 my biggest complaint about AI is we didn’t ask for it. zero popular movements took to the streets to demand AI. no one sat around kitchen tables lamenting how hard life is without AI. what people want is health care, housing, climate change solutions, etc We sit around kitchen tables wondering how to pay for college, get loved ones the psych and addiction support they need, or help the people on our streets who need homes 105 comments
AI should be like the James Webb telescope. put a team together and we will decide if your proposal is of sufficient social value to warrant use of the machine, otherwise sorry you can pay an illustrator a living wage to make art for the story  @seachanger and where did the actual research for things like detecting cancer with AI go? That was making progress, not hearing much about it now because these guys are too busy eliminating artists. @kristinHenry @seachanger You can pop over on JAMA and type "Artificial Intelligence" to see the landscpe. It's also worth noting that *all* this work with sequence recognition and generation is applicable and has breakthroughs in variants optimized for DNA, RNA, and other long sequence medical applications. It's pretty easy to find a ton of really promising looking papers for various types of experiments, discussions and proposed diagnosis tooling being published consistently. @kristinHenry @seachanger this is what gets me with all the "capitalism is the only reason we have technological progress" - It isn't! It doesn't! We have an inner drive to explore, to create, to solve problems (may this drive be curiosit , hope or laziness!), and capitalism co-opt this and turns it into silly little products the serves only a small group of people, etc etc etc...  @pixie @kristinHenry @seachanger There is so much on this timeline before capitalism shows up, makes what you're saying kind of obvious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_inventions honestly we didn’t need an app for everything in 2010 and we don’t need AI for everything now. all we have ever needed was to tax the rich and take care of people  @seachanger@alaskan.social Especially since it isn't even really intelligence. It's a convincing-looking stochastic bullshit generator. @seachanger I just perused the replies and wow that was a lot. I thought hating GMOs was just a 2010s trend  @seachanger @seachanger You are right, don't care the haters. The World needs more people like you, more reconing and less speaking @seachanger We also need to put the basic bureaucratic tasks online in a way that is open and easy. You should not need to buy commercial software to file your taxes, for example.  @mike805 @seachanger wait a minute: in the US you have to PAY for a software to fulfill a legal/fiscal obligation?!?!?! what the actual fuck?!?!?! @cairobraga @seachanger Nah you don't have to pay. You can physically fill out the forms and mail them in, which I do. However, the government and the tax prep industry have openly conspired to prevent the government setting up a simple online filing system. There is instead supposed to be a "free option" from the commercial tax prep companies for low to middle income people. But they used all sorts of dark patterns to steer people away from those. @cairobraga @seachanger As an example, the leading tax prep software "free option" will happily take down all your information and set up to submit your taxes. Then when you click submit, it comes up and says, sorry, your income is too high to use the free option, enter your credit card number to pay for the software. You either pay, or start over and do your taxes manually. A lot of Americans file at the last minute, and fear the tax authorities like they were the Stasi, so this is effective. @cairobraga @mike805 @seachanger it really comes down to the power of money: the tax preparation industry has spent money since the 90s lobbying Congress not to authorize the IRS to offer that service. The well-funded government incompetence narrative supports that, too, since many Americans just assume those businesses are right when they say the government doesn’t have the skills to do that, and since most Americans don’t travel internationally few people know most other countries offer it.  @cairobraga @mike805 @seachanger The Tax Software lobby is strong and has killed every bill to eliminate the horrible torture we're forced to endure. @cairobraga @mike805 @seachanger for U.S. taxes, the IRS offers "Free Fillable Forms", an interactive web version of Form 1040 (and supplemental forms) that includes links to explanations and instructions. You can submit these forms to the IRS directly through their provided web site. This is free for all income levels and covers all tax situations. Many U.S. states also offer similar free-filing services online for their state taxes as well. @cairobraga @mike805 @seachanger However, U.S. tax law is so intentionally esoteric (specifically so that rich people don't have to pay taxes) that many people don't feel confident enough to fill out and submit Form 1040 themselves. It also doesn't help that tax-preparation services, such as #TurboTax and #HRBlock, spend significant amounts of money to openly #bribe politicians and civil servants in order to keep the tax code complicated. @zrb @cairobraga @seachanger I used those once. Lately I've been using the PDF fillable forms, printing them out and mailing them in. If I could just upload the filled PDF files I would not be on here complaining. @rskikuli @cairobraga @seachanger Rome took a while too. And like the Romans, America is paying off the barbarians. When the money runs out (or no longer buys anything) look out!  @cairobraga I am in the US and I have been filing my taxes online for free for as long as I can remember, but also I don’t have high income or complicated tax returns. I did have to pay to do my deceased brother’s tax return because he had a 1099 in there which is lame. So I guess this change would have saved me whatever I paid for that. But we have had free online filing for a lot of people for a long time. @cairobraga @seachanger @mike805 nutshell: greed. like fire and war, greed devours everything in the end. greed is never satisfied. @cairobraga @seachanger Here's another one. Lawyers use a private system called Lexis/Nexis to do legal research. They are more or less required to use this monopoly system because judges want the reference numbers (like hyperlinks) in case citations. If you don't use Lexis/Nexis the judge may well not read your argument, and you lose the case!  @mike805 @cairobraga @seachanger @the5thColumnist @cairobraga @seachanger They intentionally do not. They were sued because of dark patterns on the website to redirect you to the paid version. As well as dark patterns within the software itself to let you invest all the effort before demanding payment.  @seachanger Remember when we had /websites/ instead of apps? But apps make it so, so much easier to collect heaps of personal information.  @seachanger taxing the rich? Sounds like only an AI app could achieve that kind of disruption - just find a VC backed startup that will work on it for two years. Rest assured it will be a huge success, as it won't use blockchain!! 😂 😩  @seachanger In this respect, LLM chatbots are just the latest sizzle that they are selling. They've been selling "you don't need experts if you have our latest shiny tool" for decades. Maybe even since the 1970's @RandomDamage @seachanger The generative tech is pretty damn relevant for DNA, and that's why we're seeing a lot of alternative models outside the current Transformer architecture with much larger context windows. @Elucidating @seachanger yes, as a tool for experts to use. That's a completely different thing from the AI Madness that's in the public eye right now. @RandomDamage @seachanger You are a "gamer" so please don't tell me that you think THAT linear algebra is good to use for mental masturbation, but THIS linear algebra must never be enjoyed by normies. @Elucidating @seachanger yeah. Bite Me. The marketing pitch is that you can replace expertise with AI. That marketing pitch is bullshit. @RandomDamage @seachanger Do you believe that will happen this time? We weren't even discussing "the marketing pitch" but you've pivoted to this because it's an easy target. Yes, categorically marketing pitches suck and are misleading. We agree. Can we go back to the subject at hand? @Elucidating @seachanger I literally came in on that. The algorithms aren't a problem, and can be quite useful But they are being oversold for things they can't do, and that is a problem @RandomDamage @seachanger Well then I totally agree there. 1000%. I came in on "we didnt' ask for it" (scientists sure did) and specific examples of these technologies being used for causes named like climate change or medical science. These conversations tend to get super charged. @RandomDamage @seachanger We already have committed to an internet anyone can join, and this is FAR more immediate responsibility than access to the average generative model. @seachanger worse, if AI isn't in your resume, good luck getting a job in tech without it. @seachanger @seachanger@alaskan.social Yeah, but none of those things make money for overpaid techbros.  @seachanger While there are positive uses, it feels like AI is a prime example of tech solutionism: solutions looking for problems to solve. @seachanger what I find most frustrating is how AI will be used to further remove or deny access to healthcare, housing, and other freedoms @seachanger I don't mean to take away from your larger point, but I will note that w.r.t. climate change and its mitigation Google Deepmind just delivered a landmark paper on rapid and more accurate weather modeling using generative techniques. The news, unfortunately, doesn't really like reporting on things that would require a science focused-journalist to be aware of.  @seachanger People's actual needs are fundamentally limited. If your aims are profit and infinite growth, fulfilling people's needs is a non-starter.  @seachanger If you consider how much worse the Internet is now that we have handed it over to AWS, Azure, and GCP you can extrapolate out a fairly dystopian future if those companies are also in charge of AI  @seachanger,   @seachanger I've been reading about and thinking about this matter for months now and actually (maybe that's naive or stupid of me) but I never looked at it like that. No one asked for this except some tech guy who had the money to make it happen. @seachanger not apples to apples comparison. We can have AI and those others too. It’s not one or the other. Also AI (deep learning ) is a technology discovery. Emphasis on the word discovery. It’s, to a certain degree, emergent behavior … magical. You should embrace it.   @seachanger agreed, and there’s an awful lot of cognitive dissonance i feel in this with how many excellent software engineers i know would *love* to have jobs where they are solving that latter set of problems, but can’t find employers that are hiring at market rate (or at all) for those missions. idk if it’s all attributable to vulture capitalists or what  @seachanger Popular creative AI doesn't solve any problems the people who vouch for it didn't make up. There's already evidence that suggests AI adoption correlates with people losing jobs--people with real lives and families--and if social progress is going to wither at the feet of technological progress, what's even the point? Why support a tool that only furthers the gap between the wealthy and the impoverished? A friend who supports AI ain't no friend of mine.  @seachanger What a surprisingly vapid take. If you want better health care, more affordable production of housing, better solar panels, and more... Then you want the engineering, scientific, and industrial base of society to improve. That doesn't happen by screaming on street corners. It *is* happening by understanding gradient descent at scale. @seachanger I do feel encouraged by how people in my university are talking about trying to use it (very, very cautiously) in analysis of the data we’re collecting on human beings, trying to use both our skill in the review of literature and AI to pick up what a small research team mightn’t pick up. I totally agree with you, but also, I’m cautiously optimistic in how psych research might benefit via responsible use of it.   @seachanger@alaskan.social useless ways to use MLLs gets all the cameras.   The main mover for the development of LLM was companies hoping to cut their costs by cutting down on client-facing employees. This has already happened -- much remote customer assistance is now done by chatbots rather than humans. @seachanger i really miss this world where someone cares what people want at the kitchen table. but apart from fulfilling the wishes of the 1%, it never mattered. at least ai still offers some inspiration to the last few meters of humanity. 👍😬  @seachanger People concentrate on bad AI and there's plenty. Good AI trained on a specific area can help in medicine by speeding diagnoses. @seachanger pretty sure you could say that about most technological development. One could argue that science fiction literature the last 50 years are representative of humanity wishing for possibilities to arise and within that frame AI’s are prominently present. @seachanger And about taxing the rich: do you really want to punish just because someone is successful?  $7 trillion in investment will go into the AI bandwagon. Thousands will be laid off as a consequence of the delusion that AI means you don't need staff anymore. The election process will be inundated by AI generated disinformation. The planet will fry because of AI generated climate denial. Over 1.2 million Americans died of GOP antivaxxer disinformation. Imagine how many will die because of AI generated malign influence campaigns.  @seachanger @drahardja And does AI help with any of the problems you named? Nope, it makes them all worse! Should be a complete non-starter under these conditions. @seachanger@alaskan.social @seachanger my thought after reading this https://www.wheresyoured.at/sam-altman-fried/ maybe we take their trillion dollar distraction as an opportunity instead? like maybe they'll be too busy obsessing over AI to be as aggressive shutting down people collectively organizing to actually improve the world @seachanger what really grates me is that the chuds cheering on the pouring of billions into AI think it _will_ achieve those things (or some of them, anyway). True tragedy that people imagine it won't just be deployed for the benefit of existing capital, even though that's literally already what's happening. @seachanger Plenty of people asked for AI, it has the potential to make a lot of innovate discoveries humans may never get to, and to reach many conclusions that may take mankind much longer to get around to. People even asked for what became generative art and prompt-driven text. The hype around the latter being conflated with the former is not at all helpful though.  @seachanger We didn’t ask for sky high corporate profits at our expense either, but here we are in a society for whom they would seem to be the unquestioned top priority for those in power. @seachanger AI, a legal theft of thoughts, ideas, inspiration owned by other people. Take books, sue AI when they use contents of your books. AI owns nothing, they abuse your data. Block, sue, disrupt, and preferably NOT use AI. AI consumes tremendous amounts of energy and AI needs more datacenters which should be denied by all countries, build these in the land of the American Nightmare. AI should be banned ww. We can do perfectly without this techmonster which only benefits techgiants. @seachanger @BorrisInABox A bit tongue-in-cheek, but do people really want better healthcare and climate change? Well, the elections are coming up, so we will see...  @seachanger @fedithom But those things don’t make tech bros billionaires though so I guess we should just die. @seachanger Eh, no one takes to the streets demanding new technologies be invented. These come out of academic research largely. It's not some huge plot by tech-bros to take over the world, simply a technological marvel researchers developed and people are now trying to make money off.  I'm pretty sure AI being shoved into everything is because the investor class is desperate to find a way to stop workers from unionizing. So uh, buy union, or buy worker owned co-op, whenever possible? The less money the VC and other rich investors get the better.  @seachanger it seems to be a TESCREAL mutation of colonialism (which just rebranded itself post WW2) https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112773676506158235  My biggest complaint is they didn't ask for it. When someone tries something big and dumb like AI, they better the hell get permission from everyone else first, if they don't want to be left hanging on the clothesline by their suspenders. The fact that we're so powerless we have to sit here and let them do this shit is... terrifying. How do we get the power to change things?
  @seachanger reminds me of this comic, which actually starts at the kitchen table 😄 https://www.approximatelycorrect.com/2020/10/26/superheroes-of-deep-learning-vol-1-machine-learning-yearning/ @DrVeronikaCH @seachanger @kdnyhan @seachanger perfect! I use it in the first lecture of a data science class I teach each year @seachanger @ClipHead “If I’d asked people what they wanted they’d have said that they would have done something like this to you in a few months ago but they were just not going anywhere else so they didn’t know it would happen to them so I guess I just didn’t want you guys in a bad mood.” —AI Henry Ford @seachanger It scares me how easily Trillions of dollars were injected into AI, but we don't get the same for like, cure cancer in this generation. Much less to solve the climate crisis: it goes even in the opposite direction. @seachanger @seachanger Agreed! Also, all those things that people actually want? Could be delivered without pouring gasoline on a planet-sized fire! @seachanger yesterday I used AI to transcribe 80 hours of audio. It's a tool that can be used for good or evil. The cat is out of the bag so there's no going back. @seachanger Nobody marched in favor of diesel engines. |
Gregory's Server
how anyone could look at the abject moral and political failures of tech giants in late stage capitalism and think jeez let’s let these guys factor this mess up into the stratosphere with zero regs is truly beyond me