The glib response here would be to say that no technology is ever inevitable and that everything is contingent. This has the advantages of being technically true and sounding wise, but unfortunately technologies very much exist that a reasonable person might well label that way. Firearms are a good example of the latter case: once they've been developed, you quite quickly hit the situation where if you want to maintain your independence and safety in a society, you have to either use one or have one used on your behalf: no other options really work.
It’s so funny to me how people don’t understand that everything connects together. Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s tied to the broader society and economy at large. The reality of the situation is that the statistics show a lagging economy overall in the US, and the money is concentrated in a handful of data centers. So, any disruption to the whole AI build out would almost certainly lead to a major economic crash. And in a situation where you have massive amounts of money being poured into a particular tech that’s become central to how the whole economy functions, it should be obvious why a few plucky bloggers aren’t going to change the direction of travel.
The author talks about social value, but doesn’t seem to realize that the fitness function in a capitalist economy is profit with any social value produced being strictly incidental. There are plenty of enterprises, such as the whole fossil fuel industry, that are actively harmful to humanity. But since they’re large and profitable, they continue to flourish in face of that.
The most likely scenario here is that we are in a huge bubble that’s driven by capitalist markets, and eventually the bubble will pop leading to another economic crash, which happen roughly every decade under capitalism. At that point the exuberance over AI will fade, but it’s highly unlikely the technology itself will simply disappear. I expect that it will be more like the dotcom bubble which created the foundation for the internet today.
I think TFA’s argument completely ignores the elephant in the room which is the economic driver behind this technology. And without addressing that, the whole argument becomes divorced from the material reality we inhabit.
The article makes the following statement:
If, however, we can neutralise the LLM threat somehow (perhaps by some combination of regulation, economics and social opprobrium), there is considerable hope.
Yet, here’s what empirical research has to say on the subject:
It’s so funny to me how people don’t understand that everything connects together. Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s tied to the broader society and economy at large. The reality of the situation is that the statistics show a lagging economy overall in the US, and the money is concentrated in a handful of data centers. So, any disruption to the whole AI build out would almost certainly lead to a major economic crash. And in a situation where you have massive amounts of money being poured into a particular tech that’s become central to how the whole economy functions, it should be obvious why a few plucky bloggers aren’t going to change the direction of travel.
The author talks about social value, but doesn’t seem to realize that the fitness function in a capitalist economy is profit with any social value produced being strictly incidental. There are plenty of enterprises, such as the whole fossil fuel industry, that are actively harmful to humanity. But since they’re large and profitable, they continue to flourish in face of that.
The most likely scenario here is that we are in a huge bubble that’s driven by capitalist markets, and eventually the bubble will pop leading to another economic crash, which happen roughly every decade under capitalism. At that point the exuberance over AI will fade, but it’s highly unlikely the technology itself will simply disappear. I expect that it will be more like the dotcom bubble which created the foundation for the internet today.
score 1 · canonical
Do you think TFA’s argument is that “the technology itself will simply disappear”? Why?
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I think TFA’s argument completely ignores the elephant in the room which is the economic driver behind this technology. And without addressing that, the whole argument becomes divorced from the material reality we inhabit.
The article makes the following statement:
Yet, here’s what empirical research has to say on the subject:
score 1 · canonical