For my part, I have tried to be very clear-eyed about this and have been driven to learn and understand how it works. I want to know what its strengths are and what its weaknesses are. And mostly, I want to know how it's going to be used to further subjugate us. I have already seen how it has been used to deny people insurance coverage and for various and sundry other nefarious uses. Most recently, it has been suspected as being one of the prime causes of the deaths of many little Iranian girls. The future is now.

I feel that if I understand it well enough, then I will be better equipped in the coming struggle against it. I see how already people are losing their jobs at the mere possibility that AI might actually replace them and be able to do their jobs for them. And I relish the coming articles that go into detail about how badly it's been overestimated and how completely it has caused ruin in the companies that have chosen it over humans.

I use AI. I don't trust it, but I know what it's good at. I also know what it's terribly bad at Most importantly, I have seen it improving and it is becoming more concerning.Articles like this seem to indicate the possibility that AI will become much more affordable and much more powerful very soon. and yet it seems clear that it is being intentionally kept out of our reach.

I am not so concerned about AI causing an extinction-level event, but more so in its acceleration of our own self-destruction through many other means, not the least of which is climate change.

I am reminded of an old adage.

To err is human. To really louse things up takes a computer.

The thinking behind this being of course that if you make one mistake and you automate it then you have the opportunity of exponentially failing, where otherwise it would just be a simple typo that you could fix with correction fluid.

To the point mentioned earlier though, I don't think it matters as much whether the technology has advanced to the point where it can replace workers (it hasn't, but it's closer than I'd like), but that they believe that it already has and are replacing workers with it anyway.

/rant

Sorry for the bad writing PH, I'm tired.

I'm fully in favor of using the power of the state to regulate AI data centers so that they're not exploitative to local resource limitations. I'm fully in favor of rewriting copyright law from the ground up for the modern era, to the extent that I think copyright should exist at all. I'm in favor of researching model-human interactions and assessing well-being of users and coming up with some forms of agency-respecting safeguards. I'm more than fully in favor of reigning in billionaire corporations whose only motive is profit and taxing the ever-loving shit out of them.

What I'm not in favor of us restricting the technology as a whole or acting like its use or even its very existence is a moral failure. I'm not in favor of stripping agency from adults because you think you know what's best for them.

no mention of how the affluent, surveillance-obsessed exec dictating its trajectory enthusiastically cozied up to fascists

There are so many surveillance-obsessed AI CEOs that this one wasn't in my top two guesses. Excellent reminder, Techdirt.

Stories like this Times piece will often fixate on the AI “doomer narrative” (SkyNet will kill us all), but downplay that this specific strain of doomerism (very often pushed by wealthy industry insiders), often exists to both misrepresent what LLMs are capable of, but also to direct attention away from more realism-based criticism the industry doesn’t really want to talk about.

The amount of attention the pro-business doom narrative gets, is fundamentally at odds with this realism, because the reality is that LLMs aren't all that great.

a huge swath of the animosity is being driven by historic and justified anger at the extraction class.

I just wish this anger was kept focused at the corporations and the way regular people are being treated as disposable resources to be shut off from the wealth/output of our society so the rich can have it all, rather than people with inherent worth that should be supported because we are people.