The Media Is Smearing the Democratic Socialists of America on Palestine
theluddite @ theluddite @lemmy.ml Posts 12Comments 348Joined 2 yr. ago
theluddite @ theluddite @lemmy.ml
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348
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2 yr. ago
Different article about the same "report" being discussed here: https://lemmy.ml/post/6609951?scrollToComments=true
No on should take any of these articles seriously. They all do the same thing: They purposefully reduce a complex task into generating some plausible text, and then act shocked when the LLM can generate plausible text. Then the media credulously reports what the researchers supposedly found.
I wrote a whole thing responding to this entire genre of AI hype articles. I focused on the "AI can do your entire job in 1 minute for 95 cents" style of article, but most of the analysis carries over. It's the same fundamental flaw -- none of this research is real science.
The purpose of a system is what it does. "There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” These articles about how social media is broken are constant. It's just not a useful way to think about it. For example:
It relies on badly maintained social-media infrastructure and is presided over by billionaires who have given up on the premise that their platforms should inform users
These platforms are systems. They don't have intent. There's no mens rea or anything. There is no point saying that social media is supposed to inform users when it constantly fails to inform users. In fact, it has never informed users.
Any serious discussion about social media must accept that the system is what it is, not that it's supposed to be some other way, and is currently suffering some anomaly.
It's actually very confusing. I think the only good definition is that it's a cultural designation for any company that was focused on digital technology at its inception, which comes with a certain cultural package, and even that has some problems. Netflix is a tech company, not a movie studio, but HBO is not a tech company, even though it also has a streaming platform, and Netflix produces a lot of its own stuff, which is even more confusing because Netflix started as a company that would mail you DVDs. Amazon is a tech company, but WalMart is not, even though Amazon has many physical stores and WalMart does more and more of its business online.
Mechanical engineering can be a part of tech, but again I think it's a cultural designation before anything else at this point. Plenty of mechanical engineers work at Apple, which is definitely a tech company, but if you're a mechanical engineer working on an oil rig, that's not tech.
Add to the confusion that Twitter is a tech company. At this point, what technology is Twitter really developing? Isn't technology about innovation? No doubt that a platform of that size has substantial daily engineering problems to overcome, but like... is that really what we mean when we say technology? Plenty of non-tech companies also deal with the same thing.
I wrote a whole thing fleshing out my theory, if you're curious.
edit: just under this post in my feed is one about how netflix is going to open physical stores.
Word. Personally, I really like St. Augustine's writings, which is a weird thing for an atheist and socialist living 1600 years later to say. I got really into his stuff during the pandemic for some reason. I also recommend some of Trotsky's writing about war, especially in the run-up to WW1 while they were trying to hold the second international together. Lots of really wonderful stuff about international solidarity, and the role of socialists in a time of capitalist war, that I think would do people good to read today, 100 years later. He also wrote some stuff once he was in power after WW1 that I personally found less cool, but interesting in a "no one can reign innocently" way.
People have been coming up with theories about this forever, from perspectives and time periods as diverse as Aristotle, St. Augustine, Gandhi, and Trotsky. You put a lot of very difficult questions in your post, but you didn't put forth a criteria for what "justified" means to you. I think you're going to need to interrogate that before being able to even think about any of these questions. For example, is violence justified by better outcomes, or by some absolute individual right to fight your oppressor? Is justification a question of morality, legality, tactical value, or something entirely different?
If you like this you should check out xenobots. They're this but actually real. They're made of muscle cells and can move on their own and apparently reproduce.
It's actually the perfect metaphor for all the AI hype.
Ya I wasn't that impressed either. Definitely way over hyped by headline. It's a way less awesome xenobot that doesn't actually do anything without significant human input.
Here ya go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wph_Im03cn0
Even if that's a real demo, I still have two thoughts.
First, the technical capacity of it has nothing to do with our user experience. Indian people are just as good at delivering customer service as Americans are, yet when we outsource customer service, we make it worse.
Second, even in that demo, the chat bot didn't do anything. I very rarely call customer service for technical support. When I call, I normally need specific answers to me, or actions from the company, like a flight change, or an explanation for a charge I don't understand, or to coordinate warrantied repairs on something I just bought, etc. Notice that all the information the chatbot gave was general-purpose, googlable stuff. Companies aren't going to let their chatbots change your flight for you or whatever. What's going to happen is we're going to have to deal with an LLM that can't actually resolve our problems, and convince it to go fetch a human.
And CEOs must make themselves personally available to angry customers for a minimum number of hours per week.
The article only slightly touched on this, but the incoming LLM customer service chatbots are going to absolutely fucking suck, just like outsourcing all the call centers made customer service actually a lot worse, not because people farther away are worse at customer service or anything, but because companies created rigid systems and scripts to remove any agency from its agents. It's now common for these outsourced call centers to have an initial layer of absolutely useless positions who are only allowed to do a few things, and then they have to escalate to a "supervisor," who is clearly just an agent with slightly more privileges, and this continues recursively forever. All this does is make the call last forever, but hey, they save some money, and customers like you and me are forced to spend an hour plus on the phone any time we have a problem with any large company.
