Erik Moeller
@eloquence@social.coop  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago

Why would a company employ a human worker, if a machine will do the job faster and a fraction of the cost? The answer seems obvious: it wouldn't.

If embodied Artificial General Intelligence becomes a reality in the near future, what does that mean for the human beings who get left behind?

Here's an attempt to answer that question: "Beyond UBI: Inching towards post-scarcity."

https://write.as/eloquence/beyond-ubi-inching-towards-post-scarcity
Erik Moeller
@eloquence@social.coop  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago

I share many critiques of AI that are common here on the fediverse, but my view is more opportunistic. AI does present opportunities to challenge existing power dynamics, because the very power that threatens labor also threatens the structures of exploitation.

If we can, slowly, gradually, mobilize it as a force multiplier for the common good, we may yet be able to avert a tech-capitalist dystopia.
Erik Moeller
@eloquence@social.coop  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago
@matt

I do. There's plenty of waste, and bias, and stupidity, but that doesn't mean there's no utility.

What gives me hope is the brain itself. It runs on 20 watts of power and has been able to get us into a lot of trouble!

As model architectures improve, I see no reason why their capabilities can't or won't be distilled down. In fact, that is happening with each model generation and made innovations like DeepSeek possible.

And that will make true open source AI more tractable over time.
Giacomo Tesio
@giacomo@snac.tesio.it  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago
@eloquence@social.coop

While I welcome your experiments like any other attempt to challenge the power structures of #capitalism.

However this specific attempt looks pretty naive and deeply misguided.

#AI is just opaque, statistically programmed, software.

As such, it embodies and reproduce the will of those who created it, selecting the source data (instead of writing the source code). They are always special-purpose software sold as general purpose.

In particular, #LLM are lossy compressions of source data selected for the sole purpose to fool people's minds and alienate them.

In general, wielding weapon of oppression against oppressor is a wild illusion that streghten their power as even the oppressed start relying on the infrastructure of their own oppression.

And unless you compile your own source dataset from scratch, without using pretrained models from third parties, you are going to serve the very same interests and power structures you are hoping to fight.