is the message.
stego-tech 1y ago
The poster hits the nail on the head in the summary alone, but I’ll go a step further: We have been duped for half a century into solving increasingly niche problems whose benefits accrue ever upward beyond our reach, and whose harms are forcibly distributed across an unwilling populace. On the whole, technology has done exponentially more harm (mass surveillance, psychological exploitation, automated weapons, pollution, contamination of data, destruction of natural resources, outsourcing, dehumanization) than good (medical technology, targeted therapies, knowledge exchanges, Wikipedia, global collaboration). Instead of focusing on the broader issues of survival staring us in the face, we have willingly ceded agency and sovereignty to a handful of unelected Capitalists who convinced us that this invention will somehow, finally, inevitably solve all our ills and enable a utopia. Not one of the boosters of any prior modern “technological revolution” can point to societal good that outpaced the harms caused by their creation. Not NFTs, not cryptocurrency, and certainly not AI. Even Machine Learning has seen more harmful than helpful use, despite its genuine benefits to human society and technological progress, enabling surveillance advertising and the disappearance of dissidents instead of customized healthcare and efficient distribution of resources in real-time. Yet whenever someone dares to point this out, we’re decried by proponents as Luddites - ignoring the fact the real plight of the Luddites wasn’t anti-technology, but anti-Capital. To call us Luddites derisively is analogous to admitting the indefensibility of your position: You’re acknowledging we are right to be angry for being harmed for the sake of Capital alone, but that you will do everything in your power to stop our cause. We aren’t saying we want technology to disappear and to revert to the dark ages, we’re demanding that technology benefits everyone more than it harms them. We demand it be inclusive rather than exclusive. It should amplify our good works and minimize societal harms. AI in the current context is the societal equivalent of suicide. It robs us of the remaining, dwindling resources we have on yet another thin, hollow promise that this time, it will be different. Four years ago we literally had Crypto Miners lighting up Coal Power Plants while proclaiming cryptocurrency and NFTs will solve climate change somehow, and now AI companies are firing up fuel turbines and nuclear power plants while promising the same thing. We need to stop obsessing over technical minutiae and showing blind faith in technology, and realize that these are all tools of varying utility. We have mounting evidence that AI is causing more harm than good now, and that there is no practicable roadmap where its benefits will outweigh its harms in the near term. For all this obsessing over share value and “progress”, we need to accept the gruesome reality that our talent, our intelligence, and our passion is being manipulated to harm the masses - and that we alone can decide to STOP. It’s about taking our heads out of the sand, objectively assessing the whole of the system and superstructure, and taking action to change things. More fuzzy code and token prediction isn’t going to save our asses or make the world a better place. The only way to do that is to acknowledge our role in the harms we perpetuate and choosing to stop them, regardless of the harms to ourselves in the moment.
rafram 1y ago
> For example, to create an LLM such as ChatGPT, you'd start with an enormous quantity of text, then do a lot of computationally-intense statistical analysis to map out which words and phrases are most likely to appear near to one another. Crunch the numbers long enough, and you end up with something similar to the next-word prediction tool in your phone's text messaging app, except that this tool can generate whole paragraphs of mostly plausible-sounding word salad. This explanation might've been passable four years ago, but it's woefully out of date now. "Mostly plausible-sounding word salad"?
- mv4 1y ago
  What would be a better explanation today?
  - diggan 1y ago
    I think "mostly plausible-sounding" is, albeit simplified, OK for an analogy I guess. But the "word salad" part gives the impression it doesn't even look like real human text, which it kind of does at the surface. I think it's mostly "word salad" that makes it sound far off from the truth.
    - relaxing 1y ago
      Word salad refers to human writing with poor diction and/or syntax.
    - djhn 1y ago
      Over the past year the chat bots have improved in many ways, but their written output has regressed to the mean: the average RLHF-driven preference. It is word salad, unless you’re a young, underpaid contractor from a country previously colonised by the British or the United States.
      - diggan 1y ago
        > Over the past year the chat bots have improved in many ways, but their written output has regressed to the mean: the average RLHF-driven preference. How could you possibly judge such a diverse set of outputs? There are thousands of models, that can each be steered/programmed with prompts and with a lot parameter-twiddling, it's always impossible you could say "the chat bots" and give some sort of one-size-fits-all judgement of all LLMs. I think your reply shows a bit of ignorance if that's all you've seen. Oxford Dictionaries says "word salad" is "a confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases", and true, I'm no native speaker, but that's not commonly the output I get from LLMs. Sometimes though, some people’s opinions on the internet feel like word salad, but I guess it's hard to distinguish from bait too.
drellybochelly 1y ago
It can be, but on the other hand its made me think in a radically different way about concepts in humanity.
kelseyfrog 1y ago
Whether we like it or not, AI sits at the intersection of both Moravec's and Jevon's paradox. Just as more efficient engines lead to increased gas usage, as AI gets increasingly better at problems difficult for humans, we see even greater proliferation within that domain. The reductio on this is the hollowing out of the hard-for-humans problem domain, leaving us to fight for the scraps of the easy-for-humans domain. At first glance this sounds like a win. Who wouldn't want something else to solve the hard problems? The big issue with this is easy-for-human problems are often dull, devoid of meaning, and low-wage. Paradoxically, the hardest problems have always been the ones that make work meaningful. We stand at the crossroads where one path leads to an existence where with a poverty of meaning and although humans create and play by their own rules, we feel powerless to change it. What the hell are we doing?
- serbuvlad 1y ago
  Prioritize goals over the process and what AIs can do doesn't matter. Want to make a movie? The goal should be getting the movie out, seen by people and reviewed. Whether it's people captured by film, animations in Blender or AI slop, what matters is the outcome. Is it good? Do people like it? I do the infrastructure at a department of my Uni as sort of a side-gig. I would have never had the time to learn Ansible, borg, FreeIPA, wireguard, and everything else I have configured now and would have probably resorted to a bunch of messy shell scripts that don't work half the time like the people before me. But everything I was able to set up I was able to set up in days, because of AI. Sure, it's really satisfying because I also have a deep understanding of the fundamentals, and I can debug problems when AI fails, and then I ask it "how does this work" as a faster Google/wiki. I've tried windsurf but given up because the AI does something that doesn't work and I can give it the prompts to find a solution (+ think for myself) much faster than it can figure out itself (and probably at the cost of a lot less tokens). But the fact that I enjoy the process doesn't matter. And the moment I can click a button and make a webapp, I have so many ideas in my drawer for how I could improve the network at Uni. I think the problem people have is that they work corporate jobs where they have no freedom to choose their own outcomes so they are basically just doing homework all their life. And AI can do homework better than them.
