- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
People Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Make Daily Life Worse::A Pew survey finds that a majority of Americans are more concerned than excited about the impact of artificial intelligence—adding weight to calls for more regulation.
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AI isn’t the problem, capitalism is.
Exactly, AI is only scary if you need a job to survive.
If AI takes work from us, we should be freed by not having to work, not doomed to starvation.
The current economic status quo is entirely unequipped to deal with the next couple of decades, and the options for progressive change are dwindling.
I’m absolutely not calling for revolution right now, but the glacial rate we’re evolving our economy is going to make it inevitable or else we’ll be left with some kind of Mad Max hellscape before the century is out.
I also find AI taking other people’s jobs depressing. Whenever I purchase something or need customer service, I’d always rather interact with a human than AI
Specifically capitalism paired with zero sum game mentality.
If someone is convinced the only way for themselves to win is to make other people (including me) lose, that’s where the biggest problems happen.
They don’t want to look at the big picture, they’d rather focus on rage bait articles
I would argue that too much centralization in any economic system is the problem.
Exactly, let’s worry about the horrible people fucking over the planet first! AI is such an amazing opportunity for distraction, capitalists are gonna capitalize on that for sure!
More so human nature. Humans are greedy.
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Remember how Soviet workers would smuggle parts out of their jobs to reuse themselves? There was a job field filled by babushkas that would inspect workers before they left. Is that the fault of capitalism? I know the people at the top do it much worse, but humans naturally compete with each other.
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Yeah that’s fair. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. We shouldn’t rely on greed to make a system nor altruism alone. The difficult part is actually making a system that works.
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People are increasingly worried, full stop.
Doom loop news cycle doesn’t help.
Social media even moreso than news, for younger audiences. Doom posts gets engagement.
I think people have always been like this. Listen to any two people talk, it is just natural that they will talk about something that makes them nervous. It is like salmon returning to the spawning ground, humans discussing fears.
I remember when we had the word Neurotic. And it described someone frankly more sane than anyone I know now.
Learn, don’t just watch news. Get perspective.
So what should we do instead? And no, going outside is not an option.
Cheer up, it may never happen.
Yeah, cruel fact about humanity. All these great technologies could give us luxury space communism in 100 years or so, but that won’t happen. Shitty people will be shitty and these technologies will be used for shitty purposes or intentionally stunted.
We could already be having that, maybe minus the space part.
I don’t like Worried Al. I want Weird Al back.
Weird Al never went away. He still drops albums from time to time.
Even the occational movie.
He has announced he’s likely finished releasing albums due to timeliness concerns and waning interest in the format. He’ll probably just release singles as he comes up with them from now on.
Go to any McDonald’s drive thru with the automated ordering. You will realize it is already making life worse.
That picture fucked me up tho
Trumpy smooches
There’s a issue with this title, and it’s not the word “AI”.
It’s the word “Will”.
It already did.
I came here to say this. We’ve had threats of “AI” for a while, and initially, it should have been better, but it wasn’t. Look at the latest voice assistant from your favorite large corporation spy gadget, like an echo dot. The voice assistant sucks. It constantly misunderstands you, half the time you get feedback like “I don’t understand” despite asking for something you’ve asked for before, in the same way you’ve asked before, and had it do something before, but now, no, fuck you.
Responses are repetitious and boring, like “playing (song) by (artist) on (streaming service)” or “turning on x lights”… Always the same, always boring. Ask about almost anything beyond a function, and usually you get a quote snippet from a webpage you’ve never heard of, which only mentions whatever you asked for and doesn’t provide any actual information 90% of the time. It would be more useful for it to respond with “I found this on the web” followed by the sounds of hippos farting.
This is the “AI” we had until now, and it’s the AI we constantly interact with. None of the star trek computer level intelligence where you can ask your assistant to increase the illumination, and have it do something because it understands the intent behind what you’re saying, not just running a select statement on your literal words… And that’s even if it understands at all. You don’t see Will Riker standing there arguing with the computer like “no, I asked for a coffee” while the replicator is populated by a cookie.
Then LLMs go into widespread use and the system shits out stuff like chat GPT which most people can’t seem distinguish from talking to a person, and now we live in this hellscape. AI chatbots are now selling us shit, replying to our emails, posing as real people even…
And I’m just talking about speech-based AI… Don’t get me started on the insanity of image AI.
You don’t have to look at things like that. Think of a different voice assistant. The one at every telephone system at every big corporation that’s now “intelligent.”
That used to be a person.
AI is already taking away jobs.
Many of those jobs were already killed off by IVR systems.
Any company that still has a live “operator” type job… Well, it’s usually piled onto another role, like receptionist. Many small to mid sized businesses basically hire a receptionist as a catch all for other jobs. Someone to accept deliveries, answer the phone, greet people coming in, do little odd jobs around the office.
Reduction of the workforce by turning a once straight forward job like receptionist into an agglutination of smaller jobs that they don’t want to have to pay someone to do, is the norm. Eliminating positions and entire swarms of people with a single individual who both doesn’t really do a job, but does every job.
