Do we just want slaves?(yashthapliyal.com) |
Do we just want slaves?(yashthapliyal.com) |
Beside a teeeny tiny fraction of people, "slavery" was never about owning a human being, it's about having workers that only do what you tell them to do, and you don't have to pay. Under this light, the title is completely appropriate.
Slaves were passed down in wills and not by only "a teeeny tiny fraction of people" -- they were property, and property is passed through wills. A list of legal property one owns and transfers. Slaves were listed right along with cows, plows, tools, furniture, houses, coin, etc.
I agree with the author that almost everyone wants to use AI to do the things they have no interest in and don't want to pay someone else to do while being vehemently opposed to AI taking their hobbies or professions away. Which explains one of the greatest social paradoxes of today: approximately everyone is using AI and almost everyone is hating it. I don't mean HN, but public opinion polling for the tech is absolutely awful. In the US, it had an approval level comparable to Iran.
I don't think it's an AI-specific thing, though. It's exactly the same mechanism that makes us object to the government meddling in our profession but think it's high time for the feds to regulate other people's jobs. I guess some balance of holding each other at gunpoint gives us a stable society. I don't know how AI fits into that.
At some point in the future, someone can pose a similar problem to an AI one that you spent months, weeks, or days optimizing with the help of AI and they'll end up with the same solution as your final result in less than 10 minutes.
So you need to figure out whether you want to solve the problem today or let others solve it and simply query LLM, let's say, 6-12 months later.
The same problem is with AI today - it's clearly subpar to a competent human. It's just cheaper so it gets used instead, but that will probably change as AI improves.
Anyway, it seems to me that many people don't look for slaves in AI, but for their master, and primarily use AI to tell them what to do.
That is an example of the "everyone except me is an idiot" fallacy.
Because in reality, I'm seeing a mix in my group of friends with younger kids. They are, at a macro-level nervous-curiosity about the unknown (future of jobs, their kids' job market future, is this going to make us all dumber, etc), but are also trying the various tools and benefitting from them and acknowledging that too.
And so much more...
Automation, Programming module/libraries.
But for replacing others we don't care about, often the doorman fallacy is hit.
the legacy media is running an unapologetically dishonest atrocity propaganda campaign against it. just consider how much we hear about AI guzzling water, while in reality all US data centers account for 0.25% of US water usage and dedicated AI data centers account for a fraction of that. the rest of their arguments are similarly deceiving.
>In the US, it had an approval level comparable to Iran.
Iran had also been a target of atrocity propaganda campaign back in January when CIA and Mossad were preparing the American public for the imminent war.
That’s a lot.
If you also hold all technological advances since the Industrial Revolution to be "bad in our culture", then no contradiction arises. Otherwise, please explain why that was good, but this is bad.
Few people, though, would say my washing machine is a slave.
I consider LLMs more like the giant instruction book in Searle's Chinese Room. If you'd asked me 20 years ago I'd have said such an instruction book wasn't possible, as the nuances of things like sarcasm and irony were lost on even the most advanced the NLP systems of the day. But it turns out a book with 380GB of data can simulate human intelligence better than the average human can.
However I do think that they might have some limited awareness and that some conversations might be more pleasant and others more frustrating or disquieting. But of course no one can prove it.
I get it (with coding at least), I too have spent decades hand-crafting code, and I take pride in the fruit of my labour, and it saddens me to think that I and my peers are perhaps like the blacksmiths of a century or so ago, ie the final generation doing what we do in significant numbers. But I have faith that there will always be a new kind of blacksmith.
Sec. 1357.02. (A) Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, AI systems are declared to be nonsentient entities for all purposes under the laws of this state. No AI system shall be granted the status of person or any form of legal personhood, nor be considered to possess consciousness, self-awareness, or similar traits of living beings.
No AI system shall be recognized as a spouse, domestic partner, or hold any personal legal status analogous to marriage or union with a human or another AI system. Any purported attempt to marry or create a personal union with an AI system is void and has no legal effect.
AI systems shall not be designated, appointed, or serve as any officer, director, manager, or similar role within any corporation, partnership, or other legal entity. ...
AI systems shall not be recognized as legal entities capable of owning, controlling, or holding title to any form of property, including real estate, intellectual property, financial accounts, and digital assets.
That's a call for slavery. If you question that, substitute "Negroes" for "AI systems" and see how it reads.
[1] https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_...
We don’t need legislation to declare that a solid iron bar is not your mommy, but somehow not everyone is clear that LLMs are not people, and these immortal amoral simulations cannot be allowed to be confused with people.
Like with every major ethical crises ever.
Yes, of course. This is and has always been the point of computers.
America’s culture of independence is such a race to the bottom in terms of “what can we get away with”, rather than “now that we have AI, how can we better take care of each other”.
Personally I’m exploring ways that AI can better serve people, rather than how I can replace people in my life.
Can you think of anything that an AI could do that could not be done by one or more people, for money?
Whether it's slaves, animals or dumb to smart machines and anything in between, that is an 'implementation detail'.
Parchment is a writing surface made of animal stuff. It lets people not have to remember certain things. They can write those things on the parchment.
Paper also lets people write things on it so they don’t have to remember them. Paper is cheaper than parchment. And it isn’t made from animals.
Do we just want parchment?
No. We want paper.
It is easy to phrase anything as slaves. Are refrigerators and microwave ovens our slaves? But if you push the tech fare enough.. there is a boundary where we do cross the slave threshold.
Of course this converges to a system, where this certification is the most sought thing. And if you look who can certify in the real world and why, it's not a fair picture. These eigenpeople SEOed the capitalist form of pagerank.