mrcwinn 1y ago
Yes, before AI, society was doing fantastically well on "social relations, empathy, and care." XD I remain an optimist. I believe AI can actually give us more time to care for people, because the computers will be able to do more themselves and between each other. Unproven thesis, but so is the case laid out in this article.
- ACCount36 1y ago
  Anyone who thinks that AI is bad for "empathy and care" should be forced to work for a year in a tech support call center, first line. There are some jobs that humans really shouldn't be doing. And now, we're at the point where we can start offloading that to machines.
gchamonlive 1y ago
Everything is dehumanization technology when society is organized to foster competition and narcissism and not cooperation and care. Technology is always an extension of the ethos. It doesn't stand on its own, it needs and reflects the mindset of humans.
- serbuvlad 1y ago
  The fundamental advantage of our society as designed is that it weaponizes narcissism, and makes narcissists do useful stuff for society. Don't care about competition? Find a place where rent prices are reasonable and you'll find it's actually surprisingly easy to earn a living. Oh, but you want the fancy stuff, don't you?
  - munificent 1y ago
    I suspect that if you find a place where rent prices are reasonable, you'll find it's actually surprisingly hard to find job there that pays a good wage, healthcare that keeps you healthy, decent schools to educate your children, and a community that shares your values and interests. People don't move to high cost of living areas because they want nice TVs. Fancy stuff is the same price everywhere.
    - serbuvlad 1y ago
      I live in Romania so I have different problems. I understand that Americans have problems with rent and healthcare. We have problem with other stuff, like food prices. But at the end of the day, it's extremely unhealthy to let these problems force us into feeling like we have to make a lot of money. You can find cheap solutions for almost everything almost everywhere if you compromise.
      - munificent 1y ago
        I don't think people feel like they have to make a lot of money. I think they seek jobs and places to live that give them the maximum overall benefit. I currently live in Seattle, which is quite expensive. If there was another city like Seattle with the same schools, healthcare, climate, and culture, but cheaper housing, I'd move there as long as the salaries there weren't so much lower that it more than canceled out the benefit of cheaper housing. The problem in the US is that even though some cities are quite expensive, they are still overall the most economical choice for people who can get good jobs in those cities. The increased pay more than makes up for the higher prices.
old_man_cato 1y ago
Dehumanization might be the wrong word. It's certainly anti social technology, though, and that's bad enough.
- munificent 1y ago
  I believe that our socializing is the absolute most fundamentally human aspect of us as a species. If you cut off a bird's wings, it can't bird in any real meaningful sense. If you cut off humans from others, I don't think we can really be human either.
  - old_man_cato 1y ago
    And I think a lot of people would agree with you.
  - ACCount36 1y ago
    There are a lot of incredibly offended kiwi birds out there now.
Lerc 1y ago
AI has the capacity to deflect accountability. That must be addressed. That does not mean that the intent, goal, or even primary result is dehumanisation. Address the concerns specifically, suggest solutions for those concerns. I have made a submission to a government investigation highlighting the need for explicitly identifying when an AI makes a determination involving an individual, and the need for mechanisms that need to be in place for individuals to be aware when that has happened along with a method to challenge the determination of they feel it was incorrect. I have seen a lot of blanket judgements vilifying an entire field of research and industry and all those who participate in it. It has become commonplace use the term techbros as a pejorative to declare people as others. There is a word for behaviour like that. That is what dehumanisation is.
tptacek 1y ago
The problem this author has is with the technology industry, not AI in particular, which really is just a (surprisingly powerful) cohering of forces tech has unleashed over the last 25 years.
teekert 1y ago
Btw, Rutger Bregman also considers empathy an error. It’s a complex argument.
- teekert 1y ago
  I mean it's really worth looking into what he means here. I tend to agree that empathy can be an overly local source of bad stuff. Empathy will often make you ignore the real problem focusing only on suffering right in front of you (ie, donate money to some crappy non-profit because a sad puppy was in their commercial, instead of really doing something). That is not all bad, but is it the best?
renewiltord 1y ago
Dear god, the endless reams of "woe is us" are worse than any LLM generated content. > Elon Musk - whose xAI data centre is being powered by nearly three dozen on-site gas turbines that are poisoning the air of nearby majority-Black neighborhoods in Memphis - went on the Joe Rogan podcast Christ, who even reads this stuff. This constant palavering is genuinely too much.
mulippy 1y ago
pedestrian rehash of standard ai critique talking points without novel insight. author conflates pattern recognition with "dehumanization" through definitional sleight-of-hand - classic motte-and-bailey where reasonable concerns about bias/labor displacement get weaponized into apocalyptic framing. the empathy-as-weakness musk quote does heavy lifting for entire thesis but represents single data point from notoriously unreliable narrator. building systematic critique around elon's joe rogan appearance is methodologically weak. technical description of llms as "word salad generators" betrays surface-level understanding. dismissing statistical pattern matching as inherently meaningless ignores that human cognition relies heavily on similar processes. the "no understanding" claim assumes consciousness/intentionality as prerequisite for useful output, which is philosophically naive. bias automation concerns valid but not uniquely ai-related - bureaucratic systems have always encoded societal prejudices. author ignores potential for ai to surface and quantify existing biases that human administrators would otherwise perpetuate invisibly. deskilling argument contradicts itself - simultaneously claims ai doesn't improve productivity while arguing it threatens jobs. if tools are genuinely useless, market forces would eliminate them. more likely: author conflates short-term adjustment costs with long-term displacement effects. "surveillance technology" characterization relies on guilt-by-association rather than technical analysis. any information processing system could theoretically enable surveillance - this includes spreadsheets, databases, filing cabinets. the public sector romanticism is revealing. framing government work as inherently altruistic ignores institutional incentives, regulatory capture, and bureaucratic self-preservation. "mission-oriented" workers can implement harmful policies with genuine conviction. strongest section addresses automation bias and human-in-the-loop failures, but author doesn't engage with literature on hybrid human-ai systems or institutional design solutions. -claude w/ eigenbot absolute mode system setting
