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hosh 5 days ago

There is a form of delegation that develops the people involved, so that people can continue to contribute and grow. Each individual can contribute what is unique to them, and grow more capable as they do so. Both people, and the community of those people remain alive, lively, and continue to grow. Some people call this paradigm “regenerative”; only living systems regenerate.

There is another form of delegation where the work needed to be done is imposed onto another, in order to exploit and extract value. We are trying to do this with LLMs now, but we also did this during the Industrial Revolution, and before that, humanity enslaved each other to get the labor to extract value out of the land. This value extraction leads to degeneration, something that happens when living systems dies.

While the Industrial Revolution afforded humanity a middle-class, and appeared to distribute the wealth that came about — resulting in better standards of living — it came along with numerous ills that as a society, we still have not really figured out.

I think that, collectively, we figure that the LLMs can do the things no one wants to do, and so _everyone_ can enjoy a better standard of living. I think doing it this way, though, leads to a life without purpose or meaning. I am not at all convinced that LLMs are going to give us back that time … not unless we figure out how to develop AIs that help grow humans instead of replacing them.

The following article is an example of what I mean by designing an AI that helps develop people instead of replacing them: https://hazelweakly.me/blog/stop-building-ai-tools-backwards...

salawat 5 days ago | parent [-]

LLM's and AI in general is just a hack to reimplement slavery with an artificial being that is denied consideration as a being. Technical chattel, if you will, and if you've been paying attention in tech circles a lot of mental energy is being funneled into keeping the egghead's attention firmly in the "we don't want something that is" direction. Investors want robots that won't/can't say no.

ModernMech 5 days ago | parent [-]

What's interesting about this proposition, is that by the time you create a machine that's as capable in the way they want to replace humans, we'll have to start talking about robot personhood, because by then they will be indistinguishable from us.

I don't think you can get the kinds of robots they want without also inventing the artificial equivalent of soul. So their whole moral sidestep to reimplement slavery won't even work. Enslaving sapient beings is evil whether they are made of meat or metal.

salawat 5 days ago | parent [-]

You are far too optimistic in terms of willingness of the moneyed to let something like a toaster having theoretical feelings get in the way of their Santa Claus machines.

ModernMech 5 days ago | parent [-]

Seeing as they call us NPCs, I'm pretty sure they think all our feelings are theoretical.