8 ms·

AI optimism is a class privilege

134 points by ragall 8mo ago

tgv 8mo ago
Author certainly has a point. The central idea is (IMO) best expressed in this quote: > to focus on its [i.e., AI's] benefits to you, you’re forced to ignore its costs to others.
- xnx 8mo ago
  Also works if you substitute "technology" for "AI".
  - tgv 8mo ago
    True, and other changes in society as well. But in contrast to e.g. the introduction of Phillips screws, AI (or rather: LLMs) is a biggy, and (IMO) one with where the negatives clearly outweigh the positives.
    - xnx 8mo ago
      Definitely agree that LLMs are a big deal, but I'm holding out hope that they are a net positive. Even the current wave of false/fake news content could have benefits if it results in emphasizing chains of trust to reliable information. Are there other technologies you think the negatives outweigh the positives? Leaded gasoline and paint come to mind for me.
- tim333 8mo ago
  I'm not sure that's true. Like I find the Google AI handy but that doesn't mean I have to ignore that others may be annoyed by it.
  - tgv 8mo ago
    It's of course a quote of a handful of words from a 5000 word article. Not to be snarky, but did you read it?
    - tim333 8mo ago
      I did read and I'll give you my comment wasn't that in line with the article. I'm not that convinced by the optimism being a class privilege thing though.
      - tgv 8mo ago
        I don't think class is supposed to correlate 100% to current socio-economic class. It's more like tech-oriented entrepreneurs and some of their high-level staff are a class, or rather, the class that stands to win when LLMs get adopted at a large scale, while for current higher classes, and possibly manual labor classes, not much will change, and the middle and lower white collar classes will lose. Wrt to manual labor: when a large part of the population loses significant income, there will be much less demand for builders, decorators, plumbers, roof thatchers, gardeners, hair dressers, etc., so they will likely be affected too.
semiinfinitely 8mo ago
finally a based take on ai
georgemcbay 8mo ago
I would say it is privilege (now) combined with denialism (for the future). Not only do you have to believe that you're in the group that benefits, but you also have to believe that "AI" improvement from here forward will stall out prior to the point where it goes from assisting your job to replacing it wholesale. I suspect there are many less people for whom that applies to them than there are people who believe it applies to them. It is very easy for us to exist in that denialism bubble until we see the machine nipping at our heels. And that is not even getting into second order effects, like even if you do provide AI-proof value, what happens when some significant percentage of everyone else (your potential customers) loses their income and society starts to crumble?
- leptons 8mo ago
  >what happens when some significant percentage of everyone else (your potential customers) loses their income and society starts to crumble? They will start to burn down data centers.
  - EA-3167 8mo ago
    There’s a reason that the Musks and Thiels of the world invested in luxury doomsday bunkers, because it won’t just be property people want to burn.
    - WalterBright 8mo ago
      The Soviets used the "iron broom" (i.e. murder) on the wealthy people. It didn't make anyone better off.
      - NoOn3 8mo ago
        The Soviets history is not so simple. ;)
        WalterBright 8mo ago
        The Soviets aren't the only country that tried that. It's never worked out anywhere it was tried.
numbchuckskills 8mo ago
[dead]
d_burfoot 8mo ago
> they mimic and amplify the inherent racism present in their own training data LLMs turn out to be biased against white men: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/me7wFrkEtMbkzXGJt/race-and-gender-bias-as-an-example-of-unfaithful-chain-of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/me7wFrkEtMbkzXGJt/race-and-g... > When present, the bias is always against white and male candidates across all tested models and scenarios. This happens even if we remove all text related to diversity.
- dogmayor 8mo ago
  Important sentences immediately before the ones you quote. > For our evaluation, we inserted names to signal race / gender while keeping the resume unchanged. Interestingly, the LLMs were not biased in the original evaluation setting, but became biased (up to 12% differences in interview rates) when we added realistic details like company names (Meta, Palantir, General Motors), locations, or culture descriptions from public careers pages.
  - daveguy 8mo ago
    Hah. Even LLMs know Meta and Palantir are evil af.
- aprilthird2021 8mo ago
  These are because of post-training. You have to give it such directives in post-training to correct the biases they bring in from scraping the whole internet (and other datasets like books, etc.) for data
- 113 8mo ago
  That's not a reliable source.
- biophysboy 8mo ago
  Looking at the paper, the effect is significant but weak (5-7%), even with the conditionals that magnify the effect. I would be curious to see the effect if this experiment were performed on a slightly different categorical variable (e.g. how are two white ethnicities treated). I do think its bad if preferences are "baked in" to the default though - prompting them away seems like a bad solution.
nomdep 8mo ago
(I feel that I write a comment like this every few years) The author catalog of harms is real. But it's worth noting that nearly identical catalogs were compiled for every major technological shift in modern history. The Internet destroyed print journalism, local retail, and enabled cyberbullying and mass surveillance. If we applied the same framework used here, Internet optimism in 2005 was also a form of "class privilege" (his term, I personally hate it). And the pattern extends well beyond the Internet. For example, mechanized looms devastated weavers, the automobile wiped out entire trades while introducing pollution and traffic deaths, and recorded music was supposed to kill live performances. In each case, the harms were genuine, the displacement was painful and unevenly distributed, and the people raising alarms were not irrational. They were often right about the costs. What they tended to miss was the longer trajectory: the way access to books, transportation, music, and information gradually broadened rather than narrowed, even if the transition was brutal for those caught in it. History doesn't guarantees a good outcome for AI, but the author does advocates from a position of "class privilege": of having access to good lawyers, good doctors, and good schools already, and not feeling the urgency of tools that might extend those things to people who don't.
- antonvs 8mo ago
  The assumption in your comment is that those changes were all net good. In hindsight though, the automobile has had possibly existential costs for humanity, the internet has provided most benefit to those who most abuse its power, and so on. In the end, it doesn’t seem as though you’ve actually made any sort of case.