- bentograd 1y ago
  I mean, this really proves the point. You dehumanize the author and anyone who even attempts to read this slop by deferring your thinking to the machine, as if this kind of human interaction was not worthy to be had. Worst of all, you dehumanize yourself.
tolerance 1y ago
This article is informative, but I can't imagine it would do anything to spur the conscious of people who use AI in ways other than the harmful examples it illustrates.
alganet 1y ago
I think AI could have been great. It's just that greed took over, and it took over big time. Several shitty decisions in a row: scaling it too much, stealing data, marketing it before it can deliver, government use. The list goes on and on. This idea that there's something inherent about the technology that's dehumanizing is an old trick. The issue lies in whoever is making those shitty decisions, not the tech itself. There's obviously a fog surrounding every single discussion about this stuff. Probably the outcome of another remarkably shitty decision by someone (so many people parroting marketing ideas, it's dumb). We'll be ok as humans, trust me on this one. It's too big to not fail.
tim333 1y ago
>The push to adopt AI is, at its core, a political project of dehumanization I can't really say I've seen that. The article seems to be about adoption of AI in the Canadian public sector, not something I'm really familiar with as a Brit. The government here hopes to boost the economy with it and Hassabis at Deepmind hopes to advance science and cure diseases. I think AI may well make the world more humane by dealing with a variety of our problems.
adamc 1y ago
I think it's an interesting piece, and calls us to consider how the technology will actually be used. A lot of things that are possible enable evil purposes as or more readily than noble ones. (Palantir comes to mind.) I think we have an ethical obligation to be aware of that and try to steer to the light.
TacticalCoder 1y ago
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davesque 1y ago
I'm not usually a fan of progressive politics, but I thought Bernie Sanders made a great point the other day when he simply asked why adoption of AI would lead to layoffs instead of a 4-day work week. I don't think the question is naive. There really doesn't seem to be any good reason why the value of AI technology couldn't be distributed this way today, only that the people in charge of it don't want to do that, because they are so accustomed to claiming value instead of sharing it.
PolyBaker 1y ago
I think there is a fundamental non-understanding of power present in the post. By that I mean that the author doesn't appreciate that technology (or any tool for that matter) gives power and control to the user. This is used to further our understanding of the world with the intent of creating more technology (recursive process). The normies just support those at the forefront that actually change society. The argument in the post is fundamentally anti-technology. Follow this argument and you end up at a place where we live in caves rather than buildings. Also the anti-technology stance is good for humanity since it fundamentally introduces opposition to progress and questions the norm, ultimately killing the weak/inefficient parts of progress.
dwaltrip 1y ago
The meat of the post does not depend on the characterization AI as “mere statistical correlations” that produces “plausible sounding word salad”. I encourage people to not get too hung up on that and look at the arguments about the effects on society and how we function as humans. I have very mixed feelings about AI, and this blog hits some key notes for me. If I have time later I will try to highlight those.
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hayst4ck 1y ago
To call AI a dehumanization technology is like calling guns a murder technology. There is obviously truth to that, but guns are also used for self defense and protecting your dignity. Guns are a technology, and technology can be used for good or evil. Guns have been used to colonially enslave people, but also been used to gain independence. I disagree with the assessment that AI is intrinsically dehumanizing. AI is a tool, a very powerful tool, and because the very rich in America doesn't see the people they rule as humans of equal dignity, the technology itself betrays their feelings. Attacking the technology is wrong, the problem is not the technology but that every company has a tyrant king at it's helm who answers to no one because they have purchased the regulators that might have bound their behavior, meaning that their are no consequences for a CEO/King of a company's misdeeds. So every company's king ends up using their company/fiefdom to further their own personal ambitions of power and nobody is there to stop them. If the technology is powerful, then failure to invest in it, while other even more oppressive regimes do invest in it, potentially gives them the ability to dominate you. Imagine you argue nuclear weapons are a bad technology, while your neighbor is busy developing them. Are you better off if your neighbor has nuclear weapons and you don't? The argument that AI is a dehumanization technology is ultimately an anarchist argument. Anarchy's core belief is that no one should have power to dominate anyone else, which inevitably means that no one is able to provide consequences for anyone who ambitiously betrays that belief system. Reality does not work that way. The only way to provide consequences to a corrupt institution is an even more powerful institution based on collective bargaining (founded by the threat of consequences for failing to reach a compromise, such as striking). There is no way around realpolitik, you must confront pragmatic power relationships to have a cogent philosophy. The author is mistaking AI for wealth disparity. Wealth is power and power is wealth, and when it is so concentrated, it puts bad actors above consequences and turns tools that could be used for the public good into tools of oppression. We do not primarily have an AI problem, but a wealth concentration problem and this is one of many manifestation of it.
- k__ 1y ago
  To be fair, people only need guns to protect themselves because guns literally are murder tech.
npteljes 1y ago
>The push to adopt AI is, at its core, a political project of dehumanization I agree with the general sentiment, but absolutely disagree with this claim. The push to adopt AI is a gold rush, not any coordinated thing. I think in the political arena they don't give a single f about how humanizing or dehumanizing a thing is, especially if it's this abstract as "AI" or whatever. Everyone out there is there to further their own limited scope goal, according to whatever idea they have on how to achieve that. AI entered the public consciousness and so, companies are now in a race to not get behind. Politicians do enter into the picture, but mostly as ones who enjoy the fruit of the AI effort, it being a good public distraction, and an effective tool in creating propaganda. But nowhere near is it a primary goal, nor does it nefariously further any underlying primary goal, such as dehumanizing the people. It's merely a tool, and a phenomenon with beneficial side effects.

