Ah yes. I'm glad we can be so confident the current administration would never do something foolish or damaging to themselves or others.

Also it only took them days to stop multi drug resistant tuberculosis treatment half way, and giving countless babies HIV that wouldn't have had it, if not for the recent actions of this administration. Or blatantly and loudly planning an ethnic genocide. Also following the putin method by the letter, and letting Russian media into the oval office while they try to put down Zelenskyy.

Hmm, what is the Russian 'go to' behaviour for shared borders?

I think we need to be developing anti drone tech among other things. I'm not saying it will happen, and it would likely instigate or be included in a civil war. I would usually think all of this sounds crazy, but we live in unprecedented times, full of familiar historical rhymes. I'm sure their preference is to take over without having to actually fight, so they can grow their power, but also things might escalate as they continue to rob and abuse the masses. There are more reasons than i can summize here, but I think pretending there is no danger is wilfully ignorant at this point. I hope for the best, but I don't trust these people to not be thoughtlessly monstrous.

Tech guy here. Really wish we could specify the corpo nepobabies from the normal tech enthusiasts. from my personal perspective, the two groups have long been at war. With musk types bluffing their way to a world where everyone believes they are actually capable, rather than just failing upwards like every nepobaby. The best techies are usually doing underappreciated open source work because the world needs it. Anti-intellectualism is not a win against the anti education cult. Just my two cents.

Perhaps instead we could just restructure our epistemically confabulated reality in a way that doesn't inevitably lead to unnecessary conflict due to diverging models that haven't grown the necessary priors to peacefully allow comprehension and the ability exist simultaneously.

breath

We are finally coming to comprehend how our brains work, and how intelligent systems generally work at any scale, in any ecosystem. Subconsciously enacted social systems included.

We're seeing developments that make me extremely optimistic, even if everything else is currently on fire. We just need a few more years without self focused turds blowing up the world.

couple decent thoughts. That the real issue is more economic than technological is the reality that's good to focus on.

Others just really display how little they know about both the issue and the technology.

"That AI is conceived and enabled by brilliant, ambitious, but immature men" was a bit of a funny line, because I'm wondering how you could defend that statement among minds like Melanie Mitchell. I mean, many of my favorites in the field are anything but "immature" In any way.

Some complain about the Canadian standards of disregarding copyright for educational purposes. I've always thought that was something that shows great humanity in the face of a system fueled by greed.

Remember when copyright only lasted a couple decades, and virtually everything else existed in public domain? We used to have these weird ideas like thinking about the betterment of the general public or educational systems were important for some reason.

All of the complaints are extremely unspecific. Do they care about open source vs corporate? Do they even understand the basic concept of how these things work?

Does our economic system need to be fixed? Yes. Are we going to get there by crying about the terror of the "soullessness" of machines and education? I doubt it.

i hate giving anecdotal evidence, but i wasn't expecting it to be such a black and white change for me personally.

i can draw a clear line between the previous twenty years of my life, and a few years ago.

it's just weirdly amazing to able to have a small thing go wrong and just be like "ah dangit." rather than having a depressive spiral and mourning my own existence for the rest of the day.

not that i don't sometimes have pessimistic thoughts or bad days, it's just not overwhelmingly defining of my every moment.

at the very least, i'm eager to see a lot more research being done. if it is legitimate, and others can have the same change in life experience that i've had, then it's a damn tragedy it hasn't been studied more thoroughly ages ago.

And you are the only voice of reason in this thread.

"Make up shit that makes OpenAI look bad" is like tech article gold right now. The amount of times i am seeing "look what ChatGPT said!!!" As if prompter intention is completely irrelevant to model output.

Objectivity doesn't exist anymore. It's just really popular to talk shit about ai right now.

Like when Altman effectively said "we should only regulate models as big or bigger than ours, we should not regulate small independent or open source models and businesses" to Congress, which was followed by endless articles saying "Sam Altman wants to regulate open source and stamp out smaller competition!"

I have no love for how unopen they've become, but at least align criticisms with reality please.

Especially when they have the money and ability to perfectly read the limits of public attention, or necessary severity of distress before drastic reaction. The general public are too focused on surviving and living to compete with companies who focus entire groups and technologies into finding people's blind spots and weaknesses.

It's a battle of minds and margins, where only one side has resources and power to affect change. Where the fuck are our representatives?

long response,

TLDR: it's not what they're saying, but how they're saying it. while i don't disbelieve the possibility of shitty actors doing shitty things which resulted in these claims, i do disagree with the emphasis used while addressing the issue.

also this is more of an open letter answering your question, so my statements and questions are open and not directed towards you personally.

firstly, I definitely agree with a lot of the article. the person responsible for cops using this technology for arrests needs to be put down hard. i think there needs to be very strict conditions showing how the system mitigates bias before such use is even potentially ethical.

the primary reason i think articles like this earn a lot of friction is that much of the framing has been towards entirely defining their and other people's personalities and lives and actions purely by their demographic. personally i despise the trend, and have grown an appreciation for things like VR socialization for this reason, where you are yourself and what you choose to be. it feels much less likely for others to dismiss your opinion, insult you, or attack you purely due to your demographic.

this type of trend would explain why many would find it credible when "Google AI head Jeff Dean acknowledged that the paper “surveyed valid concerns about LLMs,” but claimed it “ignored too much relevant research.”

frankly, i believe much in how these people are addressing the issue itself encourages "the exacerbation of racism and sexism." which they claim, and i hope believe to be against. i think encouraging people to define themselves and others by demographic above all else is harmful and segregationist. those i am familiar with in the field are very eager to ensure a solution to the problem of bias, without instigating or encouraging a culture focused on people defining themselves purely by their demographic.

