i wrote down my current thoughts on AI, first draft, titled "AI is Fake People": https://minute.social/index.html
what do you think?
6 Boosts
1 Like
I particularly appreciated your phrasing: "gaslighting as a service".
It seems to me, a lot of awful things, get their names changed, in order to avoid recompense?
e.g. Windscale (renamed to Sellafield after nuclear accidents, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire).
In the USA? Bribery is illegal; yet "lobbying"? Seems to be a different word, for the same sort of thing, thus apparently escaping whatever primitive regex pattern match was in place prohibiting the practice. To me? I perceive "cloud" computing as more or less synonymous with timesharing mainframe systems which the personal computer revolution in the last quarter of the 20th century, sought to displace. Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp? Now they're Meta. Twitter? Is X. undsoweiter.
The names may have changed, yet the underlying awfulness? Remains the same.
To me? Having considered myself a survivor of the last so-called "A'I' Winter"? I see LLMs and Machine Learning as new names, for the same old bullshit.
Which is to say: "those who have learned from history are doomed to watch others repeat it."
Or maybe why some claim: "history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."
I dunno, maybe in a longer timeline, I will fathom the rhymes? Just seems villainous ad nauseam.
This federated comment is not yet available here.
@whitequark the thing about pets really resonates with me. i've thought about animals multiple times while writing this, but didn't know how to include this topic. another self-critique that i had when i went to bed is like "i hope it's clear i don't mean prosthetics", and assistive technology. which is connected to your point about transhumanism. i'd call myself ex-transhumanist maybe, and recently learned about posthumanism. i'm not against augmentation and cyborgism, and am transgender.
@mntmn i still don't actually know how we (as a society) should deal with cats. for example, TNR programs are probably worse from a genetic perspective than outright killing problem animals (though not as effective). on a less morbid note, cat colonies clearly have culture and approximately not a single person, no matter how cat-minded, would consider destruction of this kind of culture... consequential
(not isolated to cats, but cats are a good benchmark in that most humans are obsessed with cats in a positive way. so other animals get it worse in many ways.)
@mntmn and yeah, I make no drastic difference between "posthuman" and "transhuman". the ends of the axis are (this is mostly a joke) "catholic" and "everything else". i'm on the "everything else" end
@mntmn re: assistive technology: I posit that there is no fundamental difference between "assistive" tech (as in prosthetics for disability) and "enhancing" tech besides, perhaps, intent. i find it far more concerning when someone is more bothered with enforcing the natural order of things than actually making sure another's life is good
birth control, for example. most cis women can safely opt out of menstruation, or at least reduce the frequency to maybe once or twice a year. this is something that is between "utterly medically necessary" and "incredibly convenient". but it's only really getting recognized now in medicine
@whitequark I think you're onto something here. As a disabled (legally blind) person myself, I'm suspicious of policies and positions that try to hold onto the natural order of things or old ways of doing things, while allowing a narrow exception for recognized disabilities. One example is going back to handwritten assignments and tests, while making an exception for blind people or people with mobility impairments. Yes, *they* can use a computer, a restricted one.
@mntmn fantastic text, thanks!
@mntmn Lucie, that article is spot on.
The kind of people who push this are power hungry, their empathy is damaged.
We can tell the care and empathy you have for the mnt community.
@mntmn « gaslighting as a service » 👌