158 points by smartmic 1y ago

cheevly 1y ago

Down with data-driven decisions and probabilistic computing!!

nh23423fefe 1y ago
[flagged]
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  The larger concern is people treating function approximation as fact (especially in the models where it is technologically understood that what is happening is an estimation algorithm, or what is happening is semantically divorced from "understanding" the underlying fact-patterns and is instead a system building fact-like sentences from data that may or may not contain actual relevant facts). There is definitely a huge gap between what is happening right now and public perception (and, I'd argue, a few people with a lot of money to gain or lose going out of their way to increase, not decrease, that gap). In that context, the overall notion the post approaches (that Canada would do well to avoid basing decisions that could help or harm real people on the output of these unproven systems at this juncture) is a good notion.

cynicalsecurity 1y ago

This almost reads as AI is from devil.

hatradiowigwam 1y ago
....Who can stand against AI? Who can make war against AI? The people ceded their power to AI, and worshiped it.
DocTomoe 1y ago
Whenever a new tech (or cultural phenomenon) appears, you have naysayers such as this one. Luddites fought against automatic weaving stools - by destroying the machines. Reasoning: It is stealing our jobs. Comics were sure to destroy our children's minds, because they wouldn't read real literature anymore (conveniently forgetting that only 100 years before that, reading was considered a plague of the youth and putting their minds into bad places). Rock music is of the devil. If you play "Stairway to heaven" backwards, and squint your ears just right ... Phones that memorise phone numbers? Surely it is brain rot if you are no longer forced to memorise phone numbers. Social media? Work of the devil! Manipulates the minds, causes addiction, bad elections, and warts on the nose! Cryptocurrency? Waste of energy, won't someone please think of the environment? Only used for crime! 3D printing? What if someone ghasp prints himself a gun? And now it is AI. And when AI is normalised, and something new shows up, it will be that.
- nico_h 1y ago
  I think except for rock music and comic books and 3d printing the naysayers are proven to be right? The luddites went at it wrong , but the externalities are definitely terrible for all your examples.
- yupitsme123 1y ago
  Most of the things in this list are pretty innocuous and were never weaponized. Two exceptions, social media and cell phones, have been weaponized and after a certain point, I would say that we'd be better off without them. I would put AI into that same group. It is and will continue to be weaponized against you by people with more power than you.
- kmeisthax 1y ago
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- skuxxlife 1y ago
  This is an extremely simplistic take that ironically ignores the human cultural context around these technologies. For one, you, like many, misunderstand the Luddite movement. They didn’t break weaving frames because they were against technology, they broke them because they were being used to grossly devalue the work weavers used to earn their livelihood. There was a mass consolidation of textile manufacturing from small groups of tradespeople into a few very wealthy factory owners who used easily exploitable labor (like children) in very poor working conditions and paid unlivable wages to make low quality but cheap garments. The luddites weren’t against technology, they were against the way it was being used. They even only targeted factories that they thought were particularly exploitative, leaving the ones with fairer business practices alone. But they get mischaracterized as anti-technology, anti-progress…but maybe they just wanted to be able to live their lives well and support their families. There’s really a lot to learn from the luddites and their historical context, and it really goes to show that history is truly cyclical.
nico_h 1y ago
All those LLMs are trained on stolen data, is pushed by ultra capitalist tech bro and billionaires, and eliminating jobs in creative industries. It’s heralded as a tool for increasing efficiency (a western capitalism favorite euphemism for cancerous exploitation of the environment and humans) while neglecting it’s externalities, which includes destroying the jobs of the very people it stole the work from, and making you more reliant upon it, possibly to the point you forget how to do the things you use it for. It’s a pretty devilish poisoned fruit.

suthakamal 1y ago

[flagged]

giraffe_lady 1y ago
> The idea that we could just reject the technology feels kind of like a Luddite reaction to it. The luddites were a labor movement protesting how a new technology was used by mill owners to attack collective worker power in exchange for producing a worse product. Their movement failed but they were right to fight it. The lesson we should take from them isn't to give up in the face of destabilizing technological change.
- mouse_ 1y ago
  Preach!
- suthakamal 1y ago
  They were wrong to believe that technological progress could be stopped. The viable path is policy which ensures the gains are fairly distributed, not try to break the machines. That tactic has never and will never work.
  - xg15 1y ago
    > The viable path is policy which ensures the gains are fairly distributed, not try to break the machines. This was exactly what the historical Luddite movement was trying to archive. The industrialists responded with "lol no". Then came the breaking of machines.
  - NegativeLatency 1y ago
    I don't want to start a snippy argument, so sorry if this sounds combative, but when you realize that there isn't a "policy which ensures the gains are fairly distributed", then what would you suggest? Unionization and collective action does work, it's why we have things like the concept of the weekend. It's also generally useful when advocating change to have a more extreme faction.

rolha-capoeira 1y ago

This presupposes that human value only exists in the things current AI tech can replace—pattern recognition/creation. I'd wager the same argument was made when hand-crafted things were being replaced with industrialized products. I'm not saying those things aren't valuable, or that humans can't express social and spiritual value in those ways, but that human value doesn't only exist there. And so, to give AI the power of complete dehumanization is to reduce humans to just pattern followers. I don't believe that is the case.

danielbln 1y ago
It kind of makes sense if following a particular pattern is your purpose and life, and maybe your identity.
- MichaelZuo 1y ago
  How would this matter? People can self assign any value whatsoever… that doesn’t change. If they expect external validation then that’s obviously dependent on multiple other parties.
- malux85 1y ago
  We should actively encourage fluidity in purpose, too much rigidity or militant clinging to ideas is insecurity or attempts at absolving personal responsibility. Resilience and strength in our civilisation comes from confidence in our competence, not sanctifying patterns so we don’t have to think. We need to encourage and support fluidity, domain knowledge is commoditised, the future is fluid composition.
  - danielbln 1y ago
    Absolutely, I agree with that.
  - asciimov 1y ago
    Great, tell that to someone who spent years honing their skills that it's too bad the rug was pulled out from beneath you, time to start over from the bottom again. Maybe there would be merit to this notion if society provided the necessary safety net for this person to start over.

wagwang 1y ago

This blog post basically reads as, AI doesn't always adhere to my leftist values.

