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Pretty hard agree here, but I think there’s space for a gripe.

Our default state as humans is pretty awful and materially deprived, so I think making technology to improve our conditions is good. Making technology that does powerful things in the real world is difficult partly because of the vast quantity of data in its structure. If we make powerful AI systems equipped to handle that scale and built to make our lives better, it would be good, but we’re failing to do that which is the issue.

> Our default state as humans is pretty awful and materially deprived, so I think making technology to improve our conditions is good.

It's not a dichotomy! When I rail against technology, I am not saying that everyone need go back to the stone age. But don't you think there might be a happy medium?

At least personally, I've found that giving up a fair amount of technology in many cases has actually improved life in ways that I didn't think possible. Not everyone needs to be ascetic, but we seem to be headed to a life very tightly integrated with technology, and I think it's arguable that THIS POINT is past the point of that happy medium.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".

This quote summarizes much of the discourse in HN and the tech industry at large.

As you point out, it is in fact a false dichotomy but it is hard to run counter to hundreds of years of cultural conditioning that has run amok since the start of the industrial revolution. Hobbesian thought is common in these threads!

Luckily, we've had recent thinkers like Ellul, E.F. Schumacher, and Ivan Illich to challenge these entrenched views.

The Shirky Principle is not to be underestimated, yet more of a humorous take imho.

thou i would question the change in 'cultural conditioning' brought by industrialization als in practice it's mostly a means to scale society.

schumacher, being an atheist, is probably the most agreeable of the authors you mentioned.

I've started thinking technology is best when it's invisible.

I think much of our technology today is just about consuming more crap, and all that could go and we’d be fine, but I also think that our, say, medical technology could be infinitely better than it is. There’s also cool potentials like space travel or intelligence augmentation that I wouldn’t want to concede.

It's hard to agree with most of what you said without starting from the big assumption that "capitalism is bad" and "being anti-capitalism is a virtue"

Becoming more effective in and of itself simply means becoming more productive, which means creating goods and services with less, which means more "welfare" to people

If people are being convinced to buy shit they don't need, that's a separate issue. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater

In my well balanced life, I love interacting with LLMs. I also appreciate the things I have all of the time, without needing to slowing down technological progress to do so

> In my well balanced life, I love interacting with LLMs. I also appreciate the things I have all of the time, without needing to slowing down technological progress to do so

Okay that's fine, but you are not the rest of the world. While you enjoy the ultimate fruits of capitalism, there are people in developing countries suffering because of it through a lack of freedom and a destructiom of the landbases that they could once depend on. When climate change comes because of consumerism, it is you and other well-off people that will be able to move first.

OF COURSE, you will disagree with me, because you are probably at the apex. (Just the very fact that you have a well-balanced life means you are close to it, proportionally speaking to the entire human population.)

I don't claim that all capitalism is bad BTW. Rather, what I claim to be bad is global capitalism where other considerations have been eliminated or decimated.

I don't think I've ever seen a more clichéd argument against LLMs than "some people in the world suffer from capitalism".

That is not my argument against LLMs. Please don't put words in my mouth. My actual argument against LLMs is that:

1. They will replace so many jobs en masse that they will cause a large loss of meaning in many lives, that they will concentrate wealth in the hands of the tech companies, that they will enable even more efficient propaganda, and that they will be used as a drug to distract the populace from increasingly destructive practices enacted by global capitalism

2. LLMs will isolate us by providing more and more services that once were provided by humans. AI therapists, girlfriends/boyfriends, solvers of problems that we once turned to our fellow human being to solve. This vast increase in individual autonomy, pushed by psychological manipuluation to THINK that we need such autonomy, will destroy more local communities and connections that people have with each other. In conclusion we will become isolated and miserable, relying completely on the machine to keep our lives balanced without any autonomy to seek out our own way of doing things.

Is that still cliche enough for you, or would you like to make more comments in bad faith about my position?

>That is not my argument against LLMs. Please don't put words in my mouth.

That was the most people could read thought from your previous comments, now that I make you notice that, you wrote some actual arguments, even though I do not share your doomerish vision of the future.

Don’t put thoughts in my head. I could understand his comments perfectly.

I think you are absolutely correct in your assessment and I think there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it.

People in developing countries are better off with capitalism than without it... speaking as someone born and raised in a developing country. No, capitalism isn't perfect, but then again nothing is

Speaking of Brazil specifically since that's in your nickname, the deforestation of the Amazon to make room for cattle isn't caused by developed countries running LLMs. It's caused by Brazilians who are negligent, complacent, happy, even, with that choice.

true, capitalism is causing deforestation. pretty bad already, no llm needed.

Brazilians are causing deforestation. Capitalism is not needed. It's not like other economic systems protected the environment. Capitalism is just concurrent with deforestation, but not its inherent cause. You might as well say sunrises are causing deforestation because with every new sunrise, more trees are being chopped down.

r/im14

I find it curious that your reaction to this is to reduce OP's point to the "capitalism is bad" trope when it is in fact more nuanced than that. His point isn't anti-capitalist per se - it critiques the traits of the dominant economic system that many of us currently live in.

I won't assume bad faith on your part, but your argument also relies on a big assumption with regards to productivity gains, and who reaps them, and at the detriment of whom and what.

Well, up until 5 minutes ago his bio explicitly mentioned "anti-capitalism" so I put 2 and 2 together

I changed it because anti-capitalist is too vague. I have to think of a better term.....

Wouldn't a personal AI help you live a more well-balanced life, allowing us to offload tasks to it so we can appreciate the world around us and simplicity, rather having to do it all ourselves?

So far it seems that other automations have not done so. We've offloaded many tasks to computers, but now we spend more time than ever in front of a screen (see https://www.statista.com/statistics/645644/north-america-dai... for example). More people live in cities, with less opportunities for fresh air. And let's not forget that the system itself is so complex now with so many dependencies that we surround ourselves with anything but simplicity.

There might be a world where what you say is possible of course, but I don't see it in this one when it comes to more advanced forms of automation.

In fact, sometimes the joys of life can be found in the most simple of mechanical tasks. Of course, not everyone thinks so.

The problem is that none of them are actually good enough for that yet. The closest I've seen are calendar-managing LLM services, and even those only really work because it's a tightly-constrained task set and easy to confirm the results as good or not.

Edit: I still can't even trust Siri to be fully accurate 100% of the time about turning the lights on and off, let alone anything more complicated than that.

Why not just simplify, and not need such?