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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Stop blaming technology for the way humans misuse it. AI, like any technology, is a lever. Like a big metal rod. You could use that to move stones for building a structure, or to dislodge a boulder to roll down a hill and destroy someone else's building.

The pre-AI situation is actually incredibly bad for most people in the world who are relatively unprivileged.

"Democracy" alternates between ideological extremes. Even without media, the structure of the system is obviously wholly inadequate.

Advanced technologies can be used to make things worse. But they are also the best hope for improving things. And especially the best hope for empowering those with less privilege.

The real problems are the humans, their belief systems and social structures. The status quo may seem okay to you on most days, but it is truly awful in general. We need as many new tools as possible.

Don't blame the tools. This is the worst kind of ignorance.

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This is a naive view of technology and its development. Yes, there is a certain degree to which technologies can be appropriate for a range of ends, but they are also created and distributed in historical situations in which the creators have incentives. There are plenty of cases in history in which purely "neutral" technological decisions and developments had intentional political and economic effects. Check out Langdon Winner's classic paper "Do artifacts have politics?"

The tools do not exist without the humans, and the humans, consciously of otherwise, design tools according to their own views and morals.

To outline just a basic example: many initial applications of generative AI were oriented toward the generation of images and other artistic assets. If artists, rather than technologists, had been the designers, do you think this would have been one of the earlier applications? Do you think that maybe they may have spent more time figuring out the intellectual property questions surrounding these tools?

Yes, the morals ultimately go back to humans, and it's not correct to impute morals onto a tool (though, ironically enough, the personification and encoding of linguistic behaviors in AI may be one reason that LLMs can be considered a first exception to this) but reducing the discussion to "technology is neutral" swings the pendulum too far in the other direction and ultimately tends to absolve technologists and designers of moral responsibility pushing it to the use, which, news flash, is illegitimate. The creators of things have a mora responsibility too. For example, the morality of designing weapons for the destruction of human life is clearly contestable.

My views are not naive. Let's get specnific. What do your propose? That LLMs or image generators be banned?

Are technologists creating AI swarms for political manipulation? Or is that being done by politicians or political groups?

Are you suggesting that an LLM or image generator is like a gun?

I'm not arguing for a ban, but I am trying to argue for a more nuanced view about technology and responsibility.

No, LLMs are not guns. That said, any responsible and conscious designer of LLMs should know they impose other risks, like the ones they pose regarding misinformation and democracy. They should also know that they pose risks regarding economic stability and copyright law and plagiarism.

You could try to weigh this against the benefits, but the fact of the matter is, the responsible way to develop these technologies is to show that you are explicitly accounting for these obvious dangers as well. Very few companies actually do that (because they selfishly choose to optimize for profit instead).

My main point is just that the user isn't the only person with some amount of responsibility when it comes to technology. Designing a tool does not therein automatically absolve you of any moral responsibility.

I think the reasonable approach is regulation—it is the only thing that helps combat sheer profit motive and force companies to attend to at least some of this responsibility.

> Stop blaming technology for the way humans misuse it

> Don't blame the tools. This is the worst kind of ignorance

"Stop blaming [guns // religion // drugs // cars // <insert_innovation_here>] for the way humans misuse it"

There is a reason regulations exist. Too much regulation is detrimental to innovation, but some amount of standards is needed.

Guns, drugs and religion are not equivalent to AI.

I did not say there should not be regulation or standards.

The point is that the whole diagnosis is wrong. People point at AI as creating a new problem as if everything was okay.

But everything is already fucked and it's not because of technology it's because of people, their social structures and beliefs. That is what we need to fix.

There are lots of ways that AI could help democracy and government in general.

None of it outweighs the harms in the hands of provably malicious governments or corporate interests. Hell, the Western ideal of Government is only truly considered tolerable given the caveat that we're constantly cycling chunks of it out, and that it never becomes so efficient and automated that it can trivially operate without the consent of the governed.

And there a lots of ways to fuck the situation even more up.

AI makes fake news in masses possible.

You think the situation is bad? Let’s talk about that in 5 years.

> Stop blaming [guns // religion // drugs // cars // <insert_innovation_here>] for the way humans misuse it

I tend to agree with this statement honestly.

Right? People say this as some defense for regulation, but it's the opposite. Everything that can, will be misused. USA has a lot of shootings - where guns are the most common on earth - big surprise? But when you get beyond the surface knee jerk, it's almost entirely gangs over drugs. Well, those things are already "regulated" so clearly there is a disconnect somewhere between freedom and being mad at the next thing in the chain - punishing everyone because someone might be bad.

The adult take is that things do not have malice, people might, so address that because the world will never be regulated into safety enough for the people that don't get human nature.

> Stop blaming technology for the way humans misuse it.

Exactly, that's why I propose every person has access to a nuke.

Elephant in the room here: the scale of technology matters. Being able to lie on a scale that eradicates truth as a concept matters.

We can't just naively say all tools are similar. No no, it doesn't work that way. I'm fine with people having knives. I'm fine with people having a subset of firearms. I am not fine with people having autonomous drones, or nuclear weaponry, or whatever. Everything is a function of scale. We cannot just remove scale from the equation and pretend our formulas still hold up. No, they don't. That's why the printing press created new religions.

We know that humans are the problem but you can’t change that.

Maybe it’s a bad idea to put powerful tools in the hands of people you know will misuse it.

Let‘s make e gedanken experiment.

We create mighty tools with two buttons. Button 1 solve world hunger and cure every disease. Button 2 kill everybody but you.

Would give everyone such a tool?

You could make it with only 1 button, (your first) and it could still end up doing the second. Full extermination of the people vulnerable to disease and hunger is, in fact, a valid optimization strategy.

There is no getting around the fact that these things are nothing like regular technology where you can at least decompose it down to functional working parts. It isn't debuggable basically. Nor predictable.

Its a bit more of a question of which can we change more easily; tools, or human nature

Human nature. The tools will always follow that.

The tool is the final key for a omnipresent full time monitoring and control.

Everywhere you move. Everything you say, everything you buy.

They've had the monitoring technology for decades. The problem was the fire hose.

There is no problem with the fire hose anymore.

If this doesn't scare the s** out of you, then you're ignorant.

Maybe if we had a well-functioning government I would hold out some degree of hope. But our Democratic institutions are already in shambles from facebook.

All previous technologies basically enhanced the talent and intelligence. Yes AI can do that, but the difference this time is it replaces intelligence on a huge scale

The role of the intelligensia, to borrow an old term, arguably has pushed idealistic progress on society with its monopoly on competence.

That Monopoly on competence generally came with it. The essential counterbalance to centralized authority and power along with idealism and philosophically derived morality and righteousness.

Ai is the end of the monopoly of competence for almost all the hacker news crowd.

North Korea is the future with AI.

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