  - jdross 8mo ago
    The set of people who believe the automobile (or the Internet) are net negatives taken as a whole for society is extremely small, for good reason
    - Retric 8mo ago
      Is it? Do you include everyone that’s died or lost a loved one due to personal automobiles in that assessment? We are so far post automobile that it’s hard to compare, but many of the benefits are illusionary when you consider how society has evolved with them as commutes for example used to be shorter. Similarly the air used to be far cleaner and that’s after we got rid of leaded gas and required catalytic converters decades ago.
abeppu 8mo ago
> You’d need to be high enough in the org chart; far enough up the pyramid; advanced enough along the career ladder. > To be an AI optimist, I’m guessing you must not be worried about where your next job might come from, or whether you can even find one. The current dire state of the job market, I have to assume, doesn’t scare you. You must feel secure. So I think even these people should not feel secure. The perceived value of expertise is decreased by AI which routinely claims to have PhD level mastery of a lot of material. I think even for people with deep experience, in the current job market, many firms are reluctant to hire or pay in a way that's commensurate with that expertise. If you're a leader whose clout in an organization is partly tied to how many people are under you in an org-chart (it's dumb but we have all seen it), maybe that will begin to shrink quarter after quarter. Unless you can make it genuinely obvious that a junior or mid-tier person could not write a prompt which cause a model to spew the knowledge or insight that you have won through years or decades of work, your job may become vulnerable. I think the class divide that is most relevant is more literal and old-school: - Do you _own_ enough of businesses that that's how you get most of your income? If so, maybe there's a way that AI will either cause your labor costs decrease, or your productivity per worker increases, and either way you're probably happy. - Can you invest specifically in the firms that are actively building AI, or applications thereof? We're back to owners vs workers, with the added dynamic that if AI lets you partially replace labor with capital, then owners of course take a bigger share of value created going forward.
- zombot 8mo ago
  > then owners of course take a bigger share of value created going forward. As has been the case with every technological change since forever.
yesimahuman 8mo ago
This sums up a lot of what I've been feeling lately. I've had a hard time getting excited about the AI long game, unlike a lot of my peers. I think being out of the industry for a few years (sold my startup a while back), and spending less time in that privileged tech bubble has made me far more aware of and concerned about average people and the future of non-tech hubs around the country/world. While I get value out of AI tools today, I see a lot more downsides in the immediate future for everyone that isn't directly working on this technology with skin in the game. Especially when our society doesn't seem even remotely ready for the big changes coming.
aaron695 8mo ago
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DesaiAshu 8mo ago
India and Africa are significantly more optimistic about AI than US and EU There exists great promise in AI to be an equalizing force, if implemented well The future is yet to be written
- wasmainiac 8mo ago
  > There exists great promise in AI to be an equalizing force, if implemented well That doesn’t sound like a promise then no?
- antonly 8mo ago
  How is it an equalising force if the commodity is sold at "market value"? This will just lead to more wealth concentration, no?
  - simianwords 8mo ago
    you are conflating equity and equality. its equalising in the sense that it democratises access to data, knowledge. but that does not mean it will end up with everyone being equal in terms of wealth.
    - antonly 8mo ago
      But it won't even do that. In the pursuit of extracting maximal capital, better models with "better" knowledge will be gated behind higher prices. If you pay more, you get more.
- hyperadvanced 8mo ago
  Being optimistic is a bad way to get good outcomes
- wolrah 8mo ago
  > There exists great promise in AI to be an equalizing force, if implemented well *looks at who's controlling the implementation of LLM-based "AI"* *looks at who the largest beneficiaries of societal inequalities are* theyre_the_same_picture.jpg
pixl97 8mo ago
So the problem here is this isn't an article about AI. When the Luddities broke machines and burned the buildings that held them it wasn't because they hated machines (well at least initially). It's because they hated starving in the streets. This is just a continuing part of the class war that has been going on since humanity started writing. Now, the only thing that might make this different is class/capital may have finally gotten the power to win it. Every time you vote against a social safety net, you are ensuring that our AI future is a dark one. History has repeated this over and over.
- jostylr 8mo ago
  We are at a fork in the road with lots of potential darkness, but simply thinking any old social safety net is going to work is not going to cut it. Nets can be, and generally are, used to capture. An interesting multi-pronged approach is post labor economics which is being promoted by David Shapiro: https://www.youtube.com/@DaveShap https://www.youtube.com/@DaveShap The basic premise is that currently we have households being supported by labor, capital, and transfers. With labor largely going away, the leaves capital and transfers. Relying on transfers alone will lead to ownership of the people by government. So we have to find ways to generate way more distributed capital ownership by the masses. This is what he plans, discusses, and promotes.
  - pseudalopex 8mo ago
    A generality about 1 word of a metaphor is not a legitimate argument. I read what David Shapiro called concrete interventions.[1] They were public ownership, redistribution, public ownership or redistribution systems he called predistribution, shorter work weeks, and under developed blockchain ideas. [1] https://daveshap.substack.com/p/understanding-post-labor-economics https://daveshap.substack.com/p/understanding-post-labor-eco...
- _DeadFred_ 8mo ago
  The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism. --Theodore Roosevelt
abcde666777 8mo ago
Many of the potential technologies we might unlock in the future come with great danger. We saw this clearly perhaps for the first time with atomic weapons - the kind of technology with which we could truly destroy ourselves. Many other advancements might also carry that kind of existential danger. Genetic engineering, human machine interfacing, actual AGI. I see the technological climb as a bit like climbing Mt Everest - it's possible that we might reach the peak and one day live on some kind of Star Trekian society, but the climb becomes increasingly treacherous along with the risk that we perish. The trouble of course is that there's nothing else for us to do: it's in our nature to explore new frontiers. It's just not clear whether we'll be able to handle the responsibility that comes with the power.