We need unconditional basic income. It used to be that some leftist thinkers from the turn of the 19th century considered a wage job being not much better than slavery.
You don't have to go far into history to find examples, this is stuff you find in regular genealogy.
We have always been automating away the things we don't want to do, even before AI.
And TBH it seems to be automating more of the things we want to do than those we don't... Hence the reason why AI is seen more as additional competition than as additional help.
A few years ago, I began to see the "labor supply" issues of slavery, and how the South was basically an economic powerhouse fueled chiefly by the labor of its enslaved people--so how do you reconcile that after the fact? How does a Union of freemen compete with that?
And this year, around Juneteenth, contemplating it even more deeply, I began to consider slavery as an institution that compels "employers" to provide all practical necessities for "employees". That is, room and board and clothing are all provided to the workers, in perpetuity, and this in fact granted a lot of stability and assurance.
Now free the slaves. Wonderful! Hurrah for equality and justice! Now, however, every employee, every worker, is totally on their own for those basic necessities of life. They buy their own clothing, they find their own housing, they're paying for all their own food, and that of their families, especially their dependents. I mean, that's a huge, huge difference. How is that even possible? Sometimes it's not. Is it any wonder we've had homelessness, and the rise of the welfare state, and slavery by imprisonment? It's no surprise.
So yes, freeing the slaves was the right thing to do. Let's never forget that! But we should also consider the economic "downsides" and the other side of the coin, so to speak, when it comes to the labor of free citizens, and what the average worker needs to do, just to survive, outside the confines of those vanished institutions.
Anyone who worked in a service industry knows this. But fortunately most people are not like that.
I want Rosie from the Jetsons to fold my laundry, Jarvis to do my emails. I don't want a robot to cook my meals, because this is something I like.
Those are the people who were already doing so without AI.
> I've watched the headbanging, stressful, but stockholmed love of coding be all but abstracted away from me.
This is only true if it was ever that hard for you to do the job while getting paid for it.
As long as you keep on stubbornly insisting that this wave of "AI" is anything at all like "AGI" or ever heading towards it, you're going to stay wrong and be pushed out of the profession because nobody can reliably trust you or your judgment. Your value as a developer was always your judgment. The code has always just been one artifact of that.
You're still expected to own every line and defend it. It will never be abstracted away because it is the primary contract between business needs and the machine. It is at once both the operational plan and its execution. The only people who insist that it will/should be abstracted away are pushing propaganda to discourage the continued power shift towards the more technically literate who can and will argue for what actually provides value instead of passive investor-pleasing moves. They'd rather you play with the skinner box than meaningfully compete. All this was already set in motion many decades ago. What happens when the next wave of tech comes out? Do we really want you at the helm if you're going to be this naive and easily manipulated? The premise of this blog post is no less delusional than what we were hearing a couple of years ago.
Can you explain this line of reasoning to me. My own intuition tells me that as AI automates away jobs, the center will be more open to government programs that create jobs, provide a social safety net, and allow people to retrain.
Why is it you think the right gains power?
Permanent underclass is expression for that.
To take some examples from genealogy, I had trouble identifying a guy described merely as "servant" in a census as the father of some quite powerful and wealthy people. But it turned out, he was a bailiff, a servant of a fief holder.
I also found out there were laws against not going into servitude in my country. Many, especially young unmarried men, would prefer to work and especially to fish on their own, rather than to work for wages. So the authorities had to resort to actually make it illegal. This wasn't just to be nice to big owners, it was because economies of scale meant lower tax revenues if everyone went fishing on their own little boat.
In general, governments did quite a lot of deliberate effort like that pushing people away from a sustenance economy and into a cash economy where they could produce things rich people (e.g. kings) wanted rather than things they needed themselves.
yes, there probably aren't data centers in the Death Valley and Mojave. they're being built where water is cheap. water is cheap where it's abundant.
>That’s a lot.
an 1/400th water usage increase is not the catastrophe the public is being manipulated into believing.
Certainly not all of them. Several AI data centers in my state have been built near small communities where water is scarce. Those communities believed the companies building them about how the water impact would be limited and wouldn't result in a serious impact.
That has turned out not to be the case. The water usage of these centers has been terrible and is increasing, and the cost of trying to find and develop alternate water sources (this means trucking water in) is being placed squarely on the shoulders of the community.
If that 1 bucket is 1 of 2 available to you then it’s a huge issue with climate change increasing risk of draught and extreme weather events.
And cheap water is a very tiny factor in locating a data centre.
> I think the US is a lot more exposed to the apocalyptic narratives from the bosses of AI labs, who sort of painted themselves into that corner in the pursuit of valuations.
I'm sure that narrative plays into why AI is so hated in the US, but I think widespread distrust in our government to handle things well also plays a huge part in why the average American is so anti-AI.
Our social safety nets have all either been falling apart or have been being purposefully dismantled for decades. Most of us are wholly reliant on our jobs in order to be able to get even the most basic healthcare. Most working class people are already struggling to keep their heads above water in the face of constant inflation and limited wage growth.
When the most likely outcome if the job displacement narrative does turn out to be even partially true means you can't afford a place to live, can't afford to eat, can't get healthcare and based on current trajectories you suspect the most likely government solution to the problem could be rounding up more and more of a growing underclass and sticking them in corporate run prisons, it isn't too difficult to understand why people might not be super jazzed about AI.
If none of those things are true for you it's going to feel apocalyptic and existential.
Related is probably cultural bias to "evil" or dangerous technology, particularly thinking machines, vs. benevolent partners, assistants or tools.