Reading stuff like this, I mentally recoil from the tone of self-righteous moral outrage. The ethical issues around AI don't seem any different than the rest of modern capitalism. But things like industrialised farming, manufacturing, fossil fuels, chemical production, etc. don't seem to generate anything close to the quasi-religious fervour that hating AI inspires in certain people.

It's difficult to escape the conclusion that the difference is that the harm from those other industries mostly accrues to the poor and the working class, whereas AI is threatening the livelihoods of rich, educated westerners who thought their social status insulated them from economic shocks like this.

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pjc50 a day ago | parent | next [-]

No, they do generate that outrage, you've just become used to ignoring it.

Besides, outrage is mostly a response to change, or seeing something in the news (a major outrage driver). If there's no news item to hang it on the outrage just sort of sits there uselessly.

There's a lot of outrage to go round. An entire US administration devoted to maximising gross national outrage will do that.

The class commentary affects why you're hearing about it, not what the baseline level of outrage is.

	▲	rob74 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Also, we are mostly too young to have experienced the outrage generated by industrial farming, industrialized manufacturing etc., while the outrage generated by AI is right here, right now.

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OnlineTux a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The ethical issues around AI don't seem any different than the rest of modern capitalism.

AI makes copyright and patents obsolete. There are no protections left for original nor derivative works; AI will hoover it all up and reproduce it without qualm and at scale. It must be trained, and it can only be trained on what already exists.

> But things like industrialised farming, manufacturing, fossil fuels, chemical production, etc. don't seem to generate anything close to the quasi-religious fervour that hating AI inspires in certain people.

A computer is a general-purpose machine. A tractor is not. AI is threatening every job that involves using a computer to accomplish it, or that could use computers and automation to accomplish it. Not to mention the promise of exponential growth; AI will continue to improve and in turn be used to improve itself, which a tractor cannot do.

These kinds of threats are what inspire such fears.

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dnemmers a day ago | parent | next [-]

"A computer is a general-purpose machine. A tractor is not."

I mean, a tractor can't do everything, but I'd be hard pressed to find something in the farmers tool box that can get a wide ranges of tasks completed.

Pretty much all farm tasks require it: Drilling, discing, spraying, cutting...not to mention pulling wagons, goods to market, etc etc.

	▲	pigpop a day ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly, the tractor was the general purpose machine for agriculture and all of the land management tasks that were tied up with that and modern people forget that agriculture used to be 60% of employment. If you broaden that to the motor then it really is a general purpose machine for all physical labour, which is something a computer is not capable of doing.

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zzzeek a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> AI makes copyright and patents obsolete. There are no protections left for original nor derivative works; AI will hoover it all up and reproduce it without qualm and at scale. It must be trained, and it can only be trained on what already exists.

if an AI produces direct plagiarized text from an existing work, that's copyright violation no different from if I simply wrote in my own book someone elses' words without attribution; the copyright holder is entitled to the same legal relief in either case.

if OTOH someone reads a lot of books and then goes off and writes their own book, and the influences of those various books is obvious but they didn't copy any sections verbatim, this is not a copyright issue, a critic might say "wow they really ripped off X and Y, what a terrible, derivative work". But no legal copyright violation, and this is incredibly common, normal, and ordinary, that people make movies/music/books/TV/whatever that is clearly derived from well known works that came before it. Doing the exact same process but also injecting one's own intent into this mixture of "derivation" is actually a feature, not a bug, of artistic creation - creators have to familiarize with the canon of work that came before them in order to produce new work. So if I said, "I want to create a computer program that makes art", of *course* it needs to *look at art*, either via ML training or encoded in the types of algorithms it uses, in order to attempt that.

What people are actually freaking out about is not the creation of cheap derivations, because bad, soulless art has always existed, but the fact that AI's can produce this usually mediocre-to-bad content at tremendous scales for very little money, crowding out human creation. As though there's a planet out there of conscious beings just like us, who have been watching human creation for centuries, and they've created their own creation economy, and one day we or them figure out how to give us humans access to it. Aside from the "we've made contact with extra terrestrial lifeforms" part of it, there'd be similar economic freakouts that humans only want to read books and watch movies made by those amazing alpha centaurian artists who are sending it to us for free.

	▲	js8 a day ago \| parent [-]
		I think the AI obsoleting copyrights is more of a problem for non-fiction, because nobody is gonna pay the primary source. So it's a big question how will remuneration work in the world where AI is effectively an enclosed commons.

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AnimalMuppet a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think it makes patents obsolete. It makes it easier to infringe on one, perhaps, but you can still get sued if you do.

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johnnyanmac a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> The ethical issues around AI don't seem any different than the rest of modern capitalism.

Let's fix that while we're at it too. I'm a bit tired of the "we already ruined this much. What's one more broken window" handwave. Let's start fixing windows instead.

>It's difficult to escape the conclusion that the difference is that the harm from those other industries mostly accrues to the poor and the working class, whereas AI is threatening the livelihoods of rich, educated westerners who thought their social status insulated them from economic shocks like this.

If you somehow assume that these people never cared about fossil fuels, manufacturing, unethical farming, etc. Yes. It can be easy to make that conclusion. Yet somehow, those have all been hot button issues for 30+ years at this point. Maybe they simply see an old pattern emerging to repeat yet again?