DowsingSpoon 1y ago
Murder also doesn’t adhere to my leftist values, which is to say, your statement is useless without being specific about which values AI doesn’t adhere to, and why you think that’s not a problem at all. The article explicitly calls out the “deeply-held values of justice, fairness, and duty toward one another.” Are these the specific leftist values you’re so dismissive of?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Or to invert it, what "non-leftist values" does grandparent poster believe are lacking? (Hopefully the answer isn't "...You know the ones.")
- charcircuit 1y ago
  For example: >What happens to people's monthly premiums when a US health insurance company's AI finds a correlation between high asthma rates and home addresses in a certain Memphis zip code? In the tradition of skull-measuring eugenicists, AI provides a way to naturalize and reinforce existing social hierarchies, and automates their reproduction. This sentence is about how AI may be able to more effectively apply the current values of society as opposed to the author's own values. It also fails to recognize that for things like insurance there are incentives to reduce bias to avoid mispricing policies. >The logical answer is that they want an excuse to fire workers, and don't care about the quality of work being done. This sentence shows that the author perceives that AI may harm workers. Harming workers appears to be against her values. >This doesn't inescapably lead to a technological totalitarianism. But adopting these systems clearly hands a lot of power to whoever builds, controls, and maintains them. For the most part, that means handing power to a handful of tech oligarchs. To at least some degree, this represents a seizure of the 'means of production' from public sector workers, as well as a reduction in democratic oversight. >Lastly, it may come as no surprise that so far, AI systems have found their best product-market fit in police and military applications, where short-circuiting people's critical thinking and decision-making processes is incredibly useful, at least for those who want to turn people into unhesitatingly brutal and lethal instruments of authority. These sentences shows that the author values people being able to break the law.

perching_aix 1y ago

> Rather than enhancing our human qualities, these systems degrade our social relations, and undermine our capacity for empathy and care. I don't genuinely expect the author of a blogpost who titles their writing "AI is Dehumanization Technology" to be particularly receptive of a counterargument, but hear me out. I can think of few things as intellectually miserable as the #help channels of the many open source projects on Discord, for example. Should I wager a guess, if these projects all integrated LLMs into their chatbots for just a few bucks and let them take on the brunt of the interactions, all participants on either side would be left with much more capacity to maintain and express empathy and care, or to nurture social connections. This extends beyond these noncommercial contexts of course, to stuff like customer service for example.

tines 1y ago
> I can think of few things as intellectually miserable as the #help channels of the many open source projects on Discord, for example. Should I wager a guess, if these projects all integrated LLMs into their chatbots for just a few bucks and let them take on the brunt of the interactions, all participants on either side would be left with much more capacity to maintain and express empathy and care, or to nurture social connections. This extends beyond these noncommercial contexts of course, to stuff like customer service for example. This would be a good counter if this were all that this technology is being used for.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  I don't think it's necessary for me to counter everything they're saying. They're making a unilateral judgement - as long as I can demonstrate a good counter for one part of it, the unilateral judgement will fail to hold. They can of course still argue that it's majority-bad for whatever list of reasons, but that's not what bugs me. What bugs me is the absolute tunnel vision of "for principled reasons I must find this thing completely and utterly bad, no matter what". Because this is what the title, and the tone, and just about everything else in this article comes across as to me, and I find it equal parts terrifying and disagreeable.

RS-232 1y ago

Were water mills, spinning jennies, and printing presses dehumanizing too?

tines 1y ago
No, because they aren't the same. Those things are tools that reallocate cognitive burden. LLMs destroy cognitive burden. LLMs cause cognitive decline, a spinning jenny doesn't.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  I don't know man? Gonna have to disagree there. A lot of models are being used to reallocate cognitive burden. A phd level biologist with access to the models we can envision in the future will probably be exponentially more valuable than entire bio startups are today. This is because s/he will be using the model to reallocate cognitive burden. At the same time, I'm not naive. I know that there will be many, many non phd level biologist wannabes that attempt to use models to remove entirely cognitive burden. But what they will discover is that they are unable to hold a candle to the domain expert reallocating cognitive burden. Models don't cause cognitive decline. They make cognitive labor exponentially more valuable than it is today. With the problem being that it creates an even more extreme "winner take all" economic environment that a growing population has to live in. What happens when a startup really only needs a few business types and a small team of domain experts? Today, a successful startup might be hundreds of jobs. What happens when it's just a couple dozen? Or not even a dozen? (Other than the founders and investors capturing even more wealth than they do presently.)
  - tines 1y ago
    It doesn't really matter what something can be used for, it matters what it will be used for most of the time. Television can be used for reading books, but people mostly don't use it that way. Smartphones can be used for creation, but people mostly don't use them that way. You've got Satya Nadella on a stage saying AI makes you a better friend because it can reply to messages from your friends for you. We are creating, and to a large extent have created, a world that we will not want to live in, as evidenced by skyrocketing depression and the loneliness epidemic. Read Neil Postman or Daniel Boorstin or Marshall McLuhan or Sherry Turkle. The medium is the message.

