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this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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People are constantly getting upset about new technologies. It's a good thing they're too inept to stop these technologies.
Every technology is a tool - both safe and unsafe depending on the user.
Nuclear technology can be used to kill every human on earth. It can also be used to provide power and warmth for every human.
AI is no different. It can be used for good or evil. It all depends on the people. Vilifying the tool itself is a fool's argument that has been used since the days of the printing press.
While this may be true for technologies, tools are distinctly NOT inherently neutral. Consider the automatic rifle or the nuclear bomb. In the rifle, the technology of the mechanisms in the gun is the same precision-milled clockwork engineering that is used for worldwide production automation. The technology of the harnessing of a nuclear chain reaction is the same, whether enriching uranium for a bomb or a power plant.
HOWEVER, BOTH the automatic rifle and the nuclear bomb are tools, and tools have a specific purpose. In these cases, that SOLE purpose is to, in an incredibly short period of time, with little effort or skill, enable the user to end the lives of as many people as possible. You can never use a bomb as a power plant, nor a rifle to alleviate supply shortages (except, perhaps, by a very direct reduction in demand). Here, our problem has never been with the technology of Artificial Neural Nets, which have been around for decades. It isn't even with "AI" (note that no extant "AI" is actually "intelligent")! No, our problem is with the tools. These tools are made with purpose and intent. Intent to defraud, intent to steal credit for the works of others, and the purpose of allowing corporations to save money on coding, staffing, and accountability for their actions, the purpose of having a black box a CEO can point to, shrug their shoulders, and say "what am I supposed to do? The AI agent told me to fire all of these people! Is it my fault that they were all ?!"
These tools cannot be used to know things. They are probabilistic models. These tools cannot be used to think for you. They are Chinese Rooms. For you to imply that the designers of these models are blameless
when their AI agents misidentify black men as criminals in facial recognition software; when their training data breaks every copyright law on the fucking planet, only to allow corporations to deepfake away any actual human talent in existence; when the language models spew vitriol and raging misinformation with the slightest accidental prompting, and can be hard-limited to only allow propagandized slop to be produced, or tailored to the whims of whatever despot directs the trolls today; when everyone now has to question whether they are even talking to a real person, or just a dim reflection, echoing and aping humanity like some unseen monster in the woods
is irreconcilable with even an iota of critical thought. Consider more carefully when next you speak, for your corporate-apologist principles will only help you long enough for someone to train your beloved "tool" on you. May you be replaced quickly.
You've made many incorrect assumptions and setup several strawmen fallacies. Rather than try to converse with someone who is only looking to feed their confirmation bias, I'll suggest you continue your learnings by looking up the Dunning Kruger effect.
EDIT: now I understand. After going through your comments, I can see that you just claim confirmation bias rather than actually having to support your own arguments. Ironic that you seem to show all of this erudition in your comments, but as soon as anyone questions your beliefs, you just resort to logical buzzwords. The literal definition of the bias you claim to find. Tragic. Blocked.
Blocking individual on Lemmy is actually quite pointless as they still can reply to your comments and posts you just will not know about it while there can be whole pages long slander about you right under your nose
I’d say it’s by design to spread tankie propaganda unabated
Blocking means that you don't have to devote your time and thoughts to that person. That's pretty valuable. And even if they decide they are going to attack you, not-responding is often a good strategy vs that kind of crap anyway - to avoid getting pulled into an endless bad-faith argument. (I'd still suggest not announcing that you've blocked them though. Just block and forget about it.)
Maybe but it’s like putting your head in the sand here. You actually restrict yourself by doing it and not the other way around. Benefits are dubious
You know what? They can go ahead and slander me. Fine. Good for them. They've shown they aren't interested in actual argument. I agree with your point about the whole slander thing, and maybe there is some sad little invective, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", further belittling my intelligence to try to console themself. If other people read it and think "yeah that dude's right", then that's their prerogative. I've made my case, and it seems the best they can come up with is projection and baseless accusation by buzzword. I need no further proof of their disingenuity.
Least you ought to care about is who thinks what about your comments. I mean I don’t wanna tell you what to think but it seems sane to just ignore that
This forum means nothing, nothing we or anyone says here is of any importance. It’s not even something that is saved anywhere in the long run but is merely some speck of digital dust that will fly away as soon as you turn off your phone
It’s the most meaningless words you will ever write, here
So you know, you either enjoy drama or memes or some arcane knowledge or what is exactly you are doing on the internet dear stranger? I hope you aren’t thinking what you say here has any meaning because no one cares and I can assure you I won’t remember about any of this in 10 minutes tops
I feel like you are trying to say something serious here and I assure you this is inherently absurd. Whatever you wanna change or whatever you want to cope with start outside the phone/tablet/laptop
A take with which I disagree, but mostly a fair one. If you want to live an unexamined life, it's not like that's any of my business. You are absolutely correct on your read of me. I am committed to arcane esoterica, so that's what I'm doing here. I'm here to discuss, and to learn, and I genuinely want to explore the limits of my understandings, identify my biases, and catch my fallacies, so when someone throws out some take that seems spectacularly inane, like "all technologies are tools, and all tools are the same", I want to know if I'm missing something.
