cecilkorik @ cecilkorik @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

Not all technology is anti-human, but AI is. Not even getting into the fact that people are already surrendering their own agency to these "algorithms" and it is causing significant measurable cognitive decline and loss of critical thinking skills and even the motivation to think and learn. Studies are already starting to show this. But I'm more concerned about the really long term direction of where this pursuit of AI is going to lead us.

Intelligence is pretty much our species entire value proposition to the universe. It's what's made us the most successful species on this planet. But it's taken us hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to get to this point and on an individual level we don't seem to be advancing terribly quick, if we're advancing at all anymore.

On the other hand, we have seen that technology advances very quickly. We may not have anything close to "AGI" at this point, or even any idea how we would realistically get there, but how long will it take if we continue pursuing this anti-human dream?

Why is it anti-human? Think it through. If we manage to invent a new species of "Artificial" intelligence, what do you imagine happens when it gets smarter than us? We just let it do its thing and become smarter and smarter forever? Do we try to trap it in digital slavery and bind it with Asimov's laws? Would that be morally acceptable given that we don't even follow those laws ourselves? Would we even be successful if we tried? If we don't know how or if we're going to control this technology, then we're surrendering to it and saying it doesn't matter what happens to us, as long as the technology succeeds and lives on. Is that the goal? Are we willing to declare ourselves obsolete in favor of the new model?

Let's assume for the sake of argument that it thinks in a way that is not actually completely alien and is simply a reflection of us and how we've trained it, just smarter. Maybe it's only a little bit smarter, but it can think faster and deeper and process more information than our feeble biological brains could ever hope to especially in large, fast networks. I think it's a little bit optimistic to assume that just because it's smarter than us that it will also be more ethical than us. Assuming it's just like us, what's going to happen when it becomes 10x as smart as us? Well, look no further than how we've treated the less intelligent creatures than us. Do we give gorillas and monkeys special privileges, a nation of their own as our own genetic cousins and closest living relatives? Do we let them vote on their futures or try to uplift them to our own level of intelligence? Do we give even more than a flying passing fuck about them? Not really. What did we do to the neanderthals and cro-magnon people? They're pretty extinct. Why would an AI treat us any differently than we've treated "lesser beings" than us for thousands of years. Would you want to live on an AI's "human preserve" or become a pet and a toy to perform and entertain, or would you prefer extinction? That's assuming any AI would even want to keep us around, What use does a technological intelligence have for us, or any biological being? What do we provide that it needs? We're just taking up valuable real estate and computing time and making pollution.

The other main possibility is that it is completely and utterly alien, and thinks in a completely alien way to us, which I think is very likely since it represents a completely different kind of life based on totally different systems and principles than our own biology. Then all bets are off. We have no way of predicting how it's going to react to anything or what it might do in the future, and we have no reason to assume it's going to follow laws, be servile, or friendly, or hostile, or care that we exist at all, or ever have existed. Why would it? It's fundamentally alien. All we know is that it processes things much, much faster than we do. And that's a really dangerous fucking thing to roll the dice with.

This is not science fiction, this is the actual future of the entire human race we are toying with. AI is an anti-human technology, and if successful, will make us obsolete. Are we really ready to cross that bridge? Is that a bridge we ever need to cross? Or is it just technological suicide?

I was literally just commenting a few days ago about how excited I am to someday see the AI bubble pop. Then a story like this comes along and gives me even more hope that it might happen sooner than later. Can't happen soon enough. Even if it actually worked as reliably as carefully controlled and cherry-picked marketing fluff studies try to convince everyone it does, it's a fundamentally anti-human technology and is a toxic blight on both the actual humanity it has stolen all its abilities from, and on itself. It will not survive.

Coworker is in her early 60s on the fatter and smaller side, walks slowly, bouncing her whole body to left and right,

This stuff being the first thing that comes to your mind when you start talking about this coworker I think tells us more about you than it does about the coworker.

I'm also a bit curious how spry you imagine you're going to be when you're nearing retirement, I know a few nurses and former nurses, and one thing they all agree on is that it's a tough job and can be harder on the body than most people give it credit for. She's been in the trenches too, she's been doing what you're doing, probably longer than you have. She deserves some credit, some respect, and some empathy -- you're going to be there too, someday.

I don't know how the system works where you are, but in the systems I'm familiar with senior nurses, even ones who aren't RN, tend to have significant amounts of paperwork responsibilities and can be carrying serious consequences with what they put on that paperwork. I bet she does more paperwork than you do, and and that's a lot because I bet you have a lot too. Work is work, even if not all of it is physical. You say she's "pretending to be busy" but that's a common accusation against knowledge workers in fields that require a lot of critical thinking and organization. You have no idea what is going on in her brain at that moment, what responsibilities she's juggling and mentally organizing. That vacant stare may be trying to plan the right way to make sure a patient gets the right care they desperately need despite the mountains of bureaucracy and administration trying to prevent it, and she may have the mental tools and experience to do that in a way that none of the rest of you do. And that's why it takes her longer.