small_model 8mo ago
It seems like the author hasn't really used the latest models, I wrote my last line of code about a month ago after 20+ years coding. Claude Code can do it for me, better faster and never gets tired etc. Yes I have to keep it on leash but humans coding is over, unless its to learn or for fun. Actually it's the lower classes that will escape the longest from AI replacing their jobs, unskilled physical work will remain human for a while yet. Whereas any job that can be done remotely is likely to replaced by one or more agents.
- jdross 8mo ago
  The new robot demos from Unitree make me wonder how many classes of unskilled labor are about to be automated (garbage collection, laundry & dishes, pothole repairs, last mile delivery, simple food preparation…) Skilled labor still has some legs.
  - small_model 8mo ago
    Can't wait for silent robots to collect the garbage, human ones seem to enjoy making as much racket as they can.
    - nicoburns 8mo ago
      There are already human-operated robots that collect garbage. Things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pl9vRCC6V0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pl9vRCC6V0. If the automated robots end up being anything like that, I wouldn't expect them to be silent.
  - small_model 8mo ago
    I don't see any humanoid robots around at the moment, whereas a huge number of knowledge based workplaces use non-embodied AI now every day.
- lowsong 8mo ago
  > It seems like the author hasn't really used the latest models The author addresses this point. > While I’m sure the technology and its costs will continue to improve, it’s hard to see how that would mitigate most of these harms. Many would just as likely be intensified by greater speed, efficiency, and affordability. > This sort of technology distributes instability to the many at the bottom, while consolidating benefit at the top—and there has arguably never been a more efficient mechanism for this than AI. Personally, I'm really tired of every criticism of AI being met with "you haven't tried the latest models". The model isn't the point. It doesn't matter how good it is, it cannot possibly outweigh the harms. > I wrote my last line of code about a month ago after 20+ years coding You are exactly the kind of person the author talks about > To be an AI optimist, I’m guessing you must not be worried about where your next job might come from, or whether you can even find one. The current dire state of the job market, I have to assume, doesn’t scare you. You must feel secure. Maybe it’s because you’ve already made a name for yourself. Maybe you’re known at conferences, or on podcasts. Maybe you’re just senior enough that your résumé opens doors for you. I fear you've entirely missed the point of the article. Just because you believe you can get value from it, does not make up for the downsides to everyone else, and it's quite literally privilege to ignore that.
delichon 8mo ago
Unpopular opinion: the reverse. God created men, but Sam {Colt, Altman} made them equal. Commoditizing physical or intellectual power makes them more accessible to lower classes, and keeping them more expensive protects class privilege.
- antonly 8mo ago
  How does it help equalise, if the commodity is sold "at market value" by the richest, and all intellectual input is immediately fed back into the tool. Looks at best like a weapon to supress
  - scarmig 8mo ago
    Imagine two bright high school students. One goes to a tony private school taught by people with PhDs; the other is in a developing country. They both want to understand, say, Morse theory. In a world without AI, only the former has access to knowledge about it. In a world with AI, the kid in a developing country can access the knowledge roughly as easily. Even if they were paying for tokens, but free tier models provide an absolute equality.
    - antonly 8mo ago
      How do we know free tier models will continue to provide adequate services? They are pretty good right now, but only because all big players are happy to burn enormous amounts of money.
- elzbardico 8mo ago
  This is an incredibly naive take and it definitely has the feelings of anti-intellectualism in it.
- notanastronaut 8mo ago
  You're not alone in this line of thinking. While "AI" has its perils, it strikes a nerve on people who previously felt comfortable in their jobs. Worrying about AI is a privileged position, while poorer people cannot afford the luxury to do so.
deleted 8mo ago
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isahers 8mo ago
I disagree with most of this article. Disclaimer: I'm a junior engineer and I believe both that: 1. AI is going to take my job, 2. AI is going to do incredible good for the world. I don't see how these are distinct. It's a technology shift, of course it's going to make certain jobs obsolete - that's how technology shifts work. I'm not going to go through every quote I disagree with, but unlike some AI negativity discourse (some of which I agree with btw, being an optimist doesn't mean being irrational) this just reads as old man yells at cloud. Mainly because the author doesn't understand the technology, and doesn't understand the impact. The author clearly does not understand model capabilities (seems to be in the camp that these are just "prediction machines") as they claim it's unreasonable to expect models to "develop presently impossible capabilities". This is not at all supported by prior model releases. Most, if not all, major releases have displayed new capabilities. There are a lot more misconceptions on ability, but again not going to go through all of them. The author also doesn't understand the impact, saying stuff like "Tech doesn’t free workers; it forces them to do more in the same amount of time, for the same rate of pay or less". What? Is the author unaware of what average labor hours were like before the industrial revolution? AI is clearly going to be hugely net positive for white-collar (and with robots eventually blue-collar) workers in the near future (it already is for many).
- elzbardico 8mo ago
  Average labour hours in a year dramatically increased with the Industrial Revolution. They would only decrease much later, after a long period of social conflict, economic growth, and technological progress. During the early phase of the Industrial Revolution (roughly 1760–1850): Agricultural workers who once labored seasonally were pushed into factory schedules of 12–16 hours per day, 6 days per week. Annual labor hours often exceeded 3,000 hours per year per worker. This was not because work became harder physically, but because capital-intensive machinery became expensive and had to run continuously to be profitable. Time discipline replaced task-based work. Before industrialization, a farmer might stop when tasks were done; factory workers had fixed shifts. This trend persisted into the late 19th century.
