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> 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,
by 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 agoI 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.
- asciimov 1y ago> What bugs me is the absolute tunnel vision of "for principled reasons I must find this thing completely and utterly bad, no matter what". AI companies also only sell the public on the upside of these technologies. Behind closed doors they are investing hard on this with the hope to reduce or eliminate their labor cost with no regard to any damage to society.
- perching_aix 1y agoI don't think fighting misrepresentation with misrepresentation is a winning strategy.
- Lerc 1y ago>This would be a good counter if this were all that this technology is being used for. Do you hold the position that a thing is bad because it is possible to do harm, or that it is predominantly causing harm? Most criticisms cite examples demonstrating the existence of harm because proving existence requires a single example. Calculating the sum of an effect is much harder. Even if the current impact of a field is predominantly harmful, it does not stand that the problem is with the what is being attempted. Consider healthcare, a few hundred years ago much of healthcare did more harm than good, charlatans and frauds were commonplace. Was that because healthcare itself was a bad thing? Was it a mistake to even go down that path?
- adamc 1y agoI don't think the path was fixed by healthcare, per se. It was fixed by adopting scientific investigation. So I think your argument is kind of misleading.
- Lerc 1y agoWhy misleading? I am advocating adopting methods of improvement rather than abandoning the persuit of beneficial results. I think science was just a part of the solution to healthcare, much of the advance was also in what was considered allowable or ethical. There remains a great deal of harmful medical practices that are used today in places where regulation is weak. Science has done little to stop those harms. The advances that led to the requirement for a scientific backing were social. That those practices persist in some places is not a scientific issue but a social one.
- adamc 1y agoBecause adopting having "doctors", for example, isn't really what made for better healthcare. We had doctors for centuries (arguably millenia) who were useful in very limited cases, and probably harmful most of the rest of the time. What made for better healthcare was changing the way we investigated problems. That ultimately enabled "doctors" to be quite useful. But the fact that the "profession" existed earlier is not what allowed it to bloom.