stego-tech 1y ago

The poster hits the nail on the head in the summary alone, but I’ll go a step further: We have been duped for half a century into solving increasingly niche problems whose benefits accrue ever upward beyond our reach, and whose harms are forcibly distributed across an unwilling populace. On the whole, technology has done exponentially more harm (mass surveillance, psychological exploitation, automated weapons, pollution, contamination of data, destruction of natural resources, outsourcing, dehumanization) than good (medical technology, targeted therapies, knowledge exchanges, Wikipedia, global collaboration). Instead of focusing on the broader issues of survival staring us in the face, we have willingly ceded agency and sovereignty to a handful of unelected Capitalists who convinced us that this invention will somehow, finally, inevitably solve all our ills and enable a utopia. Not one of the boosters of any prior modern “technological revolution” can point to societal good that outpaced the harms caused by their creation. Not NFTs, not cryptocurrency, and certainly not AI. Even Machine Learning has seen more harmful than helpful use, despite its genuine benefits to human society and technological progress, enabling surveillance advertising and the disappearance of dissidents instead of customized healthcare and efficient distribution of resources in real-time. Yet whenever someone dares to point this out, we’re decried by proponents as Luddites - ignoring the fact the real plight of the Luddites wasn’t anti-technology, but anti-Capital. To call us Luddites derisively is analogous to admitting the indefensibility of your position: You’re acknowledging we are right to be angry for being harmed for the sake of Capital alone, but that you will do everything in your power to stop our cause. We aren’t saying we want technology to disappear and to revert to the dark ages, we’re demanding that technology benefits everyone more than it harms them. We demand it be inclusive rather than exclusive. It should amplify our good works and minimize societal harms. AI in the current context is the societal equivalent of suicide. It robs us of the remaining, dwindling resources we have on yet another thin, hollow promise that this time, it will be different. Four years ago we literally had Crypto Miners lighting up Coal Power Plants while proclaiming cryptocurrency and NFTs will solve climate change somehow, and now AI companies are firing up fuel turbines and nuclear power plants while promising the same thing. We need to stop obsessing over technical minutiae and showing blind faith in technology, and realize that these are all tools of varying utility. We have mounting evidence that AI is causing more harm than good now, and that there is no practicable roadmap where its benefits will outweigh its harms in the near term. For all this obsessing over share value and “progress”, we need to accept the gruesome reality that our talent, our intelligence, and our passion is being manipulated to harm the masses - and that we alone can decide to STOP. It’s about taking our heads out of the sand, objectively assessing the whole of the system and superstructure, and taking action to change things. More fuzzy code and token prediction isn’t going to save our asses or make the world a better place. The only way to do that is to acknowledge our role in the harms we perpetuate and choosing to stop them, regardless of the harms to ourselves in the moment.

rafram 1y ago

> For example, to create an LLM such as ChatGPT, you'd start with an enormous quantity of text, then do a lot of computationally-intense statistical analysis to map out which words and phrases are most likely to appear near to one another. Crunch the numbers long enough, and you end up with something similar to the next-word prediction tool in your phone's text messaging app, except that this tool can generate whole paragraphs of mostly plausible-sounding word salad. This explanation might've been passable four years ago, but it's woefully out of date now. "Mostly plausible-sounding word salad"?

mv4 1y ago
What would be a better explanation today?
- diggan 1y ago
  I think "mostly plausible-sounding" is, albeit simplified, OK for an analogy I guess. But the "word salad" part gives the impression it doesn't even look like real human text, which it kind of does at the surface. I think it's mostly "word salad" that makes it sound far off from the truth.
  - relaxing 1y ago
    Word salad refers to human writing with poor diction and/or syntax.
  - djhn 1y ago
    Over the past year the chat bots have improved in many ways, but their written output has regressed to the mean: the average RLHF-driven preference. It is word salad, unless you’re a young, underpaid contractor from a country previously colonised by the British or the United States.
    - diggan 1y ago
      > Over the past year the chat bots have improved in many ways, but their written output has regressed to the mean: the average RLHF-driven preference. How could you possibly judge such a diverse set of outputs? There are thousands of models, that can each be steered/programmed with prompts and with a lot parameter-twiddling, it's always impossible you could say "the chat bots" and give some sort of one-size-fits-all judgement of all LLMs. I think your reply shows a bit of ignorance if that's all you've seen. Oxford Dictionaries says "word salad" is "a confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases", and true, I'm no native speaker, but that's not commonly the output I get from LLMs. Sometimes though, some people’s opinions on the internet feel like word salad, but I guess it's hard to distinguish from bait too.

drellybochelly 1y ago

It can be, but on the other hand its made me think in a radically different way about concepts in humanity.

kelseyfrog 1y ago

Whether we like it or not, AI sits at the intersection of both Moravec's and Jevon's paradox. Just as more efficient engines lead to increased gas usage, as AI gets increasingly better at problems difficult for humans, we see even greater proliferation within that domain. The reductio on this is the hollowing out of the hard-for-humans problem domain, leaving us to fight for the scraps of the easy-for-humans domain. At first glance this sounds like a win. Who wouldn't want something else to solve the hard problems? The big issue with this is easy-for-human problems are often dull, devoid of meaning, and low-wage. Paradoxically, the hardest problems have always been the ones that make work meaningful. We stand at the crossroads where one path leads to an existence where with a poverty of meaning and although humans create and play by their own rules, we feel powerless to change it. What the hell are we doing?

serbuvlad 1y ago
Prioritize goals over the process and what AIs can do doesn't matter. Want to make a movie? The goal should be getting the movie out, seen by people and reviewed. Whether it's people captured by film, animations in Blender or AI slop, what matters is the outcome. Is it good? Do people like it? I do the infrastructure at a department of my Uni as sort of a side-gig. I would have never had the time to learn Ansible, borg, FreeIPA, wireguard, and everything else I have configured now and would have probably resorted to a bunch of messy shell scripts that don't work half the time like the people before me. But everything I was able to set up I was able to set up in days, because of AI. Sure, it's really satisfying because I also have a deep understanding of the fundamentals, and I can debug problems when AI fails, and then I ask it "how does this work" as a faster Google/wiki. I've tried windsurf but given up because the AI does something that doesn't work and I can give it the prompts to find a solution (+ think for myself) much faster than it can figure out itself (and probably at the cost of a lot less tokens). But the fact that I enjoy the process doesn't matter. And the moment I can click a button and make a webapp, I have so many ideas in my drawer for how I could improve the network at Uni. I think the problem people have is that they work corporate jobs where they have no freedom to choose their own outcomes so they are basically just doing homework all their life. And AI can do homework better than them.

mrcwinn 1y ago

Yes, before AI, society was doing fantastically well on "social relations, empathy, and care." XD I remain an optimist. I believe AI can actually give us more time to care for people, because the computers will be able to do more themselves and between each other. Unproven thesis, but so is the case laid out in this article.