  - ungovernableCat 8mo ago
petercooper 8mo ago
> AI optimism requires believing that you … are not among those who will be driven to psychosis, to violence, or even to suicide by LLM usage. At the very least, this means you feel secure in your own mental health This has echoes of moral panic to me. We hear about mental health crises triggered by LLMs in the media because they’re novel, uncommon and the stories grab attention. The modern equivalent of video games cause violence, or jazz is corrupting the youth? I’ll concede AI has many perils, and I doubt we’ve even broken the surface of it yet, but I don’t think user psychosis is either now, or going to be, a common one.
- elzbardico 8mo ago
  Well, maybe one day, there’ll be a situation justifying a moral panic. We can’t simply dispose of an argument just because it smells in a particular way to us.
  - antonvs 8mo ago
    “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” — Christopher Hitchens
RickJWagner 8mo ago
[flagged]
aogaili 8mo ago
His characterization is the privilege. Most people are left with no choice but to adapt or parish. The fact he is contemplating optionally in the most profound automation in the industry is a form of a.. privilege.
caconym_ 8mo ago
"Class privilege" doesn't go far enough. If the class war is a war then AI may be its Manhattan project: a weapon that destroys the value of, and the ruling elite's need for, labor. I continue to be shocked by the way people (with platforms) talk up to the (speculative) line where AI replaces most or all jobs, and then lamely suggest that this will be bad for the people who've lost their jobs because they will be poor, or something. No. What actually happens in that scenario is that money ceases to have value, at least in the way we currently understand it to. That scenario will produce a handful of monsters—sociopathic trillionaire brains encysted in layers of automation and automated production—that will crave more resources, more land, more power, and they will fight each other by various means for those things, and the rest of us will be at best in the way. This scenario is not a given, because it's not obvious that AI can become this capable in the near term where the stage is set for such a profoundly lopsided outcome, but you can bet these people are thinking about it now, if not talking about it, if not materially preparing for it. And they are, indeed, the only people with reason to feel optimistic about it.
- elzbardico 8mo ago
  Once money loses value, sociopathic trillionaire brains become immeditally obsolete and power migrates to the men with guns and a very thin technocratic class.
  - caconym_ 8mo ago
    > sociopathic trillionaire brains > men with guns and a very thin technocratic class Bold of you to assume these are disjoint. In the US we're spiraling toward oligarchy with a billionaire president whose primary goal in office is evidently to enrich himself and his family, and his regime is (with the $encouragement of AI titans) aggressively pushing integration of AI in various government and military applications. If I was somebody like Sam Altman and I had indeed been thinking about this, I'm not sure things could be going much better for me wrt. that scenario.
- elzbardico 8mo ago
  And if money loses value why would the guys with guns and the guys who run the AI still take orders from the oligarchs?
metalman 8mo ago
If the ultimate form of goodness is a miracle, and the ultimate form of badness is evil,then, in reality evil, is infinitly easier to realise, perform, refine, and produce at scale, and miracles remain hard and rare, but of course, somehow spoken of as some sort of yet to come but assuredly triumphant ,however eventualy. now with real time personalised halucinations!
akoboldfrying 8mo ago
> Imagine the damage one bad kid could cause using deepfakes Deepfakes are highly damaging right now because much of the world still doesn't realise that people can make deepfakes. When everyone knows that a photo is no longer reliable evidence by itself, the harm that can be done with a deepfake will drop to a similar level as that of other unreliable forms of evidence, like spoken or written claims. (Which is not to say that they won't be harmful at all -- you can still damage someone's reputation by circulating completely fabricated rumours about them -- but people will no longer treat photorealistic images as gospel.)
senko 8mo ago
Always fun to read white male tech employees living in the US talking about privilege, so up on the Maslow's pyramid they don't even see the ground.
r00tanon 8mo ago
Josh Collinsworth paints an accurate picture here, and he’s not wrong. People will be hurt by the displacement and disruption that new technology brings, not just AI. It has been happening since humans first picked up stones and sharpened sticks. No one says you have to be happy about it, or even optimistic, even if you happen to be part of a privileged class.
bitwize 8mo ago
The best time to have a communist revolution in the USA was 100 years ago. The second best time is now.
suzzer99 8mo ago
I started playing Civ (any version) for the first time a few months ago. I'm somewhat addicted, but at the same time I might find a new game soon because I get upset when the AIs attack me. Sometimes I take it personally and decide to just destroy that AI to the detriment of winning. I also am leery of an AI if they attacked me in a previous game. I also don't like to attack a previously friendly AI out of the blue, even if I'm supposed to to win the game. I realize these are all silly and "me" problems. But like the author, it's interesting that I actually have to work to emotionally divest myself from being upset at a bunch of 1s and 0s.
singularity2001 8mo ago
I'm optimistic that the whole population will profit. Even if in some form of mild communism.
peteforde 8mo ago
I hope someone close to the author can break it to him that actually, we're not all seeing endless videos of women being strangled...
tim333 8mo ago
The author perhaps pessimistically seems to think AI will benefit some privileged groups and hurt others but it could turn out to be something like clean water and sanitation that benefits almost everyone. I don't think it has to be bad.
OneMorePerson 8mo ago
Maybe in our system this is true. If you believe the latest surveys (I didn't see them publish their methodology) countries like China have way higher optimism about AI than the West, so maybe its a class privilege because we expect only a small amount of the gains will actually go to the wider society.
rossant 8mo ago
There’s an argument I don’t hear very often. Society is becoming increasingly dependent on data/compute centers running AI models. It would take only a few bombs from a hostile country to disrupt the entire economy, army and so on, especially if workers can no longer do anything useful without AI.
- shmobot 8mo ago
  Exactly, this type of economy feels like it's built for the peace and globalization times. Sadly, lately it seems like those times are over.
nunez 8mo ago
Couldn't have said this better myself. Thank you for writing this.

