This is fair as a criticism of the leading AI companies, but there's a catch.

When you attribute blame to technologies, you make it difficult to use technologies in the construction of a more ethical alternative. There are lots of people who think that in order to act ethically you have to do things in an artisanal way; whether it's growing food, making products, services, or whatever. The problem with this is that it's outcompeted by scalable solutions, and in many cases our population is too big to apply artisanal solutions. We can't replace the incumbents with just a lot of hyper-local boutique businesses, no matter how much easier it is to run them ethically. We have to solve how to enable accountability in big institutions.

There's a natural bias among people who are actually productive and conscientious, which is that an output can only be ethical if it's the result of personal attention. But while conscientiousness is a virtue in us as workers, it's not a substance that is somehow imbued in a product, if the same product is delivered with less personal attention then it's just as good - and much cheaper and therefore available to more people, which is the product is good for them, makes it more ethical and not less.

(I'm making a general point here. It's not actually obvious to me that AI is an essential part of the solution either)

I agree with this. We've made existing problems 100x worse overnight. I just read the curl project is discontinuing bug bounties. We're losing so much with the rise of AI.

I suppose to belabor the analogy, its still not the petrol’s fault - the same fuel is also used to transport firefighting resources, in fact, a controlled burn might have effectively mitigated the risk of a forest fire in the first place. Who left those leaves to smolder in the first place, anyway? Why’d you throw petrol on the pile?

You just have to be careful not to say “this is AI’s” fault - it’s far more accurate, and constructive, to say “this is our fault, this is a problem with the way some people choose to use LLMs, we need to design institutions that aren’t so fragile that a chatbot is all it takes to break them.”

or, having a glass of wine with dinner or a few beers on the weekend is fine. but drinking a 6-pack per day or slamming shots every night is reckless and will lead to health consequences.

I agree and disagree with parts of what you said.

AI may have caused a distinct trajectory of the problem, but the old system was already broken and collapsing. If the building falls over or collapses in place doesn't change that the building was already at its end.

I think the fact that AI is allowed to go as far as it has is part of the same issue, namely, our profit-at-all-costs methodology of late-stage capitalism. This has lead to the accelerated destruction of many institutions. AI is just one of those tools that lets us sink more and more resources into the grifting faster.

(Edit: Fixing typos.)

I think the wrong lesson to draw for this is that it's just a systems problem. Somehow if we do a different song and dance, the outcome will be different. I've been thinking that the end state of capitalism and communism are not that different - what is the difference between wealth that you can't spend in a million lifetimes and "no" wealth at all? The endpoint is the same, the game becomes about relative power over others, in service of an unending hunger.

Capitalism is the manifestation of the aggregate human psyche. We've agreed that this part of our selves that desires to possess things and the part that feels better when having even more, is essential. This is the root we need to question, but have not yet dared to question. Because if we follow this path of questioning, and continue to shed each of our grasping neuroticisms, the final notion we may need to shed is that we are people, individual agents, instead of nonseparate natural phenomena.

We will have to confront that question eventually because we will always have to face the truth.

I'll focus just on food here: people do have a choice. I don't live in the US but is it impossible to buy basic ingredients, fruit, vegetables, grains, meat whatever etc., and actually cook something? Eating this kind of food you can even stack your life chances more in your favor. Huge amounts of information abound as to the how you can do that. Consumers, if they are free to choose, determine value and entrepreneurs will respond. It can be profoundly distorted, that's true but at base, capitalism is doing something that someone else finds of value or not.

It's not capitalism, it's the monetary system that's the problem. It's not a level playing field. Capitalism requires a fair monetary system as a precondition. Though I can agree that communism would be better than whatever perverse system we have now.

>Capitalism is destroying institutions.

What year do you think was the first year of capitalism? Depending on your starting point, it caused the American Revolution and French Revolution.

It caused destruction of monarchy.

Man I had forgotten how batshit conspiracy theory that was

Exactly! Was going to make a similar comment if I didn't already see one. People keep saying things like this and drives me fuckin' nuts. It's not that there are no positives but I don't see how the positives outweigh the negatives.

I have observed this with students. Some use AI to really extend their capabilities and learn more, others become lazy and end up learning less than if they hadn't used AI.

A government related alignment may lead to increased truth?? Have you been paying attention in the last year where the government is cleansing government websites of any facts that don’t support its narrative

> Universities have pushed post-modernism since the 60s which is the precursor for the deprecation of truth.

This is wildly overstating the influence of post-modernists or universities in general. There is a war on objective reality but it grew out of religious (creationism, anti-feminism/LGBTQ) and industrial (pollution) sources, not a bunch of French intellectuals in parts of some universities, and that started long before post modernism. Even if you think they’re equivalent, there’s simply no comparison for the number of people reached by mass media versus famously opaque writings discussed by many orders of magnitude fewer people.

What kind of left populism are you talking about, and how has it contributed to the destruction of the state?

> Universities have pushed post-modernism since the 60s which is the precursor for the deprecation of truth.

Call me crazy, but the situation may be more nuanced than this (and your next statement). For example, all universities embraced post-modernism? Also, universities are the arbiter for truth? If so, which universities and which truths? Or is it the transcendental Truth all universities gave out? Lastly, post-modernist ideas on media or some other part of culture?

Complaining about post modernism in universities reads like a dog whistle