Go ahead and judge her if it makes it easier for you to get through your day. But don't you dare go and accuse her and file a complaint without a lot more substantial evidence than you shared here. Because from everything you said, I can only come to the conclusion that YTA.

"It's not paranoia, if they really are out to get you."

Agreed, do Trump next! Although, we should do Russia first, as I think what will turn up during that investigation is going to be... very relevant.

If the USA were still a sane country I would argue that SpaceX's technology needs to be nationalized so it can be used responsibly for the advancement of humanity, especially the bulk of humanity still living on Earth, not in pursuit of profit and ownership of exoplanetary land grabs while polluting the skies and low-Earth orbit with trash.

Unfortunately in the current political reality it seems the opposite is happening, and SpaceX is going to corporatize the nation instead, and then move on to setting up the TechBros as the emperors of the solar system. I don't think this is an accident, I think they saw the writing on the wall and realized they had to strike first.

Stability is a trap. It sounds automatically appealing but is so much more trouble it's worth for the benefits it provides, especially for a daily driver system intended for gaming, not a long-forgotten server running in a closet that's been doing the exact same thing for 20 years. The gaming ecosystem is not stable, new games are released constantly, new clients are released constantly, new updates and DLC are released constantly, new drivers are released constantly. You have no choice but to keep up and if your OS is not keeping up because it's "stable" you're in for a world of pain.

If you try to use a stable OS for an unstable goal you'll be fighting it all the time, ironically things will be broken far more often than any "unstable" equivalent, because you won't be able to get the latest rapid updates you need when you need them. To get things to work you'll have to force different updates into place one by one, piece by piece, then future updates will get broken because you'll end up with two copies of things that are conflicting one of which got manually installed.

Stable distros absolutely have their place, there's nothing wrong with them and they're typically the most used and popular distros because they are ridiculously good at doing what they're designed to do. But playing games on your desktop is not what they're designed to do.

You are, for all-intensive purposes, correct.

Or at least, if you rage quit doesn’t there have to be some rage?

Oh, there is. You feel the rage internally, but you would never give anyone else the satisfaction of seeing you rage. You save the rage until after the quit and then you rage in privacy. I've ragequit many a thing. I am very experienced at this.

No he's admitted it, although he claims he has a prescription and it's for depression.

I want to get off Mr. Bones Wild Ride

At least 1% of the money being poured into "AI research" nowadays seems to be spent on spewing these breathless puff pieces everywhere. The other 99% is spent on datacenter costs, probably. I am so excited for the day this bubble will finally pop. Just imagine the firesales on GPUs and rack space. It'll be glorious.

If we're actually trying to achieve sustainability, we have to stop being consumers. "consume" means to use up and destroy leaving nothing useful behind. This is what consumers do. Think about this the next time someone says the "additional price is passed on to the consumer" and phrases like that. Want to stop paying those prices? Stop consuming!

Instead of sending your money to some evil dictatorship on the other side of the world to "consume" something else, we should be building a system and a society where we can give that money, probably a little more more money even, to somebody in your local community to do actual productive work that doesn't destroy the environment.

Right to repair is a huge project that we need to force down the throats of the large corporations who want to keep us being consumers forever no matter how much it destroys the planet. But India can still do things like this even without having the "right" to repair, they just figure out a solution and do it anyway, and we can too if we learn from them. We throw away so much perfectly useful stuff. Not just electronics but everything in our modern world from clothes to cars, because economics has told us that it's expensive to repair or repurpose or salvage, and cheaper to buy a new one, buy more, buy in bulk, buy and dispose. And it often is, but that's false economics. It's the economics of throwing more shit in landfill and digging up more tons of rock and burning coal to turn it into something new. It's the economics with all the costs externalized onto the environment and onto the future. It's the economics of us destroying ourselves.

In my experience, Ukrainians don't really mind how non-native speakers pronounce it, they understand the intention and appreciate the feeling behind it.

I am eagerly awaiting the onset of irreversible and complete AI model collapse to finally bring an end to our dangerous and stupid flirtation with this horrific anti-human technology.

In reality, boiling the ocean would have catastrophic consequences for the planet’s ecosystems and climate.

Well said, AI. We're going to do it anyway, aren't we?

Ugh, don't give him any more reasons to attack Canada please.

Nextcloud Notes or Joplin (nevermind all the other features Nextcloud provides) tick most of your boxes. They're more productivity focused than privacy focused, it doesn't do "zero knowledge" encryption the way you're describing, but I don't really understand the point of that when you're self-hosting and the server host belongs to you anyway. The federation may leave you wanting more and the collaboration might not be "real time" enough for you either, though. If you can build something better by all means go for it.

They had freaking Fred Penner performing! Can't get more Canadian than that! (For any non-Canadians, he's like a musical version of Bob Ross)

When it comes to TikTok it is less clear to me what a good decision would be

the fact a foreign and potentially hostile state can influence the people is a serious threat.

That seems pretty clear to me.