>The statistics I have heard quoted say, that merely 25% of the people actually like their job. Meaning they like doing what they do for its own sake, not because it gets them money, which they desperately need to live.
Even people who like their jobs work because they need money to live.
My point is, that people who want to do their job properly are less likely to sling AI slop and be found out to do that, and that I wish we could stop destroying their jobs or lives, to chase stakeholder wet dreams of the companies they invested in letting go almost everyone.
We all have to pay for the actions of these guys because they were voted into power. Americans had the opportunity to avoid this but decided they wanted more of it, and now they're getting it. Elections have consequences.
I don't know. Trump's popularity was definitely fueled by the social media. QAnon started as a meme on 4chan.
I think it's a mistake to overstate the effect but it's definitely there and it seems different than even Obama's use of social media, which was considered revolutionary at the time.
A Star-Trek style "post-scarcity" economy can't exist in the real world. It depends on an impossible paradigmatic shift in basic human nature across the entire species (people just "evolve" beyond their base vices and desires such that they're willing to work purely for the sake of voluntarism and the betterment of humanity, there is no racism, no sexism, no struggles for power. *) and technology that violates basic physics (replicators, warp drives, transporters, etc.)
I'm sorry but anyone who looks at Star Trek as a serious model for anything is at best naive. It's a space fantasy show whose Luxury Space Communism is little more than set dressing because it's a capitalist enterprise (pun intended come at me petaQs) made by capitalists for capitalist ends.
Likewise, expecting LLMs to serve anti-capitalist ends (eliminating the need for jobs among anyone but the capitalist class) when they are entirely controlled by capitalists is naive.
* according to the canon set by Gene Roddenberry. What actually plays out in the franchise is different, because human conflict makes for better entertainment.
From the perspective of pre-history, anyone living in a western country is in a post-scarcity society.
Practically no one starves. The murder rate is down by crazy numbers. I'm not sure how much of a problem racism was at that time, but you wouldn't have had many chances to meet people from different haplogroups in any case.
The abundance created by industrial society is not distributed "evenly" or "fairly" but the baseline shift is insane.
Of course. I was just responding to the parent who was sad that AI isn't turning out to be "the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago." But that was always fantasy sci/fi anyway.
Programs helping vulnerable groups, domestic violence survivors, children, the elderly, non-white people etc. (in other words, "woke" social programs) are usually the first to get gutted by a Republican administration looking to "tighten their belts."
And I assume given the current political atmosphere in the US that this was made even easier by the fear that children might be exposed to wrongthink. Libraries are a known vector for exposure to un-Christian propaganda the "gay agenda," and we can't have that.
Plenty of people besides the Pope have made essentially the same criticisms about AI and the dangers of the cultlike influence it seems to have on our society. Every one of those people were dismissed as paranoid and ignorant Luddites who simply feared and hated progress if not humanity itself until the Pope came along and voiced an opinion on the matter. Then and only then was criticism of AI taken to be valid, or at least taken seriously, because of the invocation of religious authority. (but now all the tradcaths are sedevacantists because the Pope is "woke" and obviously a Luddite who hates progress and humanity.)
I'll take it, but I really wish we didn't need it.
Peter Thiel is just putting an ill-defined pseudo-Christian facade around his AI accelerationist beliefs because he knows that in the current American right-wing climate evangelical Christianity is what drives political power particularly in tech. His "antichrist" is merely anyone or anything standing between him and as much money and power as possible.
this argument is weakened by welding large bulky statements together.. IMO each part there is a tip of a dynamic-systems-iceburg. "He just does THIS" and "that is THIS" ... the short form medium kills inquiry.
A studied person once admonished me "avoid the word IS when comparing systems in the abstract"
Nobody requires me or anyone else to agree with the comment you respond to, but what you write sounds plainly confused to me and other than vague stylistic concerns weaved together with the general sentiment that you disagree, I can't make out what argument you're trying to make.
Not really. Search engines are a tech so centralized only two of them exist in the west, Google and Bing. There are zero open source search engines of any usable quality. Whereas there are lots of models out there, some free to download.
"only two search engines exist in the west" and "only two search engines in the west are of usable quality to me" are contradictory statements.
The models free to download aren't the models used by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. You aren't going to get all of OpenAI downloaded to your desktop and running fully on just your hardware.
And in each case (search and AI) the potential to decentralize and maintain "usable quality" is limited by these technologies requiring physical infrastructure at a scale that isn't available to the home consumer.
I mean, they are the models used by Google, at least. Gemma is used by Google and you can download it freely, weights and all. OpenAI has released an open weights model although I don't know if they use it themselves.
They aren't as good as the full fat models but they're plenty useful for many real world tasks. Show me the open source web search engine that I can run locally and that's plenty useful for many real world tasks!
The intended defense is that we all march on Washington armed to the teeth and shoot dead every last politician standing and start over.
Of course that made a lot more sense in the 18th century than it does in the 21st, we tend to view states that routinely engage in violent coups as failures, and the man who famously said of Shay's Rebellion that "the tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots" ran from Monticello like a coward when the British showed up and left its defense to his slaves.
But the last line of defense is supposed to be "we just kill them all." What the founders didn't anticipate was that the militias would side with the tyrants, or that society and its morals would advance to the point where political violence was no longer seen as a noble act except by extremists.
To be fair, links at the top of the site header aren't exactly hidden.
I've seen comments where people haven't noticed for years that the site has a footer with links as well. The mods added thread folding and people just never even bothered to try clicking the new link to see what it did, so they never realized that was possible and kept asking for the feature. All of this "hidden" functionality is literally just a link or two away, but it might as well be buried under desert sand as far as this community is concerned.
Even people who like their jobs work because they need money to live.
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