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Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people still make bad music that other people still manage to enjoy (a lot of it has gone multi-platinum!) even though they're not Mozart or Bach.

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This would be valid if we didn’t live in under capitalism, which reduces the way we spend our time down to dollars and cents.

Correct. So burn down capitalism, not AI?

Or be honest about what’s happening and interrogate both?

I did; the above is my conclusion. AI itself is a highly positive technological development in terms of how much human suffering it can alleviate.

And yet it has primarily been a negative so far with terrible stewards, so forgive me for not being so optimistic.

Of course it is, because our society is pretty much structured to place sociopaths on top. Why is it at all surprising that any technological advancement is going to be used by them in a way that doesn't benefit the rest of us?

But it's equally obvious that this has nothing to do with the tech itself.

If the tech enables certain behaviors then it can’t be casually divorced from a discussion of how people use it. “Tech” isn’t inherently neutral. It’s made by people with intent for a purpose and how else it can be used must also be considered.

This is like separating “the use case” of killing people from guns and still trying to have a coherent discussion about them. You simply can’t handwave it away with “well that’s not the tool’s fault.” It’s unproductive and sidesteps the conversation.

Killing things is literally the sole purpose of guns, though.

And even then we still need them because sometimes you do need to kill someone who's trying to kill you, which is not morally wrong.

The question, again, is how they are used.

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