134 points by ragall 8mo ago

tgv 8mo ago

Author certainly has a point. The central idea is (IMO) best expressed in this quote: > to focus on its [i.e., AI's] benefits to you, you’re forced to ignore its costs to others.

xnx 8mo ago
Also works if you substitute "technology" for "AI".
- tgv 8mo ago
  True, and other changes in society as well. But in contrast to e.g. the introduction of Phillips screws, AI (or rather: LLMs) is a biggy, and (IMO) one with where the negatives clearly outweigh the positives.
  - xnx 8mo ago
    Definitely agree that LLMs are a big deal, but I'm holding out hope that they are a net positive. Even the current wave of false/fake news content could have benefits if it results in emphasizing chains of trust to reliable information. Are there other technologies you think the negatives outweigh the positives? Leaded gasoline and paint come to mind for me.
tim333 8mo ago
I'm not sure that's true. Like I find the Google AI handy but that doesn't mean I have to ignore that others may be annoyed by it.
- tgv 8mo ago
  It's of course a quote of a handful of words from a 5000 word article. Not to be snarky, but did you read it?
  - tim333 8mo ago
    I did read and I'll give you my comment wasn't that in line with the article. I'm not that convinced by the optimism being a class privilege thing though.
    - tgv 8mo ago
      I don't think class is supposed to correlate 100% to current socio-economic class. It's more like tech-oriented entrepreneurs and some of their high-level staff are a class, or rather, the class that stands to win when LLMs get adopted at a large scale, while for current higher classes, and possibly manual labor classes, not much will change, and the middle and lower white collar classes will lose. Wrt to manual labor: when a large part of the population loses significant income, there will be much less demand for builders, decorators, plumbers, roof thatchers, gardeners, hair dressers, etc., so they will likely be affected too.

semiinfinitely 8mo ago

finally a based take on ai

georgemcbay 8mo ago

I would say it is privilege (now) combined with denialism (for the future). Not only do you have to believe that you're in the group that benefits, but you also have to believe that "AI" improvement from here forward will stall out prior to the point where it goes from assisting your job to replacing it wholesale. I suspect there are many less people for whom that applies to them than there are people who believe it applies to them. It is very easy for us to exist in that denialism bubble until we see the machine nipping at our heels. And that is not even getting into second order effects, like even if you do provide AI-proof value, what happens when some significant percentage of everyone else (your potential customers) loses their income and society starts to crumble?

leptons 8mo ago
>what happens when some significant percentage of everyone else (your potential customers) loses their income and society starts to crumble? They will start to burn down data centers.
- EA-3167 8mo ago
  There’s a reason that the Musks and Thiels of the world invested in luxury doomsday bunkers, because it won’t just be property people want to burn.
  - WalterBright 8mo ago
    The Soviets used the "iron broom" (i.e. murder) on the wealthy people. It didn't make anyone better off.
    - NoOn3 8mo ago
      The Soviets history is not so simple. ;)
      - WalterBright 8mo ago
        The Soviets aren't the only country that tried that. It's never worked out anywhere it was tried.

numbchuckskills 8mo ago

[dead]

d_burfoot 8mo ago

> they mimic and amplify the inherent racism present in their own training data LLMs turn out to be biased against white men: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/me7wFrkEtMbkzXGJt/race-and-gender-bias-as-an-example-of-unfaithful-chain-of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/me7wFrkEtMbkzXGJt/race-and-g... > When present, the bias is always against white and male candidates across all tested models and scenarios. This happens even if we remove all text related to diversity.

dogmayor 8mo ago
Important sentences immediately before the ones you quote. > For our evaluation, we inserted names to signal race / gender while keeping the resume unchanged. Interestingly, the LLMs were not biased in the original evaluation setting, but became biased (up to 12% differences in interview rates) when we added realistic details like company names (Meta, Palantir, General Motors), locations, or culture descriptions from public careers pages.
- daveguy 8mo ago
  Hah. Even LLMs know Meta and Palantir are evil af.
aprilthird2021 8mo ago
These are because of post-training. You have to give it such directives in post-training to correct the biases they bring in from scraping the whole internet (and other datasets like books, etc.) for data
113 8mo ago
That's not a reliable source.
biophysboy 8mo ago
Looking at the paper, the effect is significant but weak (5-7%), even with the conditionals that magnify the effect. I would be curious to see the effect if this experiment were performed on a slightly different categorical variable (e.g. how are two white ethnicities treated). I do think its bad if preferences are "baked in" to the default though - prompting them away seems like a bad solution.

nomdep 8mo ago

(I feel that I write a comment like this every few years) The author catalog of harms is real. But it's worth noting that nearly identical catalogs were compiled for every major technological shift in modern history. The Internet destroyed print journalism, local retail, and enabled cyberbullying and mass surveillance. If we applied the same framework used here, Internet optimism in 2005 was also a form of "class privilege" (his term, I personally hate it). And the pattern extends well beyond the Internet. For example, mechanized looms devastated weavers, the automobile wiped out entire trades while introducing pollution and traffic deaths, and recorded music was supposed to kill live performances. In each case, the harms were genuine, the displacement was painful and unevenly distributed, and the people raising alarms were not irrational. They were often right about the costs. What they tended to miss was the longer trajectory: the way access to books, transportation, music, and information gradually broadened rather than narrowed, even if the transition was brutal for those caught in it. History doesn't guarantees a good outcome for AI, but the author does advocates from a position of "class privilege": of having access to good lawyers, good doctors, and good schools already, and not feeling the urgency of tools that might extend those things to people who don't.

