@kzodasnowman Agreed - and I think this attitude can and should be applied to technologies, as living people, themselves. I get in the context of AI that's going to sound weird, because there's efforts that will likely succeed in getting AI configurations recognized, legally, as people, like human people, but that isn't what I mean. I mean more, like... I feel like AI is driving a lot of people to a weirdly puritan primitivist morality, where if a technology is bad it needs to be first, abstained from, then abandoned, then destroyed. The idea that we learn from technologies to learn about their wider context seems to be getting less and less attention. Accepting the various harms of AI as harmful - and I'll extend this to "Markov chains are harmful" so we're talking about like, 1970s+AI, not just 2022+AI - the first question should be "what is it that led us to do this harmful thing?" not "we are bad, we deserve punishment; people who do bad are bad unless they feel guilt." I know y'all aren't actively pushing back on it here, but I am seeing anti-AI sentiment cultivate a general attitude that it is good for a person to suffer either because they have personal moral failings that have led them to do harm to others, or because their society is sinful for doing harm to others, and thus suffering is the necessary baseline of doing good. Like, there's this... slip, like a worn-out ratchet, from "harm is harmful" to "harming is bad, judging good/bad is good, jduging is good," that manages to make shit about who to hurt, when, and how, in the name of preventing harm, in some weird belief that this'll this'll, in some complete reversal of the causality of spacetime, prevent harm that was allowed to occur because judgement was ongoing? I cannot see this as anything other than a recreation of the melacholy of the early ecclesiastical church, during a time of similar environmental turmoil (running out of forests)

Like, being deeply embedded in systems IS the human condition; it's the exisistential condition.

Balancing that participation as a participation in good and evil is just an epistemic perspective on that condition, though, a Christian inheritence. Distributing that judgement through society via decentralized measurements that aggregate into localized formations of force is a technology ontop of that belief: liberalism. It's also, to bring things back to the top of the thread, exactly how AI agents work. If AI agents and the world they live in work under harmonious logics that amplify the formation of force into the external world, understanding that logic seems incredibly pertinent to anyone who wants to understand the formations of force they're under, at all the various scales.

But the attitude is generally that that because this stuff is evil, it isn't worth learning about; as though power only exists when that person, personally, is giving it attention? (This is what too much computer UI does to a person: they forget the world moves even when they aren't giving it input.)

And like, I know I just sound grandiose, but I really don't think people see how much needing to perform a judgement against AI is leading them to judge things like cognition and knowledge itself as illegitimate, and how deeply that contradicts *everything* they experience day to day, and there is no way I see this playing out that doesn't lead to them becoming hardened, bitter, and unable to exert care toward anything in the world around them that just using their last breathes of energy to gasp "no! i don't like this!"

If this knowing is illegitimate, then stop saying words. Right? Like if this shit is serious, so serious it's going to genocide humanity and leave the Earth a lifelife husk (something people NOW believe, when I've been dealing with climate denialism forever?), if pursuit of knowing and acquiring knowing is literally what is actually killing the planet: what the fuck are folk doing *researching* climate breakdown? planning disaster shelters?

Because right now the "AI is bad, knowing is bad" energy is going more toward people posting shit like "gosh, people who use AI remind me of addicts! here's the way in which both are bad."

And not any serious interrogation of maybe language is harmful to humans. Because if you say that - well, you can't say it without language - but no one is going to take you seriously. But if you say "AI is harmful to humans," which is not anything different, in any technical way that anyone can point to as a clear, "this is where the line is between language and <AI>," then that's just performing common acceptable knowledge.

But without a firm definition behind it, ALL that's possible is a moral-style judgement of people based on that one fact; there's no deeper reasoning, unpacking, possible.

I've seen some people pivot from being "anti-AI" to "anti-chatbot" and I have liked seeing that kind of specificity emerge; there's a great number of critiques that are legitimate of ANY chatbot, that are often what people mean when they're against AI, that are NOT applicable to lots of AI (which is about shit like weather modeling, y'know?)

But going around saying "I don't think people should spend 12 hours a day talking to chatbots," or, "I don't think we should burn a country's worth of coal just so white folk can sext robots," doesn't have the same grandiose technological insight as "Artificial intelligence is destroying human curiousity," and instead just has rather mundane solutions that are simply impossible to enact without also doing a bunch of stuff that would destroy the world the speaker usually is heavily invested in maintaining.

@elplatt

computers are fast enough. we don’t need faster computers we need better software