"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/33936586
~~all~~ ^only
Also; the reason why it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism is that ending the world actually is easier than ending capitalism.
It doesn't solve the energy and emissions crisis we are facing but sure.
(the energy and emissions crisis are also byproducts of capitalism)
They don't disappear if capitalism disappears. I agree with you capitalism needs to end in order to deal with them but there are hard issues that we have to deal with even with capitalism gone.
Even if the causes ceased we would still be left with residual emissions and degraded natural systems to try and deal with and a lower EROI society to do it.
They're "hard issues" because we don't have a centrally planned economy, we have to rely on the market to provide solutions.
Through a combination of marshaling the forces of production to build a renewable infrastructure and strict fossil fuel rationing during the build-up phase I think we could get the crisis under control within 5 years.
... I'll admit that's just vibes, though.
I get the sentiment and I wish it were true.
Some of the issues stem from material and energy limitations regardless of human organisation structures. Fossil Fuels are stored sunlight over a long period of time that means that burning them has a high yield and that's given us a very high EROI society (one where there's an abundance of energy for purposes that aren't basic functioning).
I recommend reading The Collapse of Complex Societies by Tainter who discussing the energy limitations of society. Its before our understanding of energy limitations of technology and he's by no means a leftist but it is still a good introductory text to it.
They’re “hard issues” because we don’t have a centrally planned economy, we have to rely on the market to provide solutions
As humans are very bad a predicting the future, centrally planned economies come with so many added problems that market based solutions are frequently more realistic.
Every corporation is centrally planned.
I recommend reading The People's Republic of Walmart. Businesses have figured out central planning, there's no reason it can't be done for nations.
No, they are not and how a business functions amd how a national economy function are incredibly different.
Walmart isn't a federation, it's very centrally planned. It's also larger than a lot of nations.
The only thing missing is a military.
Are you really this poorly educated in economics that you do not get that for profit businesses and nation states function under completely different realities?
Last I checked, businesses and nations exist in the same reality and follow the same physical laws.
Central planning works and you have been lied to by those same businesses that don't want to be nationalized.
Last I checked, businesses and nations exist in the same reality and follow the same physical laws.
They function under entirely different realities when it comes to economics. If you need this explained to you then you shouldn't be making definitive statements about anything related to economics in any regard. Microeconomics and macroeconomics exist for a reason.
Below is a link to MIT's open coursework providing free classes on specific subjects. You might consider looking into intro micro and macro.
The Aral Sea is essentially gone and it was killed by poor Soviet planning. Capitalism was not the driving factor rather ignorance was and ignorance is held equally by all sides.
Capitalism isn’t the only thing driving environmental collapse. It’s industrialization
Okay Tyler Durden
Central planners in the Soviet Union didn't even have computers and they lacked the level of scientific understanding we have today of the environment, of our resources, and of the limits to growth. We've all heard about Mao killing the sparrows in China.
This isn't a reason to never try central planning again.
Industrialization to make money is encouraged by capitalism. Why do you think big oil was lying about global warming? It's not a few bad apples it is a systemic drive to make more money even if it hurts people or the planet.
Industrialization has been done by every nation that is capable of doing it regardless of their economic system or philosophy.
Thinking this is a capitalist issue ignores the Marxist states that have horrible records on the environment eg China and the USSR. It's industrialization that is the issue.
There's a difference between industrialization for people and trade versus industrialization for money and power. One helps everyone, The other only helps capitalists.
I wouldn't necessarily look at China and USSR and say they are a good alternative. I prefer a more democratic socialism. My problem with capitalism is specifically the lack of choice of the people. We spend 8 out of 12 hours on average working for a company that we don't get a vote in.
There’s a difference between industrialization for people and trade versus industrialization for money and power.
Not as far as the environment is concerned and frankly many will tell you running water and electricity are huge advantages regardless of how you get them.
What? Yes, the environment can tell because there would be less pollution. The motivations are different. Do you think worker controlled industries would use the same tactics to over produce and polute the areas the workers live in? No one would benefit from that.
I'm not saying we would reach zero pollution but there would be a lot less pollution.
I have no problem with running water and electricity, most reasonable socialist would agree.
Nor does it resolve the inherent biases introduced by humans working on it
To be honest I'm tempted to say that desire to remove humans from the production of society is a fundamentally capitalist one.
While that might be true in some contexts it makes no sense in the context of my comment.
Im saying that leftist coders inherent personal problems and racism will make their way into the AI much like how it has worked with capitalist AI.
Humans have many of the same biases and issues regardless of political lean.
Yes that's fair. I guess my comment wasn't a direct response to yours other than it made me think this desire that all the difficult issues (like bias) just disappear if you remove all the humans from the process* is flawed and any anticapitalist society should really start from that understanding. One that understands that conflict will emerge and pro-social "convivial" systems and structures need to emerge to handle them.
*You are right to point out that the "AI" we are talking about is statistical models built from humans that includes bias where as the hype is that we have Data from Star Trek and therefore these systems hide the human inputs but don't remove them.
It's less of a bias of the programmer and moreso a bias of data, particularly when a factor like gender or ethnicity correlates with something without direct causation, such as crime rates correlating with ethnicity largely because of immigrants being poorer on average, and economic standing being a major correlating factor. If your dataset doesn't include that, any AI will just see "oh, people in group x are way more likely to commit crimes". This can be prevented but it's generally more of a risk of overlooking something than intentional data manipulation (not that that isn't possible).
Completely untrue.
The environmental impact would still be as bad, it would still spout out misinformation, it would still scrape for art against people's will, the images would still be shit and not art anyway, and would still make an intellectual sinkhole.
prove it
Ok cool make a true communist society and then I can.
Problem is that AI is going to be used to make it harder to overthrow capitalism. It’d be interesting to see the uses of AI in a world where it wasn’t being used to chip away at some of the last occupations where talent and skill mean anything.
It's also going to be used to eliminate positions where "talent" and "skill" aren't required, which is where a gigantic portion of a lot of countries populations work.
When ownership decides "I own the AI that run the factory and the AI inside the Robots that perform all the physical tasks in the factory, so why the fuck should any of my profit go to pay parasites on society?" that's when we get into the "let them all starve" portion of capitalism...
sure lets just get rid of capitalism as a whole, lets see where that lands us
Yes, let’s
I really disagree with this meme. For just one example, capitalism isnt why people are using ai to generate nudes of unwilling people and children. Without capitalism I do very much doubt AI would be where it is right now, but the cats out of the bag and it isnt going away if we didnt have capitalism.
People generating porn, no matter how abhorrent, is one of the LEAST problems with AI, but the fact that you are stuck on it is very telling
edit: you have no idea how bad AI is already fucking up your life and it has nothing to do with prompt art
"stuck on it" is an egregious hyperbole, they just gave it as an example.
Yeah lol, I just gave one quick example of something I felt was indisputably not tied to capitalism. But apparently I'm stuck on it and the only problem I have is with it generating porn? Wild way to read my post, and entirely untrue.