antonvs 8mo ago
The assumption in your comment is that those changes were all net good. In hindsight though, the automobile has had possibly existential costs for humanity, the internet has provided most benefit to those who most abuse its power, and so on. In the end, it doesn’t seem as though you’ve actually made any sort of case.
- jdross 8mo ago
  The set of people who believe the automobile (or the Internet) are net negatives taken as a whole for society is extremely small, for good reason
  - Retric 8mo ago
    Is it? Do you include everyone that’s died or lost a loved one due to personal automobiles in that assessment? We are so far post automobile that it’s hard to compare, but many of the benefits are illusionary when you consider how society has evolved with them as commutes for example used to be shorter. Similarly the air used to be far cleaner and that’s after we got rid of leaded gas and required catalytic converters decades ago.

abeppu 8mo ago

> You’d need to be high enough in the org chart; far enough up the pyramid; advanced enough along the career ladder. > To be an AI optimist, I’m guessing you must not be worried about where your next job might come from, or whether you can even find one. The current dire state of the job market, I have to assume, doesn’t scare you. You must feel secure. So I think even these people should not feel secure. The perceived value of expertise is decreased by AI which routinely claims to have PhD level mastery of a lot of material. I think even for people with deep experience, in the current job market, many firms are reluctant to hire or pay in a way that's commensurate with that expertise. If you're a leader whose clout in an organization is partly tied to how many people are under you in an org-chart (it's dumb but we have all seen it), maybe that will begin to shrink quarter after quarter. Unless you can make it genuinely obvious that a junior or mid-tier person could not write a prompt which cause a model to spew the knowledge or insight that you have won through years or decades of work, your job may become vulnerable. I think the class divide that is most relevant is more literal and old-school: - Do you _own_ enough of businesses that that's how you get most of your income? If so, maybe there's a way that AI will either cause your labor costs decrease, or your productivity per worker increases, and either way you're probably happy. - Can you invest specifically in the firms that are actively building AI, or applications thereof? We're back to owners vs workers, with the added dynamic that if AI lets you partially replace labor with capital, then owners of course take a bigger share of value created going forward.

zombot 8mo ago
> then owners of course take a bigger share of value created going forward. As has been the case with every technological change since forever.

yesimahuman 8mo ago

This sums up a lot of what I've been feeling lately. I've had a hard time getting excited about the AI long game, unlike a lot of my peers. I think being out of the industry for a few years (sold my startup a while back), and spending less time in that privileged tech bubble has made me far more aware of and concerned about average people and the future of non-tech hubs around the country/world. While I get value out of AI tools today, I see a lot more downsides in the immediate future for everyone that isn't directly working on this technology with skin in the game. Especially when our society doesn't seem even remotely ready for the big changes coming.

aaron695 8mo ago

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DesaiAshu 8mo ago

India and Africa are significantly more optimistic about AI than US and EU There exists great promise in AI to be an equalizing force, if implemented well The future is yet to be written

wasmainiac 8mo ago
> There exists great promise in AI to be an equalizing force, if implemented well That doesn’t sound like a promise then no?
antonly 8mo ago
How is it an equalising force if the commodity is sold at "market value"? This will just lead to more wealth concentration, no?
- simianwords 8mo ago
  you are conflating equity and equality. its equalising in the sense that it democratises access to data, knowledge. but that does not mean it will end up with everyone being equal in terms of wealth.
  - antonly 8mo ago
    But it won't even do that. In the pursuit of extracting maximal capital, better models with "better" knowledge will be gated behind higher prices. If you pay more, you get more.
hyperadvanced 8mo ago
Being optimistic is a bad way to get good outcomes
wolrah 8mo ago
> There exists great promise in AI to be an equalizing force, if implemented well *looks at who's controlling the implementation of LLM-based "AI"* *looks at who the largest beneficiaries of societal inequalities are* theyre_the_same_picture.jpg

pixl97 8mo ago

So the problem here is this isn't an article about AI. When the Luddities broke machines and burned the buildings that held them it wasn't because they hated machines (well at least initially). It's because they hated starving in the streets. This is just a continuing part of the class war that has been going on since humanity started writing. Now, the only thing that might make this different is class/capital may have finally gotten the power to win it. Every time you vote against a social safety net, you are ensuring that our AI future is a dark one. History has repeated this over and over.

jostylr 8mo ago
We are at a fork in the road with lots of potential darkness, but simply thinking any old social safety net is going to work is not going to cut it. Nets can be, and generally are, used to capture. An interesting multi-pronged approach is post labor economics which is being promoted by David Shapiro: https://www.youtube.com/@DaveShap https://www.youtube.com/@DaveShap The basic premise is that currently we have households being supported by labor, capital, and transfers. With labor largely going away, the leaves capital and transfers. Relying on transfers alone will lead to ownership of the people by government. So we have to find ways to generate way more distributed capital ownership by the masses. This is what he plans, discusses, and promotes.
- pseudalopex 8mo ago
  A generality about 1 word of a metaphor is not a legitimate argument. I read what David Shapiro called concrete interventions.[1] They were public ownership, redistribution, public ownership or redistribution systems he called predistribution, shorter work weeks, and under developed blockchain ideas. [1] https://daveshap.substack.com/p/understanding-post-labor-economics https://daveshap.substack.com/p/understanding-post-labor-eco...
_DeadFred_ 8mo ago
The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism. --Theodore Roosevelt

abcde666777 8mo ago

Many of the potential technologies we might unlock in the future come with great danger. We saw this clearly perhaps for the first time with atomic weapons - the kind of technology with which we could truly destroy ourselves. Many other advancements might also carry that kind of existential danger. Genetic engineering, human machine interfacing, actual AGI. I see the technological climb as a bit like climbing Mt Everest - it's possible that we might reach the peak and one day live on some kind of Star Trekian society, but the climb becomes increasingly treacherous along with the risk that we perish. The trouble of course is that there's nothing else for us to do: it's in our nature to explore new frontiers. It's just not clear whether we'll be able to handle the responsibility that comes with the power.