Capitalist job replacement isn't a one-for-one. So long as it makes more profits to do it, they will, even if it makes the service suck. When I have a problem, I need a person with some understanding and agency to resolve it on the other end. LLMs don't know anything. Even a semi-fluent person with no admin privileges is so much more useful than an LLM. These companies are going to fire all these workers and make customer service an absolute fucking nightmare.
omg haha. Glad to have you! I guess the lemmy tech communities are pretty small ;)
I agree. Tech news, in general, is basically ads, some more thinly veiled than others -- it's a lot of "look at this new cool thing." And the tech critics, with the exception of Cory Doctorow, generally know surprisingly little about tech itself, focusing instead on the companies, their owners, their users, their financing, and so on. That can be very valuable, but I do think that it's missing a piece.
This is why I founded theluddite.org. It’s an independent site written by leftists working in tech and academia, mostly aimed at other people in tech and academia, but also for tech enthusiasts. We are not professional opinion-havers, which means we don't need to stay friendly with say Apple to get invited to their product launch or get early access to their new service or whatever, and that's good, because I hate apple. I myself am the main writer for the luddite, and I write code for a living every day, and have been for going on 13 years. It's something that surprisingly few tech commentators have ever done. Because of our jobs, we know how technology and the industry actually work. That's why, while other people can write about Google's court case, we can just straight up show you how google is breaking the internet.
We're mostly interested in how that intersects with human agency and society. It's also explicitly anti-capitalist. That may or may not be your jam, but given the nature of this post, I assume you're at least a little skeptical of a system which fills everything with ads and pretends it's news :).
I am! The US military's fossil fuel usage is very well-documented and a matter of public record. Here's a forbes article about it, titled The U.S. Military Emits More CO2 Than Many Industrialized Nations . Forbes isn't exactly a left-wing rag!
If you're in the US, even if you personally literally stop eating, breathing, and even moving, the US military is emitting such an enormous amount of carbon on your behalf that you still have among the worst "carbon footprint" (a dubious concept generally but useful for this discussion) on earth.
Personally, I'm a member of several socialist groups, because I believe only large, structural changes can fix this, even before we talk about fixing them equitably. The DSA is active in your area, so that's a really good place to start. There's also an Extinction Rebellion chapter in your area. Another good place to start. If you have specific interests, say economics, I can suggest other organizations too.
Important question, by the way. Appreciate you posting it.
I'm going to politely disagree. We should be afraid, but not the helpless feeling you describe, but an actionable, productive fear. The kind of fear that you feel when you see a kid too close to the edge of the stairs, or when you meet someone obviously dangerous. It needs to be a focusing fear, because we need to act now, and it's going to be an unpleasant process. We're not going to be able to vote or buy or donate our way out of this. We're going to need to be angry and loud. People aren't going to like it, and that's when we'll need our fear.
Most of us are afraid of conflict, or looking stupid, or making people angry, or getting made fun of, or even being arrested. We need to be more afraid of climate change so that we don't care, like a parent who sees their kid in trouble and just dives, without worrying about how stupid they're going to look after. We need to be afraid enough that the normal routines of our daily lives become intolerable, because those routines will be disrupted, whether we like it or not. The question is how we do it: We can do it now, which will suck, or when climate change comes for us, which will suck a lot more.
As for carbon capture, it's what I call a technological antisolution. It's a technical solution to a political problem that is incapable of actually solving said problem, but instead monetizes it, and further entrenches existing power structures.
Here's what I mean -- look at the big new carbon capture thing that was making the news just recently:
It's a deal with none other than Exxon Mobile. Carbon capture only exists because it allows companies to profit off creating the problem and its "solution." Antisolutions maximize GDP in the climate emergency. They even admit it without realizing it. From the article:
Carbon capture is a big boys' game," said Peter McNally [...] "These are billion-dollar projects. It's big companies capturing large amounts of carbon. And big oil and gas companies are where the expertise is.
What a bizarre coincidence that our most well-funded "solution" to climate change relies on big oil companies!
edit: (accidentally hit save before finishing) as for concrete steps, we need to organize. That always has been and always will be the solution to politics. We need to get together, and we need to demand that things change. It's going to take marches, strikes, protests, walk-ins, sit-ins, boycotts, ...
If you want to see an example of how to actually challenge power, take a look at what organizers in Atlanta are doing to stop the city from cutting down their forest and replacing it with "cop city," a training ground for the increasingly militarized police. They've been fighting it off for a long time now, and they're showing us what works and what doesn't, and, importantly, how loud and obnoxious you have to make yourself for power to listen.
This is supremely frustrating. I knew it was going to be frustrating before I clicked, but it was even more frustrating than I had anticipated.