ACCount36 1y ago
Anyone who thinks that AI is bad for "empathy and care" should be forced to work for a year in a tech support call center, first line. There are some jobs that humans really shouldn't be doing. And now, we're at the point where we can start offloading that to machines.

gchamonlive 1y ago

Everything is dehumanization technology when society is organized to foster competition and narcissism and not cooperation and care. Technology is always an extension of the ethos. It doesn't stand on its own, it needs and reflects the mindset of humans.

serbuvlad 1y ago
The fundamental advantage of our society as designed is that it weaponizes narcissism, and makes narcissists do useful stuff for society. Don't care about competition? Find a place where rent prices are reasonable and you'll find it's actually surprisingly easy to earn a living. Oh, but you want the fancy stuff, don't you?
- munificent 1y ago
  I suspect that if you find a place where rent prices are reasonable, you'll find it's actually surprisingly hard to find job there that pays a good wage, healthcare that keeps you healthy, decent schools to educate your children, and a community that shares your values and interests. People don't move to high cost of living areas because they want nice TVs. Fancy stuff is the same price everywhere.
  - serbuvlad 1y ago
    I live in Romania so I have different problems. I understand that Americans have problems with rent and healthcare. We have problem with other stuff, like food prices. But at the end of the day, it's extremely unhealthy to let these problems force us into feeling like we have to make a lot of money. You can find cheap solutions for almost everything almost everywhere if you compromise.
    - munificent 1y ago
      I don't think people feel like they have to make a lot of money. I think they seek jobs and places to live that give them the maximum overall benefit. I currently live in Seattle, which is quite expensive. If there was another city like Seattle with the same schools, healthcare, climate, and culture, but cheaper housing, I'd move there as long as the salaries there weren't so much lower that it more than canceled out the benefit of cheaper housing. The problem in the US is that even though some cities are quite expensive, they are still overall the most economical choice for people who can get good jobs in those cities. The increased pay more than makes up for the higher prices.

old_man_cato 1y ago

Dehumanization might be the wrong word. It's certainly anti social technology, though, and that's bad enough.

munificent 1y ago
I believe that our socializing is the absolute most fundamentally human aspect of us as a species. If you cut off a bird's wings, it can't bird in any real meaningful sense. If you cut off humans from others, I don't think we can really be human either.
- old_man_cato 1y ago
  And I think a lot of people would agree with you.
- ACCount36 1y ago
  There are a lot of incredibly offended kiwi birds out there now.

Lerc 1y ago

AI has the capacity to deflect accountability. That must be addressed. That does not mean that the intent, goal, or even primary result is dehumanisation. Address the concerns specifically, suggest solutions for those concerns. I have made a submission to a government investigation highlighting the need for explicitly identifying when an AI makes a determination involving an individual, and the need for mechanisms that need to be in place for individuals to be aware when that has happened along with a method to challenge the determination of they feel it was incorrect. I have seen a lot of blanket judgements vilifying an entire field of research and industry and all those who participate in it. It has become commonplace use the term techbros as a pejorative to declare people as others. There is a word for behaviour like that. That is what dehumanisation is.

tptacek 1y ago

The problem this author has is with the technology industry, not AI in particular, which really is just a (surprisingly powerful) cohering of forces tech has unleashed over the last 25 years.

teekert 1y ago

Btw, Rutger Bregman also considers empathy an error. It’s a complex argument.

teekert 1y ago
I mean it's really worth looking into what he means here. I tend to agree that empathy can be an overly local source of bad stuff. Empathy will often make you ignore the real problem focusing only on suffering right in front of you (ie, donate money to some crappy non-profit because a sad puppy was in their commercial, instead of really doing something). That is not all bad, but is it the best?

renewiltord 1y ago

Dear god, the endless reams of "woe is us" are worse than any LLM generated content. > Elon Musk - whose xAI data centre is being powered by nearly three dozen on-site gas turbines that are poisoning the air of nearby majority-Black neighborhoods in Memphis - went on the Joe Rogan podcast Christ, who even reads this stuff. This constant palavering is genuinely too much.

mulippy 1y ago

pedestrian rehash of standard ai critique talking points without novel insight. author conflates pattern recognition with "dehumanization" through definitional sleight-of-hand - classic motte-and-bailey where reasonable concerns about bias/labor displacement get weaponized into apocalyptic framing. the empathy-as-weakness musk quote does heavy lifting for entire thesis but represents single data point from notoriously unreliable narrator. building systematic critique around elon's joe rogan appearance is methodologically weak. technical description of llms as "word salad generators" betrays surface-level understanding. dismissing statistical pattern matching as inherently meaningless ignores that human cognition relies heavily on similar processes. the "no understanding" claim assumes consciousness/intentionality as prerequisite for useful output, which is philosophically naive. bias automation concerns valid but not uniquely ai-related - bureaucratic systems have always encoded societal prejudices. author ignores potential for ai to surface and quantify existing biases that human administrators would otherwise perpetuate invisibly. deskilling argument contradicts itself - simultaneously claims ai doesn't improve productivity while arguing it threatens jobs. if tools are genuinely useless, market forces would eliminate them. more likely: author conflates short-term adjustment costs with long-term displacement effects. "surveillance technology" characterization relies on guilt-by-association rather than technical analysis. any information processing system could theoretically enable surveillance - this includes spreadsheets, databases, filing cabinets. the public sector romanticism is revealing. framing government work as inherently altruistic ignores institutional incentives, regulatory capture, and bureaucratic self-preservation. "mission-oriented" workers can implement harmful policies with genuine conviction. strongest section addresses automation bias and human-in-the-loop failures, but author doesn't engage with literature on hybrid human-ai systems or institutional design solutions. -claude w/ eigenbot absolute mode system setting

bentograd 1y ago
I mean, this really proves the point. You dehumanize the author and anyone who even attempts to read this slop by deferring your thinking to the machine, as if this kind of human interaction was not worthy to be had. Worst of all, you dehumanize yourself.

