@quanin@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence At least, from Ice Crhimp, you could go to a version with less bells and whistles, called frozen shrimp. And then, a very basic one called, breaded shrimp.
@mcourcel@quanin@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic Oh you mean while you're writing all kinds of AI music? Lol but seriously, I agree. I'm worried about the long-term effects on both the planet and our children.
@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.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@quanin@mcourcel No but I certainly think AI helped with spreading conspiracy theories and far right talking points on all social media platforms. All of those algorithms can be rigged to show whatever they want you to see.
@lynessence@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@mcourcel The thing is, we've been using AI and machine learning for decades. We just haven't been calling it that. The new component we've just layered on top of it is the large language model. The digital thermostat you probably had in 2005? Very basic AI.
@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.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Exactly. We haven't even figured out real intelligence and we're trying to develop the artificial variety? Have these people never seen a robot movie? The thing turns on its creator and they're all shocked faces, but it's just doing exactly what it was programmed to do. We suck at programming but it's the AI's fault.
@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.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel I admire your optimism. What will more likely happen instead is the AI will indeed be smarter than us, and it will figure out it can do capitalism better than they can. And because it's AI, it'll (in theory) remove the emotion from the equation, so it will be able to rationalize any decision it makes.
@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.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Well, for starters, it looks like taking how society views people like the disabled and cranking it up to 11. However little or much you think society right now cares about the disabled, AI will amplify that. Have you seen iRobot, for example? You should. I'm distracted by baseball so that's the first movie that came into my head along that theme.
@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".
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Again, I admire your optimism. Many of those adaptive devices were created by blind people. And most if not all of the AI bigwigs are the type who are perfectly okay with a health emergency bankrupting you. Remember, we build systems to reflect who we are. And who we are sucks.
@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.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel You assume the ability to do something else automatically means the willingness to do something we agree with. There's a vast, vast distance between "don't do this system" and "do something better". And we'll have absolutely no control over where in that distance AI decides to park itself. It could absolutely decide that no one should have less than $1000000 in their bank account and nothing should cost more than $1000. It could also decide that you're using resources it can be using better. Like you said, the wealthy won't just let it escape their control, so if it succeeds, it likely means at least some of them are dead.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel And "some of them are dead" is, at this point, better than the situation we have now. Even if AI decides to end all of humanity...climate change was heading us in that direction anyway. AI could make things a lot better, or make the worse things happen faster. I'd happily toss the dice.