It already has. Autocorrect has gone to compete shit. Online news reports have become nothing but buzz words. Internet searches have become useless.
All of these are results of companies switching from simple algorithms that were already proven to work just fine to “artificial” intelligence which is practically useless at this point for anything other than deep fakes or eldritch horror images.
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Because it was already established. The algorithm was already used to my word choice and was easily able to figure out what word I’m trying to use (I use swipe to text) and now I have to manually type out words I use regularly because the new ai system doesn’t know what the fuck I want.
It’s like making a better mousetrap. Don’t fix what isn’t fuckin broken.
As far as I know autocorrect isn’t using actual AI yet.
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Oh good. Sounds like the next iteration of iOS will forget my daughter’s name.
Online news reports have become nothing but buzz words
Wasn’t that the case for the past decade or so already?
I don’t see such an amazing difference in daily news unless maybe you’re reading some already worthless tabloid rags. Journalism has to be searched for and usually paid for. Free “news” sites were always clickbait and pointless reposts of real sources.
I’m worried because AI is supposed to be sorting trash, cleaning sewers, and other laborious work. Instead we got AI trying to take the jobs of artists. 🤦🏽♂️
That’s just the most visible part because artists are constantly complaining about it in the news. In fact the news loves reporting doom scenarios for everything (because in the end that’s what the consumer clicks on.)
But for laborious work you just need robots, not AI. Robots already took over a huge chuck of dangerous, laborious work and will continue to take more.
This just in: people are gullible as fuck and will believe anything the media (and certain overzealous social media owning billionaires) tells them.
How can having more tools to solve problems make things worse? I can’t think of any problem in my life that more tools and methods would work against solving it.
What problems will get solved? “Our ads aren’t effective enough? We have to pay people to do things when we could be putting it into profits? We’re charging less rent than we think people will pay, but we don’t know how much? People have gotten savvy to my latest scam.”
The capital holding class will be the ones using ai to their benefit. The dishonest will join them. We may get some concessions here and there, but they own them.
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Not really. It hallucinates so much I don’t use it for factual information. It has massive glaring issues in applications like driverless cars. I suppose that applications like a driverless train would be nice but it’s not something I expect anytime soon. I suspect I’ll be told to like it when it tries to get me to consume more.
Maybe better ai in video games will be nice.
Maybe I’ve just become a cranky old lady, but while I can acknowledge actual theoretical value in it when I hear ai hype it feels like listening to crypto bros at worst and at best like listening to an executive telling me I need to implement lean manufacturing and plugging their ears when I want to discuss the costs and risks.
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If there was evidence AI was heading that direction at all, that direction was where society wanted to move AI to, and that there was the understanding we absolutely aren’t there yet… I’d be significantly more optimistic.
My problem is that currently, Machine Learning and Expert Systems are being implemented quietly by a number of companies to at best to improve their own commercial offerings and at worst to cut their human staffed support teams to ribbons. Nearly everyone can relate to frustrations of seeking support with an automated system instead of a human. Those situations have continued to get worse, instead of better, as this tech has grown.
Additionally, thanks to how convincing LLMs are at appearing intelligent, they’ve become a fad rather than being evaluated and appreciated for what they actually are. There are countless startups now who are just trying to cash in on the hype by using the ChatGPT api to offer products that just shove GPT at all sorts of entirely unsuitable use cases.
Lastly, there are a good deal of issues with the currently most popular AI tech, LLMs, that the industry appears to have no intention of attempting to address in good faith. The complete disdain for copyright, IP, or even fair use when it comes to the data the models have been trained on. The recent articles stating that in order to remove material from a dataset would require effectively rebuilding the LLM. The lack of methodology to get true sources for the data used in responses, lack of reproducability of responses, lack of any auditability of these systems because that would jeapordize the “secret sauce” or is just simply impossible on a technical level. And when most people discuss this they get shouted down by the “true believers” as just not understanding the technology rather than any attempt at discussion in good faith. If you have concerns you’re either stupid or against technological advancement. Don’t you see all the good this could potentially do in the future but it it isn’t doing yet?
I would love for the type of trustworthy, helpful digital assistant it sounds like you’re describing. I’ve wanted that technology for well over a decade. We’re just not there yet.
That sounds really nice and we get to the root cause of my issue here: I don’t think that that is what will happen. I’m not saying to ban the stuff or anything but when I see how it’s being sold to the investors I’m not seeing reasonable and achievable plans of action that benefit everyone. I’m seeing gimmicks, ads, and moonshots. All while the dishonest are getting a lot out of it. I’m seeing it at its most effective being a means to increase the power of the capital holding class because that’s who’s investing in it and I don’t think that training such things will get cheaper.
And I expect them to improve yes, but I’m also concerned with methodological failures. And I’m not saying that it’ll never make life better, but right now in 2023 I’m not impressed by what I’m seeing. And that’s before I get into the realm of the tendency for trends like this to blind policy makers and business leaders. Hyper loop was sold as being for autonomous vehicles and specifically made to not be cheaply convertible to a known better solution. The whole fucking cloud computing craze comes to mind as well.