small_model 8mo ago

It seems like the author hasn't really used the latest models, I wrote my last line of code about a month ago after 20+ years coding. Claude Code can do it for me, better faster and never gets tired etc. Yes I have to keep it on leash but humans coding is over, unless its to learn or for fun. Actually it's the lower classes that will escape the longest from AI replacing their jobs, unskilled physical work will remain human for a while yet. Whereas any job that can be done remotely is likely to replaced by one or more agents.

jdross 8mo ago
The new robot demos from Unitree make me wonder how many classes of unskilled labor are about to be automated (garbage collection, laundry & dishes, pothole repairs, last mile delivery, simple food preparation…) Skilled labor still has some legs.
- small_model 8mo ago
  Can't wait for silent robots to collect the garbage, human ones seem to enjoy making as much racket as they can.
  - nicoburns 8mo ago
    There are already human-operated robots that collect garbage. Things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pl9vRCC6V0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pl9vRCC6V0. If the automated robots end up being anything like that, I wouldn't expect them to be silent.
- small_model 8mo ago
  I don't see any humanoid robots around at the moment, whereas a huge number of knowledge based workplaces use non-embodied AI now every day.
lowsong 8mo ago
> It seems like the author hasn't really used the latest models The author addresses this point. > While I’m sure the technology and its costs will continue to improve, it’s hard to see how that would mitigate most of these harms. Many would just as likely be intensified by greater speed, efficiency, and affordability. > This sort of technology distributes instability to the many at the bottom, while consolidating benefit at the top—and there has arguably never been a more efficient mechanism for this than AI. Personally, I'm really tired of every criticism of AI being met with "you haven't tried the latest models". The model isn't the point. It doesn't matter how good it is, it cannot possibly outweigh the harms. > I wrote my last line of code about a month ago after 20+ years coding You are exactly the kind of person the author talks about > To be an AI optimist, I’m guessing you must not be worried about where your next job might come from, or whether you can even find one. The current dire state of the job market, I have to assume, doesn’t scare you. You must feel secure. Maybe it’s because you’ve already made a name for yourself. Maybe you’re known at conferences, or on podcasts. Maybe you’re just senior enough that your résumé opens doors for you. I fear you've entirely missed the point of the article. Just because you believe you can get value from it, does not make up for the downsides to everyone else, and it's quite literally privilege to ignore that.

delichon 8mo ago

Unpopular opinion: the reverse. God created men, but Sam {Colt, Altman} made them equal. Commoditizing physical or intellectual power makes them more accessible to lower classes, and keeping them more expensive protects class privilege.

antonly 8mo ago
How does it help equalise, if the commodity is sold "at market value" by the richest, and all intellectual input is immediately fed back into the tool. Looks at best like a weapon to supress
- scarmig 8mo ago
  Imagine two bright high school students. One goes to a tony private school taught by people with PhDs; the other is in a developing country. They both want to understand, say, Morse theory. In a world without AI, only the former has access to knowledge about it. In a world with AI, the kid in a developing country can access the knowledge roughly as easily. Even if they were paying for tokens, but free tier models provide an absolute equality.
  - antonly 8mo ago
    How do we know free tier models will continue to provide adequate services? They are pretty good right now, but only because all big players are happy to burn enormous amounts of money.
elzbardico 8mo ago
This is an incredibly naive take and it definitely has the feelings of anti-intellectualism in it.
notanastronaut 8mo ago
You're not alone in this line of thinking. While "AI" has its perils, it strikes a nerve on people who previously felt comfortable in their jobs. Worrying about AI is a privileged position, while poorer people cannot afford the luxury to do so.

deleted 8mo ago

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isahers 8mo ago

I disagree with most of this article. Disclaimer: I'm a junior engineer and I believe both that: 1. AI is going to take my job, 2. AI is going to do incredible good for the world. I don't see how these are distinct. It's a technology shift, of course it's going to make certain jobs obsolete - that's how technology shifts work. I'm not going to go through every quote I disagree with, but unlike some AI negativity discourse (some of which I agree with btw, being an optimist doesn't mean being irrational) this just reads as old man yells at cloud. Mainly because the author doesn't understand the technology, and doesn't understand the impact. The author clearly does not understand model capabilities (seems to be in the camp that these are just "prediction machines") as they claim it's unreasonable to expect models to "develop presently impossible capabilities". This is not at all supported by prior model releases. Most, if not all, major releases have displayed new capabilities. There are a lot more misconceptions on ability, but again not going to go through all of them. The author also doesn't understand the impact, saying stuff like "Tech doesn’t free workers; it forces them to do more in the same amount of time, for the same rate of pay or less". What? Is the author unaware of what average labor hours were like before the industrial revolution? AI is clearly going to be hugely net positive for white-collar (and with robots eventually blue-collar) workers in the near future (it already is for many).

elzbardico 8mo ago
Average labour hours in a year dramatically increased with the Industrial Revolution. They would only decrease much later, after a long period of social conflict, economic growth, and technological progress. During the early phase of the Industrial Revolution (roughly 1760–1850): Agricultural workers who once labored seasonally were pushed into factory schedules of 12–16 hours per day, 6 days per week. Annual labor hours often exceeded 3,000 hours per year per worker. This was not because work became harder physically, but because capital-intensive machinery became expensive and had to run continuously to be profitable. Time discipline replaced task-based work. Before industrialization, a farmer might stop when tasks were done; factory workers had fixed shifts. This trend persisted into the late 19th century.
- ungovernableCat 8mo ago

petercooper 8mo ago

> AI optimism requires believing that you … are not among those who will be driven to psychosis, to violence, or even to suicide by LLM usage. At the very least, this means you feel secure in your own mental health This has echoes of moral panic to me. We hear about mental health crises triggered by LLMs in the media because they’re novel, uncommon and the stories grab attention. The modern equivalent of video games cause violence, or jazz is corrupting the youth? I’ll concede AI has many perils, and I doubt we’ve even broken the surface of it yet, but I don’t think user psychosis is either now, or going to be, a common one.

