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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • My superior mind knew you would say this. I’ve calculated all possible histories extending from this point. There will be no further battles.

    Okay, that part is good. Google stop text to talk. Google stop text to talk. God damn it. Stupid fucking hello computer. I’m doing great, thanks. None. My superior mind knew you would say this. I’ve calculated my total is 71.94 dollars while in line and already have the correct amount in my hand. I’ve also procured my ID in the other. Your slow mind may not have caught up to this fact yet, but I have dos equis approaching you on the conveyor. If I am not in fact 21, this may be your final transaction. What will you do, Isabella?















  • I will admit that, unlike crypto, AI is technically capable of being useful, but its uses are for problems we have created for ourselves.

    – “It can summarize large bodies of text.”
    What are you reading these large bodies of text for? We can encourage people to just… write less, you know.

    – “It’s a brainstorming tool.”
    There are other brainstorming tools. Creatives have been doing this for decades.

    – “It’s good for searching.”
    Google was good for searching until they sabotaged their own service. In fact, google was even better for searching before SEO began rotting it from within.

    – “It’s a good conversationalist.”
    It is… not a real person. I unironically cannot think of anything sadder than this sentiment. What happened to our town squares? Why is there nowhere for you to go and hang out with real, flesh and blood people anymore?

    – “Well, it’s good for learning languages.”
    Other people are good for learning languages. And, I’m not gonna lie, if you’re too socially anxious to make mistakes in front of your language coach, I… kinda think that’s some shit you gotta work out for yourself.

    – “It can do the work of 10 or 20 people, empowering the people who use it.”
    Well, the solution is in the text. Just have the 10 or 20 people do that work. They would, for now, do a better job anyway.

    And, it’s not actually true that we will always and forever have meaningful things for our population of 8 billion people to work on. If those 10 or 20 people displaced have nowhere to go, what is the point of displacing them? Is google displacing people so they can live work-free lives, subsisting on their monthly UBI payments? No. Of course they’re not.


    I’m not arguing that people can’t find a use for it; all of the above points are uses for it.

    I am arguing that 1) it’s kind of redundant, and 2) it isn’t worth its shortcomings.

    AI is enabling tech companies to build a centralized—I know lemmy loves that word—monopoly on where people get their information from (“speaking of white genocide, did you know that Africa is trying to suppress…”).

    AI will enable Palantir to combine your government and social media data to measure how likely you are to, say, join a union, and then put that into an employee risk assessment profile that will prevent you from ever getting a job again. Good luck organizing a resistance when the AI agent on your phone is monitoring every word you say, whether your screen is locked or not.

    In the same way that fossil fuels have allowed us to build cars and planes and boats that let us travel much farther and faster than we ever could before, but which will also bury an unimaginable number of dead in salt and silt as global temperatures rise: there are costs to this technology.


  • There’s a lot you can do, actually. You can put people in jail, for one. Possession in non-designated areas, such as a construction site or a personal residence, could lead to confiscation and a misdemeanor. It can just be socially impolite to have one around people—you know, like your car keys are after you’ve been drinking.

    The chasm of understanding is that you don’t want to do anything—literally anything—about abuse in your society.

    And for what? So that chatgpt can give you advice on what to order next from your burrito taxi? So that you don’t have to go through the pain of writing a long email to your boss that he’s going to summarize with the same AI service anyway?

    I don’t think being able to generate funny looking pictures is worth letting Palantir, another pet project of the vampire Peter Thiel, create a nightmare social-credit system actually worthy of 1984 to deter union advocacy, palastinian-genocide protest, being remotely anti-Trump—anything found disagreeable to the state—from ever realistically happening again. In all countries, mind you.

    We can’t do anything about that?

    You know what else we can’t do anything about? Global Warming. When the water wars finally kill us, I suppose I’ll come greet you in hell.