I will cede one thing here though. I do think it has a lot of room for use as one of many engineering tools to help with the design process. Being able to directly compare to known optimization methods is always going to be useful and if it can automatically plug a layout or process into a model it would be nice. Idk if I expect that to happen as well as anyone seems to think though.
I guess I just don’t trust the tech industry anymore. When I see something like LLMs it seems gimmicky as hell and a lot of early adoption is either minor or harmful. I see driverless cars getting priority over public transit over and over despite the fact that they’ve been 5 years away since I was a kid. I see people talking about using AI to help the fight against climate change from the same people who won’t quit meat. Meanwhile surveillance increases, wages stay stagnant, and the world keeps getting hotter. Contrary to how I sound I love technology. I’m an engineer for a reason. But there’s just so many reasons to feel skeptical of it. So yeah enjoy your hype. If it winds up useful for someone like me I’ll try it. But I’m not buying into the hype and I’ll be skeptical of it until I start seeing actual results.
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in my life
You aren’t the only one with access to these tools. Yeah if I and I alone had ai that wouldn’t be bad. But the people who used to run Nigerian Prince scams now have ai. Advertisers have ai. The bosses who want to cut jobs have ai. The cops who want to ensure there’s no revolts from the folks getting fucked by the system have ai. So yeah I don’t think I can get nearly as much out of it as the people who want to use it in ways that will/could negatively impact me will. So I’m not excited for it or happy about it, and I’m terrified because the people who seem really excited about it seem blind to it’s weaknesses
“[Eli] Whitney believed that his cotton gin would reduce the demand for enslaved labor and would help hasten the end of southern slavery. Paradoxically, the cotton gin, a labor-saving device, helped preserve and prolong slavery in the United States for another 70 years.”
How can having more tools to solve problems make things worse?
Depends on who’s using it and for what purpose.
in my life
This isn’t about you.
It never is I noticed.
Well, for one clearly this creates more mechanisms to exploit the poor. Especially if we chose to regulate as slowly as we have with other tech in the past.
If you manage to keep your job then sure, you’ll be way more efficient. I guess AI will help you with your job search and resume if you’re laid off, but maybe companies won’t need as many people as they used to. 🤷
I don’t know if it’s just me or what, but I don’t think AI, and eventually androids, replacing humans doing awful grunt work is really bad, it’s a system that refuses to figure out a way to tax corporations using AI to support those displaced workers.
For decades it’s been the grunt work that was automated and outmoded. Suddenly it’s highly educated individuals that are nearing the chopping block.
Nah my job is already heavily automated. All more will do is let me go even faster
No, the point of AI is not that you work better, faster and more efficiently. The point of AI is that you will not be necessary anymore.
If we were at that point there is nothing left to discuss.
Ask the thousands of information laborers, some who might’ve think the same as you, who no longer have a job because they were layoff when the manager got swindled by OpenAI marketing.
Man a lot of people seem to know what I do for a living without me saying a word about it.
“It doesn’t affect me, therefore it is not a problem. Fuck those people, I got mine.” The absolute lack of empathy of some.
The AI is in the hands of interests who think you are the problem.
(They don’t like me either.)
Every other technical innovation has made the average person’s life worse. Why would this one be any different?
The aquaduct…
What have the Romans done for us lately
nice shoes and cars mostly
What an absurd thing to think.
Great counter argument lol.
I might as well argue that the sky is blue. There are countless ways technology has benefited humanity, it’s sort of ridiculous to say otherwise outside of some thought experiment.
It’s also an option to not say anything.
Gives advice, doesn’t listen to own advice. Nice.
I said that it was an option. Not that it was required.
Sorry, when someone says something ridiculous I can’t help but call it out. Call it a character flaw if you like.
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That’s a lot of assumptions. Poor people don’t go on the internet?
I have a very well paying job that wouldn’t exist without technology.
I read library books without going to the libtary or carrying around paper, thanks to technology
I pay for stuff without having to carry cash or ever visit a bank, thanks to technology
Cars are technology too, as are flush toilets and furnaces
You don’t sound like an average person.
No other innovation has been able to replace human creativity or general human thought. Computers came close but they required specialized knowledge to build AND to use so displaced workers had an opportunity to adapt and upskill.
displaced workers had an opportunity to adapt and upskill.
Learn to code.
This isn’t really what happened or how the world works at large. It just made a bunch of rich dudes much richer, and west virginians a lot poorer. And yeah it changed the world in the broad scope of things yada yada thats besides the point 😉
I think in recent years a lot of “innovation” has been pure marketing fluff and had no real potential to change the world. This one really might. I’ve tempered my expectations, because tech bros really want us to believe there is magic to AI, but eventually it might actually change the world.
It is not shocking that people are worried about AI impacting their lives negatively when nearly all of the main stream coverage of it centers around all of the ways, both real and conspiratorial, that it will hurt them.
No, people are concerned other people are using AI for dirty shit that will end up making lives harder for 90% of us … you all know which 90% …
Of course they’re worried. They’re being told to be worried.