As far as why I dare to be so "absurd": I'm inclined to wonder why you have decided that your personal nihilism means that no-one else should be able to have a serious discussion of any kind. That's kind of sad.
You are on the internet how do you want to have serious discussions when you don't even know who are you talking to. I may be a toddler for all you know it or some kind of psychotic serial killer chilling with a cigarette after the job well done. Like seriously people get the heck out of social media and do something actually that matters
How am I supposed talk seriously when you call my common sense a nihilism too lol. Just focus your capacity of seriousness for real life, thats the only sane way to go around. Or feel free to go insane on the internet discussing geopolitics with toddlers and ai and drunk college dropouts.
Enjoy getting baited every 5 seconds and probably be angry and miserable daily because you treat your phone with funny digital people so firkin seriously
Even this is getting too serious lol, like cmon I can't believe I am actually doing this and every fiber of my being recoils right now saying "run, there's nothing productive here, get the frick away and rain missiles from afar instead of getting involved in the pointless trenches of internet keyboard warfare"
Remind me to kill myself if I reply once more
I'm a science teacher. I have serious conversations with unserious children every day. It's what I do.
Don't kill yourself. Engagement with people through a digital medium is not a sin.
Also, if I mischaracterized your position in calling it nihilism, I'm sorry. It seemed like your primary thesis was "none of this matters, and to think it does is inherently absurd, so you should do nothing". To me, that sounds like nihilism.
You don’t understand it, you are naive as a fresh leaf on a spring morning. Internet is not a platform for serious issues. If you have seen what I seen and know what I know from 20 years or more web surfing experience you wouldn’t harbour so much benefit of doubt towards whatever composted filth internet is made of.
After all this is the very reason of why we are failing as a species. It would be crazy to still treat it in any serious way after it literally implodes democracy worldwide from insane tribalism.
Internet must burn and people must lose the disillusionment that they have any sort of power or that their internet speak matters when it is only a box to yell at and thus be silent irl. We must collectively touch grass. We must burn this place and any other, such is the duty of those who know
And yes, Ted Kaczynski was right, at least partially though he had wrong methods
I appreciate your response. If you think that the invention of the internet is why we are failing as a species, that it is the thing destroying our planet, then it seems I have much more work to do. Corporate greed and political corruption are what is literally destroying our planet. I agree: talk is cheap. Go find a way to make corporations, billionaires, and corrupt politicians fear the people.
Somehow our world has gone to shit after invention and adoption of social media. Imagine that. Obviously it is something that needs to burn. Lemmy is the last thing to switch off but still it’s shit because it cannot be not. This illusion that social media can be valuable is the most dangerous thing to our society. Making us not fight the eternal struggle as we used to but use up our mental strength on pointless shit because of the illusion that it matters.
We set up echo chambers and circlejerks to feel good about ourselves and change nothing, we disarm ourselves
The corporate greed was always there and we always were fighting and struggling but now we can just make an angry post and forget about it or even feel good from the likes. No, we must burn social media to the ground.
Your definition of the internet as just modern social media is, in my opinion, deeply reductive. There is so much beautiful, useful and enlightening stuff out there on the internet, much more than any one person could ever hope to even delve, let alone hold within their mind. And yes, corporate interests have been behind social media from the first "like". Does that mean that maybe people should go out and touch grass? Yes, of course it does. Does that mean that all social media is inherently evil? I mean, maybe? I'm willing to be convinced that even somewhere federated might be irredeemably corrupted by purpose and intent as a tool, much like the rifle and bomb up above. (I actually agree with your earliest point about how the block feature on Lemmy was likely implemented in that way to allow for minority opinions to have the last word, often to the benefit of Tankies.) But the entire technology of the internet as nothing more than the opiate of the masses? No. Just because you seem to be disillusioned by it doesn't mean that all effort to use digital connections is futile, let alone that that is somehow causing all of the world's problems. The problems we're seeing today are just the consequences of the political and regulatory decisions of the last 100 years, from Ratfucking to the failure of Antitrust, from climate change to corporate capture. Certainly sped up by the vast acceleration in information transfer rates from the 90s to now, but none of them caused by it. Even the existence of Billionaires is a symptom, not the cause. The root cause is debatable, but I would posit that it is the laissez-faire capitalist perspective of most governments in the world with respect to corporate regulation in all respects.
Humans always been struggling against the odds and only through collective effort maintained a comfortable world. Hard times make strong people, strong people make Easy times, Easy times make weak people make Hard times and ad nauseam.
Social media addicted resident is prime definition of weak and pathetic, unable to do anything. Creating hard times for us all.
Only preserverance and intense struggle and determination can create a good world to live in. Make people lazy sitting doomscrolling and what happens is regression. We are lazy. We are weak. We are entitled. We are allergic to effort. We are stupid. Time for some wars I reckon.