elzbardico 8mo ago
Well, maybe one day, there’ll be a situation justifying a moral panic. We can’t simply dispose of an argument just because it smells in a particular way to us.
- antonvs 8mo ago
  “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” — Christopher Hitchens

RickJWagner 8mo ago

[flagged]

aogaili 8mo ago

His characterization is the privilege. Most people are left with no choice but to adapt or parish. The fact he is contemplating optionally in the most profound automation in the industry is a form of a.. privilege.

caconym_ 8mo ago

"Class privilege" doesn't go far enough. If the class war is a war then AI may be its Manhattan project: a weapon that destroys the value of, and the ruling elite's need for, labor. I continue to be shocked by the way people (with platforms) talk up to the (speculative) line where AI replaces most or all jobs, and then lamely suggest that this will be bad for the people who've lost their jobs because they will be poor, or something. No. What actually happens in that scenario is that money ceases to have value, at least in the way we currently understand it to. That scenario will produce a handful of monsters—sociopathic trillionaire brains encysted in layers of automation and automated production—that will crave more resources, more land, more power, and they will fight each other by various means for those things, and the rest of us will be at best in the way. This scenario is not a given, because it's not obvious that AI can become this capable in the near term where the stage is set for such a profoundly lopsided outcome, but you can bet these people are thinking about it now, if not talking about it, if not materially preparing for it. And they are, indeed, the only people with reason to feel optimistic about it.

elzbardico 8mo ago
Once money loses value, sociopathic trillionaire brains become immeditally obsolete and power migrates to the men with guns and a very thin technocratic class.
- caconym_ 8mo ago
  > sociopathic trillionaire brains > men with guns and a very thin technocratic class Bold of you to assume these are disjoint. In the US we're spiraling toward oligarchy with a billionaire president whose primary goal in office is evidently to enrich himself and his family, and his regime is (with the $encouragement of AI titans) aggressively pushing integration of AI in various government and military applications. If I was somebody like Sam Altman and I had indeed been thinking about this, I'm not sure things could be going much better for me wrt. that scenario.
elzbardico 8mo ago
And if money loses value why would the guys with guns and the guys who run the AI still take orders from the oligarchs?

metalman 8mo ago

If the ultimate form of goodness is a miracle, and the ultimate form of badness is evil,then, in reality evil, is infinitly easier to realise, perform, refine, and produce at scale, and miracles remain hard and rare, but of course, somehow spoken of as some sort of yet to come but assuredly triumphant ,however eventualy. now with real time personalised halucinations!

akoboldfrying 8mo ago

> Imagine the damage one bad kid could cause using deepfakes Deepfakes are highly damaging right now because much of the world still doesn't realise that people can make deepfakes. When everyone knows that a photo is no longer reliable evidence by itself, the harm that can be done with a deepfake will drop to a similar level as that of other unreliable forms of evidence, like spoken or written claims. (Which is not to say that they won't be harmful at all -- you can still damage someone's reputation by circulating completely fabricated rumours about them -- but people will no longer treat photorealistic images as gospel.)

senko 8mo ago

Always fun to read white male tech employees living in the US talking about privilege, so up on the Maslow's pyramid they don't even see the ground.

r00tanon 8mo ago

Josh Collinsworth paints an accurate picture here, and he’s not wrong. People will be hurt by the displacement and disruption that new technology brings, not just AI. It has been happening since humans first picked up stones and sharpened sticks. No one says you have to be happy about it, or even optimistic, even if you happen to be part of a privileged class.

bitwize 8mo ago

The best time to have a communist revolution in the USA was 100 years ago. The second best time is now.

suzzer99 8mo ago

I started playing Civ (any version) for the first time a few months ago. I'm somewhat addicted, but at the same time I might find a new game soon because I get upset when the AIs attack me. Sometimes I take it personally and decide to just destroy that AI to the detriment of winning. I also am leery of an AI if they attacked me in a previous game. I also don't like to attack a previously friendly AI out of the blue, even if I'm supposed to to win the game. I realize these are all silly and "me" problems. But like the author, it's interesting that I actually have to work to emotionally divest myself from being upset at a bunch of 1s and 0s.

singularity2001 8mo ago

I'm optimistic that the whole population will profit. Even if in some form of mild communism.

peteforde 8mo ago

I hope someone close to the author can break it to him that actually, we're not all seeing endless videos of women being strangled...

tim333 8mo ago

The author perhaps pessimistically seems to think AI will benefit some privileged groups and hurt others but it could turn out to be something like clean water and sanitation that benefits almost everyone. I don't think it has to be bad.

OneMorePerson 8mo ago

Maybe in our system this is true. If you believe the latest surveys (I didn't see them publish their methodology) countries like China have way higher optimism about AI than the West, so maybe its a class privilege because we expect only a small amount of the gains will actually go to the wider society.

rossant 8mo ago

There’s an argument I don’t hear very often. Society is becoming increasingly dependent on data/compute centers running AI models. It would take only a few bombs from a hostile country to disrupt the entire economy, army and so on, especially if workers can no longer do anything useful without AI.

shmobot 8mo ago
Exactly, this type of economy feels like it's built for the peace and globalization times. Sadly, lately it seems like those times are over.

nunez 8mo ago

Couldn't have said this better myself. Thank you for writing this.