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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
Admin
completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those.
keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
Location Ottawa
Birthday 1987-12-20
Pronouns he/him (EN)
matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@lynessence @dhamlinmusic @quanin @mcourcel In order to escape our control, it would have to evolve beyond us. Because I can't see us willingly giving up control.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Sure, sounds cool. But it's fantasy, not science fiction. Because again, "AI" is just a kind of magic, and always will be until we can define what we mean by intelligence. and we can't make prognostications about what magic can, or will, do.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Right, but as long as they're just systems we control, they're not "AI" the way you seem to mean it. A system that's smart enough to escape our control is smart enough to do something else. Any other system is just us, using a tool to do the same things we've always done.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@lynessence @dhamlinmusic @quanin @mcourcel The reason communism never works is because the people at the top are always crooked. If you had a mythical perfectly fair AI, it'd work fine. But AI is created by humans, so unless it's both magic and smarter than us, it won't be fair, either, because we still control it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Any "smart" AI would see just how much money goes into healthcare and adaptive devices. It's a huge part of capitalism. But once again, it's impossible to speculate, because in this discussion we're using "AI" to mean "magic technology that hasn't been invented yet and we have no clear pathway to".
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Sure, but UAV's don't get you magical thinks for itself AI anymore than OCR does.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Right, but what does "do capitalism better" look like? Any actually smart AI will realize that if everyone is broke or dead, capitalism can't happen. The current capitalists either don't realize that or don't care. So the AI capitalist, from the case of humanity, will always be some kind of improvement.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel You're assuming that anything else will get funded. Large language models do exactly what they need them to do.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Nope. Large language models don't think. They respond to stimulus. Sometimes by stimulating themselves, sure. But all this talk of uncontrolled AI is just to distract from problems like climate change and wealth inequality. It's not an actual thing. Unless you meant magic when you said AI, and in that case...I dunno. Magic can do anything!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel My hope is that if we ever really did develop an artificial general intelligence, it would be smarter than us, and realize that the selfish actions being taken by the ultra-wealthy aren't even good for them. Nothing they're doing is in any way rational. I suspect that's why we will never achieve an artificial general intelligence; it's only what they pretend to want, not what they actually want.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel We actually don't suck at programming, though. Neither does the AI. Before AI, algorithms were programmed by real people to turn against other people. AI is just doing what people would otherwise do themselves.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel And they are largely correct, mostly because Google has become utter shit. Kagi is better. But half the time I find myself using AI because I don't want to sift through the advertising filled news website and download 18 megs of JavaScript and skip four autoplaying videos just to get a single fact. So I use AI because, in the world that exists, it's much easier than the alternative. And it's not that much less accurate, when judged against the accuracy of most of the garbage websites out there.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Yup. Artificial intelligence is a meaningless term, because we have no universal definition of what intelligence even is. And now we have people who hate AI complaining that Firefox added machine translation. Replace the word "AI" with "magic" anywhere it's used, and the semantic meaning will remain unchanged.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Nah, five years ago they used to ask on mailing lists for someone else to Google Shit. The lazy people were always, and will always be, lazy.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@lynessence @dhamlinmusic @quanin @mcourcel Right, but it's the wealthy who are rigging them. It doesn't have much to do with AI. If five people didn't control all of soal media, TV, newspapers, and radio, they couldn't do what they're doing with or without AI.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@lynessence @dhamlinmusic @quanin @mcourcel The thing to keep in mind is that AI is based on averaging out training data. So the primary effect of AI is going to be making things more like they are now than they've ever been. That's why the ultra-wealthy love it so much. It gives them the chance to freeze society in the current moment, and call it algorithmically correct. But then, they tried the same thing in the 1800's with various Utopian societies that had no place for women or the disabled, and in the 1900's with straight out eugenics. AI is just the same old new thing.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@lynessence @dhamlinmusic @quanin @mcourcel I'm kind of not? Like, they didn't need AI to elect a fascist government to our south. AI might make things slightly better, or slightly worse...but mostly it'll just make things different. We didn't need AI to lose trust in the news media. Covid and vaccine conspiracies were alive and well before GPT. Bitcoin and cars were already destroying the environment. Cheap kids crap on YouTube was already destroying brains. AI is either a cure or a null factor.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence Hmmm, I don't actually think instance admins do all that much fu...nope. I've hit my teenaged boy joke quota for the day.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@dhamlinmusic @lynessence @quanin @mcourcel It's a flavour. It's based on IceShrimpJS, that's based on Firefish, that's based on Sharky, that's based on Misskey. It works with Tuskey and Mona and all the other major clients, though.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel To be fair, I use iceshrimp.net, not Mastodon. So I have no idea what's possible on Mastodon.