It’s no longer time for doomscrolling but rather time to savour the last moments of peace delecting yourself in as many hedonistic activities you can gather. Sex, drugs, meaningful connections, money if you have it. Who cares if a cop takes your driving license for weed driving if the world is ending? Use it all to the maximum. Fuck like a rabbit, drive like a madman, spend like a king. Each day a bite of a fine meal. Change your gender twice even, maybe every other time. Get married, divorce. Get a dog. Go to casino once if you weren’t
Can you point out and explain each strawman in detail? It sounds more like someone made good analogies that counter your point and you buzzword vomited in response.
Dissecting his wall of text would take longer than I'd like, but I would be happy to provide a few examples:
Though wolfram claims to have read my post history, he seems to have completely missed my many posts hating on TSLA, robber barons, Reddit execs, etc. I completely agree with him that AI will be used for evil by corporate assholes, but I also believe it will be used for good (just like any other technology).
Tools are neutral. They have more than one purpose. A nuclear bomb could be used to warm the atmosphere another planet to make it habitable. Not to mention any weapon can be used to defend humanity, or to attack it. Tools might be designed with a specific purpose in mind, but they can always be used for multiple purposes.
There are a ton of invalid assumptions about machine learning as well, but I'm not interested in wasting time on someone who believes they know everything.
I understand that you disagree with their points, but I'm more interested in where the strawman arguments are. I don't see any, and I'd like to understand if I'm missing a clear fallacy due to my own biases or not.
Many of their points are factually incorrect. The first point I refuted is a strawman argument. They created a position I do not hold to make it easier to attack.
I don't see it, as it seems like you are in fact arguing that tools are neutral. Giving counter examples isn't the same thing as a strawman, it's challenging your argument. Did you mean a different part of their argument?
Did you not read my previous post? The first point I refuted is a strawman argument. They created a position I do not hold to make it easier to attack.
If you don't believe this to be a strawman argument, please explain your logic.
I suppose you're talking about the part about your post history, which seems flimsy. Just because some of your posts agree with the other poster doesn't mean the ones specifically referred to don't exist. A strawman is putting your ideas up framed such that you do not support them, but arguing that you do in order to make a simpler argument. That doesn't appear to be happening, as lacking nuance isn't the same thing as a strawman. You do seem to be making the argument referred to, and having a nuanced position from other posts doesn't make that untrue. It also seems irresponsible to use that one point to discredit the entire argument, which broadly doesn't care about said point.
I am not a corporate apologist. I never said I was a corporate apologist. My post history backs up the fact that I am not a corporate apologist. There's nothing "flimsy" about this. It's clear cut if you're willing to objectively look at the logic of the arguments presented.
I'm not using that one point to discredit their entire post. I posted two examples and stated their wall of text was so full of false statements that I wasn't interested in debating every single point with someone who already had their mind made up.
You claimed they made several strawman arguments. The one you are pointing to is where they called your argument corporate apologia, which isn't a strawman, whether you are or are not l, as it's referring to the beneficiaries of your argument, which they argue to be corporations. The points they are making are sound.
For example (none of this is my actual beliefs), I could make an argument for unrestricted gun ownership. Someone, in disagreement with me, could say I need to take my gun lobby apologia and leave, after discussing why my position supports the gun lobby. In actuality, hypothetical me wants easier gun ownership for queer people and other marginalized groups. Me not supporting the gun lobby doesn't make that a strawman. They aren't making a strawman argument by saying because my argument supports the gun lobby, it is automatically invalid.
They do this exact same thing against your argument. They argue the points that your beliefs ultimately support corporations, not that your opinion is automatically invalid because you support corporations. If all they said was that last line about corporate apologia, you'd have a point, but they don't. You're simply misusing and diluting the strawman fallacy. You also claimed they made several strawman arguments, but failed to demonstrate the one example you pulled. I don't even really care about your arguments or theirs in regards to my response, as others have covered my beliefs already, I only am concerned in discussing the improper use of logical fallacies to discredit people you disagree with.
"A straw man fallacy occurs when someone distorts or exaggerates another person's argument"
They distorted my argument by making shit up. That's called a straw man fallacy.
You think you're saying a lot, but you've said nothing.
Saying "your views support this" is not making the argument you're claiming it does.
Been this way since the harnessing of fire or the building of the wheel.
My big problems with AI are the climate cost and the unethical way that a lot of these models have been trained. If they can fix those, then yeah I don’t have an issue with people using it when it’s appropriate but currently lots of people are using it out of sheer laziness. If corpos are just using it to badly replace workers and kids are using it instead of learning how to write a fucking paragraph properly, then yeah, I’ll hate on AI
Every tech can be safe and unsafe? I think you've oversimplified to the point of meaninglessness. Obviously some technologies are safer than others, and some are more useful than others, and some have overwhelming negative effects. Different tech can and should be discussed and considered on a case by case basis - not just some "every tech is good and bad" nonsense.
Those fools do not realize that creating the torment nexus is just the same as inventing the wheel!
I am very smart!
Commenting on your torment tablet
TBH sometimes being on the internet is self harm.
isn't that comic gas company propaganda, or am i rememberong it wrong
You're not going to find any disciples of Schumpeter in this thread, I'm afraid.
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