kreskin@kreskin@lemmy.world

Replying to @⁨eicker@lemmy.world⁩

After the initial dot com boom and bust (remenber pets.com?) I remember being told laptops and desktops were dead and we’d all be using tablets. Metaverse, google glass, self driving vehicles real soon, theranos will transform health care, NFTs, crypto. And now AI. Its all just a repeating toilet bowl swirl of empty speculation, exactly like a casino. And not a single one of those things came to much. I wonder if AI will leave much progress behind when it implodes. Maybe this time itll be different?

mobyduck648@mobyduck648@lemmy.world
edited

Replying to @⁨kreskin@lemmy.world⁩

I wonder if AI will leave much progress behind when it implodes.

I think it will, it’s the one bit of AI optimism I actually have. I have a theory the big AI firms love for example Yudkowsky’s doomsday cult so much because it’s easier for them to imagine the end of humanity than it is to imagine them not getting an extractive oligopoly over an emerging technology.

The tech itself is actually decent as tech, it’s not what the boosters claim it is but even if development stopped advancing today there’s loads of niches it’d be changing for a long time; computer vision in medical settings for example. Useful things like TTS will be much better going forward than they ever were, and for better and worse things like computer vision in general (ie in public) will never be the same. LLMs are basically magic NLP boxes too, they’re useful for classification as much as generating slop.

krakloskewm@krakloskewm@lemmy.zip

Replying to @⁨mobyduck648@lemmy.world⁩

My own opinion is that Ai is the greatest threat to capitalism since Karl Marx and nobody has caught on to it yet.

The idea of top down control of this technology- eg a single or a few companies holding the rinse and selling it to everyone else - has been quickly proven to be a fantasy.

I think it’s what both the fuck ai crowd and the Ai bros are missing with the whole situation. No one makes money with Ai (except the people that make the hardware it runs on). Not the people who used to do the things it does, not the people who want to control and sell it.

en
mobyduck648@mobyduck648@lemmy.world
edited

Replying to @⁨krakloskewm@lemmy.zip⁩

It’s definitely an interesting point of view I think, and definitely one worth taking seriously.

One thing it might be really cool for is implementing cybernetic ideas, which would be ironic as the term AI was originally coined to move away from cybernetics! I think cybernetics could well be the weapon of choice for a serious socialist challenge to capitalist norms, I don’t think anyone sane wants to bring Gosplan back from the dead for example (it was a good example of very constrained and unreliable information flow) but cybernetics is a serious answer to the neoliberal argument that only prices carry the necessary economic information to operate a modern economy.

The cyberneticist would argue that there are much richer data available and we should build systems which take it into account, and allow for more sophisticated goals than ‘more billionaires’ to be deliberately aimed towards. It can also be used to do away to some extent with all-powerful centralised bureaucracies (and the inevitable bureaucratic class which forms around them) because decentralisation is a key component of cybernetic ideas.