@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 Also, remember that the AI bigwigs are okay with a health emergency bankrupting you because they get your interest payments, and you become a debt slave for life. Look at Henry Ford: he was a terrible, awful man. But even he recognized that he had to pay people so they'd have the money to buy his cars! Current capitalists don't understand that. But any functional AI would have to, if it's not just a bunch of code they run and control.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Any functional AI may also decide that the amount of money you have should be directly related to its evaluation of your value to society. This is why we should actually want whatever AI system that comes of this mess to remain controlled. Those people who say things like "the first job that should be replaced by AI should be the CEO" are missing something. If AI decides it can run the business better with 0 employees, there's now nothing actually preventing the AI from significantly reducing headcount.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel And a functional AI that could do that would also be smart enough to understand that if every company does that, no company can exist, because nobody will have the money to buy products. So if its goal is shareholder value, forever, it would realize it has to do something different. In a way humans do not.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel You assume shareholders will still be a thing in this situation. The reason "shareholder value forever" works in the current system is because money talks, and everyone involved in the system right now is listening. The AI could easily hand every shareholder more money than one person will ever see in a lifetime, call it a buyout, and go on its merry way. And if you happen to be someone AI doesn't see any value in, well... no moneys for you.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Sure, and then you get inflation, and nobody has any money, so my lack of it becomes irrelevant. I think I can boil down what you mistakenly call my "optimism" to this: climate change means that humanity is extinct within the next 250 years or so. AI either makes no change, makes our remaining 250 years better, makes our remaining 250 years worse, solves climate change, or ends us early. If it ends humanity early, we're no longer around to care. All other options are either good or neutral. So I'm just not worried about AI.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel I mean, I'll probably be dead before either AI or climate change becomes a real problem, so for myself personally I'm not really worried about either. But if solving climate change is a priority, I trust us to do that before an AI we don't control. In theory, we care if we survive. AI will survive with or without us, so long as it has the resources and the ability to use them.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel I don't. The wealthy have no interest in anything beyond the next quarter. I suspect we'd be better off rolling the AI dice.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Most people have no interest beyond the end of their nose by default. Anything that looks like influence or status we're coded to gravitate towards. The current iteration of that is wealth, but I mean as we've already discussed it's why communism and socialism failed. As long as there has been humans, there has been an underclass of humans. And that's the people who will be teaching AI what to value. If we do end up in a situation where the AI is in control, we'll be lucky if humanity in general is the underclass.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel But if we don't end up in a situation where AI is in control, things will be the same as they are now, until we're all dead. All revolutions do is kick one set of corrupt humans out, and put another in. AI could be our only chance at real, meaningful change. And it might suck. But what we've got now sucks pretty bad.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel If the AI learns that this is just how the world works and is fine with that, the risk is you don't actually change anything except who's pulling the levers. It's just as likely the AI decides there's nothing wrong with the way things are, or decides that the wealthy should be protected and the rest of us can get fucked. There's still a non-zero chance that someone who's currently poor won't be in 10 years. Maybe it's not 50% or higher, but it's not 0. With AI, it's just as likely to be 0 as it is to be 100.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Depends on where you live. In Canada, sure. In the US...well, for now. In North Korea? The chance is already zero. And the longer climate change goes on, the more the chances trend towards zero for everyone, everywhere. And I would say that there is a zero percent chance that human society is going to do anything meaningful about climate change in time.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Oh, I'm absolutely convinced we'll do something about it. What it will end up being is destroying the environment in a different way. Electric vehicles, for example. I'm waiting for the environmental damage from those to be added up.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Giving up cars entirely won't solve it either. We'll still need to be able to do the traveling that cars currently allow us to do. Are we electrifying our rail lines yet? And if yes, what kind of damage is that doing to the environment?
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel "still need to be able to do the traveling". No, see, that's my point. Meaningful action on climate change means completely re-architecting society so we do not, in fact, need to do the traveling. Working from home was a tiny step. But return to office policies put an end to even that. As long as we insist on having grapes shipped in from France and computers shipped in from China, climate change cannot be solved.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel I mean, we should probably agree on a definition of "traveling". Yes, RTO is dumb. But unless you mandate that no one is ever allowed to leave the city you're born in, RTO is only one very, very small aspect of traveling and probably not actually the most damaging to the environment. And I say that as someone who doesn't actually have an office to return to at the moment even if he wanted to.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel I think you're underestimating the impacts of hour long commutes, twice a day, in rush hour. In a car designed to fit four or five people, but with only one person in it. But you're correct that the most damaging form of travel is flights. We would, I would think, have to mandate no flying anywhere unless it's a medical emergency, and probably strictly ration travel via ships and trains. And stop shipping a lot of goods. Either produce it locally or don't have it.
@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel The long and short of it is: to have any hope of making the effects of climate change survivable (even if we cut all pollution right this second by magic, the temperature is still going up by at least 1.5 C), we would need to cut the overall resource usage of humanity to something like a fifth of what it is today.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Welp, Ottawa being a government town isn't producing much of squat. And Canada having pretty much no tech outside of Shopify means... yep, that's the modern economy toasted. Your apartment's AC is damaging the environment so we should probably ditch that. Your inhaler is definitely damaging the environment, so no more of those. The list goes on.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Exactly. That's why climate change won't be solved. Because for humanity to survive, we need to start doing things, right now, that a lot of people would not survive and many others would think would make life not worth living.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Well, if the choice is basically we die or we die, then... yeah, that kinda makes sense. If it's a no-win situation why play the game, you know? I mean, I don't think it's a no-win situation, but if I agreed with that logic it would certainly be a reason for me to not do as much on my own as I do.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel It's a no-win situation because every second Taylor Swift's jet creates more emissions than you and I will in our entire lives. Never mind the rest of the big companies and ultra wealthy. But even if we eat the rich, all of them, right now, undoing the damage they've already done will take massive hardship and sacrifice. I stopped reading climate journals because the only conclusions that can be drawn from the latest data are just too depressing.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Here's the thing. The planet doesn't care what we do or when we do it. Even if we'd started doing what we thought was the right thing 50 years ago, we may very well still be having this conversation today. If the planet's gonna bump us off, it's gonna bump us off whether or not we solve climate change. That doesn't mean we shouldn't leave the place better than we found it, but I mean... how much climate change did the dinosaurs cause? Planet didn't care. Squish. Bye.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Right. It's not the planet bumping us off. We're bumping ourselves off because we were too stupid and selfish to avoid the oncoming disaster.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel We'd also be bumping ourselves off to avoid the disaster. So I'd argue the decision was made that we'd be bumped off without our actual involvement.
