this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Fuck AI
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The world is a wildly different place now, and the people developing them were headed by people motivated by reasons other than extracting as much money out of the world at any cost.
This is not nearly as comparable.
Beyond that, very few people had an issue with AI as fuzzy logic and machine learning. Those techniques were already in wide use all over the place to great success.
The term has been co-opted by the generative, largely LLM folks to oversell the product they are offering as having some form of intelligence. They then pivot to marketing it as a solution to the problem of having to pay people to talk, write, or create visual or audio media.
Generally, people aren't against using AI to simulate countless permutations of motorcycle frame designs to help discover the most optimal one. They're against wholesale reduction in soft skill and art/content creation jobs by replacing people with tools that are definitively not fit to task.
Pushback against non-generative AI, such as self-driving cars, is general fatigue at being sold something not fit to task and being told that calling it out is being against a hypothetical future.
I mean... they were developing an information tool that could survive a nuclear strike. One of the ironies of the modern internet is how its become so heavily centralized and interdependent that it no longer fulfills any of the original functions of the system.
One could argue the same of the original internet. The Web1 tools were largely decentralized and difficult to navigate, but robust and resilient in the face of regional outages. Web2 went the opposite direction, engaging in heavy centralization under a handful of mega-firms and their Walled Garden of services. The promise of Web3 was supposed to be a return to fully decentralized network, but it just ended up being even more boutique fee-for-service Walled Gardens.
Modern internet is horribly expensive, inefficient, and vulnerable to outages at an international scale. Convenience has become obligation (always-on DRM, endless system updates, tighter and tighter obsolescence timelines). Interface has become surveillance (everything with a mic or a camera is used to spy on us). Communication has become commodity (constant data scraping, compiling, and trading of human interactions).
AI is all this on steroids.