note the phrase "they’re either wealthy enough to get out of it, or white enough to get out of it, or male enough to get out of it,”

this is the kind of race/gender-war inciting garbage i'm talking about. just casually slipping "white" and "male" with "wealthy" is probably going to set off many peasants of the demographic. i'm also generally intolerant of the idea that blatant bigotry is A-OK when it's "punching up" against the "bad demographic."

i'm pretty sure every bigot thinks their target is the "bad demographic."

i remember waiting outside of a library as a child, being beaten until my eyes were swollen shut by people i didn't know due to this rhetoric. afterwards they claimed i used a slur and i was the one blamed for the incident. i was a poor child from an abusive and unloving home who just wanted to read a book and escape. i said nothing to these older kids, because i had no ambition to experience the treatment of strangers. i could say a lot for my privileged foster children friends also growing up being neglected and abused on a regular basis. i'm sure they have no issue accepting their privilege. although usually the response to this sarcastic point is to completely erase their personal experience or tragedy by saying "but they probably still had it better because of their demographic." i'll note that personal experience is far too variable to justifiably make such a claim.

"punching up" isn't defensible when it leads to children being attacked for no fault of their own other than the body they were born into. especially when the things that directly encourage this antagonistic mindset do not actually improve anything. there are many other personal anecdotes i could make on the topic, but i think the occurrence itself as i've presented should be obviously indefensible. unless you are a hateful monster.

i guarantee being lumped in with the asshole "elite" families that have come from privilege is a distressing experience for many not-so-privileged members of the demographic. denounced as the evil bad, enemy of progress and good, by the original sin of the body they were born into. regardless of any action, thought, intention or experience they've ever held. the less reasonable actors in the demographic will probably not find a poetic way to voice this dissatisfaction. probably furthering the cycle of shitty experiences by the innocents on either side.

we won't even get into the neurotic requirements of addressing microaggressions.

why can't we deal with the issues of bias and demographics without actively encouraging the exacerbation of racism and sexism? weren't they calling that the existential threat in the article?

again, to say openly to everyone, your experience is not everyone else's experience. your local community and experiences are not always relatable to the experience of everyone else. there is a weirdly high dimensional and abstracted nature to the experiences and interpretations of these concepts. there are billions of individuals, and almost as many different and differently sized groups of every kind. bad actors and shitty people exist on every side, and will take the leeway they are given to be abusive or hateful to whomever they see as "the enemy."

we are all human, we should all define ourselves as human, and work to mitigate the evil that is prejudice and hate without also directly encouraging it. is that really an unreasonable request?

that's my two cents anywho. please don't label me with things i disagree with or find abhorrent purely because you want to defend segregationist rhetoric.

also, fuck the rich.

Had to share a work van with one of these sort for work. I would get an hour of details on how math is just "a trick to make people believe certain things"

Also "Jews are from Saturn"

And "the chemtrails are full of microchips"

There is literally nothing you can do to sway any of their beliefs, because basic reason and logic are the enemy.

Rather, maybe we need to subvert their base instincts in a way they can turn them towards logic despite their preconceptions and inability to process basic information. Kind of like the mobile game market or unethical media companies which have free reign to influence these people for malicious self gain.

The issue is that ethical people are too upstanding to use such subversive means, which means they will ultimately lose out in our current socio-economic ecosystem

I think smart people need to fight evil with the same tools used by evil, until such tools are invalidated.

Are we talking about data science??

There needs to be strict regulation on models used specifically for user manipulation and advertising. Through statistics, these guys know more about you than you do. That's why it feels like they are listening in.

Can we have more focus and education around data analysis and public influence? Right now the majority of people don't even know there is a battle of knowledge and influence that they are losing.

Exactly what I keep saying when people start blaming the tools being used for automation. Productivity is up and up and up, but none of that has been given back to the workers in the past fifty years. If I try to find dialogue on that issue, I run into a mountain of blatant propaganda defending the continued robbery of the middle and lower classes.

It's faux pas to even defend yourself, or question the framing of a dialogue or call out legitimate direct discrimination. If you think labeling an entire group as the evil enemy is going to make the bad actors or moderates in the group more likely to align with you, you are an idiot. On Reddit I moved to the leftist subreddit /r/onguardforthee when /r/Canada became too right wing and I'd started to see directly bigoted comments more often.

I got banned from the new subreddit for saying "hey maybe calm down with the direct racism and sexism here. We should be better than those we criticize."

If you're defending "the bad ones" you're the enemy.

I've been thoroughly egalitarian and anti-bigotry my entire life. I've also been beaten until my eyes were swollen shut in school by people I didn't know, and punished for "instigating with racist language" that I would never use because the older two kids knew it would get them out of trouble. I was just waiting to get into the library to read a book.

I've been accused countless times of racism working in retail because of things I had no control over. (Shout out to my old manager Om for calling out their bullshit)

I've been told in no uncertain terms by another manager that I would not have been hired if they were there at the start because they "do not hire men."

I've been told countless times I should not even be allowed to speak or have an opinion due to the body I was born into. That any action I take is directly unfair or harmful regardless of my intent or reasoning. I don't define myself or others by their bodies. Nobody chose their body.

Etc.

Would you think defending this sort of behavior really helps to reduce bigotry?

It's really just making me hate all of humanity. Everyone is terrible and being reasonable is an unforgivable sin on every side.

No nuance is allowed. If you don't agree with incredibly broad generalizations, you are evil. American history and culture is globally applicable and enforced.

I just want people to stop judging and mistreating others for things they have no control over. I guess I deserve to be hated or mistreated for that alone.