tolerance 1y ago

This article is informative, but I can't imagine it would do anything to spur the conscious of people who use AI in ways other than the harmful examples it illustrates.

alganet 1y ago

I think AI could have been great. It's just that greed took over, and it took over big time. Several shitty decisions in a row: scaling it too much, stealing data, marketing it before it can deliver, government use. The list goes on and on. This idea that there's something inherent about the technology that's dehumanizing is an old trick. The issue lies in whoever is making those shitty decisions, not the tech itself. There's obviously a fog surrounding every single discussion about this stuff. Probably the outcome of another remarkably shitty decision by someone (so many people parroting marketing ideas, it's dumb). We'll be ok as humans, trust me on this one. It's too big to not fail.

tim333 1y ago

>The push to adopt AI is, at its core, a political project of dehumanization I can't really say I've seen that. The article seems to be about adoption of AI in the Canadian public sector, not something I'm really familiar with as a Brit. The government here hopes to boost the economy with it and Hassabis at Deepmind hopes to advance science and cure diseases. I think AI may well make the world more humane by dealing with a variety of our problems.

adamc 1y ago

I think it's an interesting piece, and calls us to consider how the technology will actually be used. A lot of things that are possible enable evil purposes as or more readily than noble ones. (Palantir comes to mind.) I think we have an ethical obligation to be aware of that and try to steer to the light.

TacticalCoder 1y ago

[dead]

davesque 1y ago

I'm not usually a fan of progressive politics, but I thought Bernie Sanders made a great point the other day when he simply asked why adoption of AI would lead to layoffs instead of a 4-day work week. I don't think the question is naive. There really doesn't seem to be any good reason why the value of AI technology couldn't be distributed this way today, only that the people in charge of it don't want to do that, because they are so accustomed to claiming value instead of sharing it.

PolyBaker 1y ago

I think there is a fundamental non-understanding of power present in the post. By that I mean that the author doesn't appreciate that technology (or any tool for that matter) gives power and control to the user. This is used to further our understanding of the world with the intent of creating more technology (recursive process). The normies just support those at the forefront that actually change society. The argument in the post is fundamentally anti-technology. Follow this argument and you end up at a place where we live in caves rather than buildings. Also the anti-technology stance is good for humanity since it fundamentally introduces opposition to progress and questions the norm, ultimately killing the weak/inefficient parts of progress.

dwaltrip 1y ago

The meat of the post does not depend on the characterization AI as “mere statistical correlations” that produces “plausible sounding word salad”. I encourage people to not get too hung up on that and look at the arguments about the effects on society and how we function as humans. I have very mixed feelings about AI, and this blog hits some key notes for me. If I have time later I will try to highlight those.

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hayst4ck 1y ago

To call AI a dehumanization technology is like calling guns a murder technology. There is obviously truth to that, but guns are also used for self defense and protecting your dignity. Guns are a technology, and technology can be used for good or evil. Guns have been used to colonially enslave people, but also been used to gain independence. I disagree with the assessment that AI is intrinsically dehumanizing. AI is a tool, a very powerful tool, and because the very rich in America doesn't see the people they rule as humans of equal dignity, the technology itself betrays their feelings. Attacking the technology is wrong, the problem is not the technology but that every company has a tyrant king at it's helm who answers to no one because they have purchased the regulators that might have bound their behavior, meaning that their are no consequences for a CEO/King of a company's misdeeds. So every company's king ends up using their company/fiefdom to further their own personal ambitions of power and nobody is there to stop them. If the technology is powerful, then failure to invest in it, while other even more oppressive regimes do invest in it, potentially gives them the ability to dominate you. Imagine you argue nuclear weapons are a bad technology, while your neighbor is busy developing them. Are you better off if your neighbor has nuclear weapons and you don't? The argument that AI is a dehumanization technology is ultimately an anarchist argument. Anarchy's core belief is that no one should have power to dominate anyone else, which inevitably means that no one is able to provide consequences for anyone who ambitiously betrays that belief system. Reality does not work that way. The only way to provide consequences to a corrupt institution is an even more powerful institution based on collective bargaining (founded by the threat of consequences for failing to reach a compromise, such as striking). There is no way around realpolitik, you must confront pragmatic power relationships to have a cogent philosophy. The author is mistaking AI for wealth disparity. Wealth is power and power is wealth, and when it is so concentrated, it puts bad actors above consequences and turns tools that could be used for the public good into tools of oppression. We do not primarily have an AI problem, but a wealth concentration problem and this is one of many manifestation of it.

k__ 1y ago
To be fair, people only need guns to protect themselves because guns literally are murder tech.

npteljes 1y ago

>The push to adopt AI is, at its core, a political project of dehumanization I agree with the general sentiment, but absolutely disagree with this claim. The push to adopt AI is a gold rush, not any coordinated thing. I think in the political arena they don't give a single f about how humanizing or dehumanizing a thing is, especially if it's this abstract as "AI" or whatever. Everyone out there is there to further their own limited scope goal, according to whatever idea they have on how to achieve that. AI entered the public consciousness and so, companies are now in a race to not get behind. Politicians do enter into the picture, but mostly as ones who enjoy the fruit of the AI effort, it being a good public distraction, and an effective tool in creating propaganda. But nowhere near is it a primary goal, nor does it nefariously further any underlying primary goal, such as dehumanizing the people. It's merely a tool, and a phenomenon with beneficial side effects.