6,888 karma · joined May 2, 2017
One of the most fundamental principles of the left is that everyone is equal.
Everyone deserves equal treatment under the law.
Sure, there are some individuals on the left (or ostensibly so) who are either bad at practicing that or who genuinely don't believe in it, but that doesn't make it not part of the core tenets.
I am saying that if you want to justify saying that a particular statistical anomaly that occurred during the 2020-2023 timeframe is not wholly or nearly wholly caused by the pandemic and its direct and indirect effects, you better have some damn good data to prove it.
Between 2018 and 2022, we had a global pandemic hit!
The only reason we were "digitalizing education" is because millions of people were getting sick and dying. Millions more lost their jobs.
Trying to blame any single aspect of what happened during that period, like moving to remote learning, is hopelessly myopic and blinkered.
...No, that's why the ICC requires us to sign on.
We voluntarily accept a joint sovereignty over each other.
The problem is that for the past 80 years or so, the US has gotten very, very comfortable forcing other nations to accept our sovereignty. Over them. The powers that be really, really don't want to give that up and be accountable to anyone.
That's not sustainable, it's not ethical, and it's guaranteed to lead to more conflict down the line.
The ICC as currently constituted may be imperfect, but IMO it is a good step forward toward a world where we are all accountable to each other, and we collectively enforce an agreed-upon set of ethics for every country's operations.
I think it's fairly straightforward to anyone approaching this discussion in good faith.
> All you're asking for is a self prompting AI that does what it wants.
I'm not asking for any of this.
I'm saying that comparing LLMs to a "demon" is hopelessly hyperbolic.
> Also, you're not really that independent and thinking-for-yourself.
I fully understand the effects that our upbringing, environment, and even diet have on our personalities and choices. (In a broad sense; I'm not trying to say I'm some kind of genius expert on that stuff.)
I also have agency, self-awareness and independence that an LLM cannot have, and trying to confuse that matter by pointing to the ways in which we are influenced by the above is disingenuous and unhelpful.
> It's kind of funny how we've lived in that science fantasy world for decades and you've just grown used to and bored of it. Look back a century or two and those people would think we live in the world of gods.
Again, you're trying to shift and deflect the conversation away from the fact that LLMs are nothing like Skynet/Durandal/HAL 9000 by drawing specious comparisons. The fact that we have technology today that the sci-fi authors of the mid-20th century could not even imagine (eg, smartphones, internet) does not in any way negate the fact that AGI/ASI remain in the realm of science fiction, much like demons remain in the realm of fantasy.
But no one has summoned a demon.
No one has built an actual, independent, thinking-for-itself, sci-fi AI.
They've built some very interesting tools that can be used for some very interesting, and sometimes useful, purposes. They then started loudly telling everyone that these tools can, should, and must be used for absolutely every purpose, and convinced a lot of other people to join in on that.
The world these people are living in is the real world, not the science fantasy world where LLMs are comparable to demons.
What's really true is that people are, 99% of the time, not actually given that choice. For "revealed preferences theory" to work, the people involved would need to consistently have a free choice between two options. And for people who have had their finances gradually stretched and stretched over the past 40 years of growing inequality, "cheaper but worse" is not a free choice.
And I'm not using "political" any more broadly than conservatives or self-proclaimed centrists do when they say they don't want anything "political" in their games, TV shows, movies, etc.
Because when they say that, 99.9% of the time, what they mean is they want their media to confirm their pre-existing biases, that straight white men are the most important, that straight women are there for their sexual gratification, and other people mostly shouldn't even show up, etc. We've seen this over and over and over again.
And the other part of what they usually say is that they want no politics in their media, just like in the old days.
But, again: it's always been there. They just didn't see it in the old days. They played Wolfenstein and shot Nazis, and didn't see that as "political", but nowadays if you put Nazis as a villain in a video game, half of those same people will scream that they're being preached to.
So if you read all those books you named, and didn't see any politics in them...
...maybe it's because they were simply confirming your pre-existing biases.
Or maybe it's because you didn't have the reading comprehension skills to understand where the politics in them were.
Because science fiction has always been political.
Particularly in an office or other "respectable" setting, you've got people who are white, and people who are political.
You've got people who are straight, and people who are political.
You've got executives who are men, and executives who are political.
And so on.
What and whom one chooses to include in stories, and what ones chooses to leave out—and, perhaps even more importantly, what one includes and leaves out without even thinking about it, are, by their very nature, political.
I'm also reminded of the Dungeons and Dragons group I heard about, whose DM made one very simple change to the published adventure path. The players were going through the towns, and finding them filled with women. The other adventurers were women. The blacksmiths were women. Even the prominent goblins in the dungeon were female! The taverns had a couple of men in them, but apart from that, there were seemingly nearly no men in the entire world. The players were convinced there was something deeply sinister going on.
But all that had happened was that the DM reversed the gender of every NPC written into the adventure. An adventure full of men, that no one would have batted an eye at, suddenly caused shock and suspicion when it had exactly the same percentage of women instead.
So: was the original adventure author "political" for the gender ratio they put into it?
Skimming through your posts in this conversation, I really don't feel like you have.
And I think one part of the problem is you don't seem to have acknowledged that, for the most part, people in this quintile do not have the tools to move out of it by choice, and this is increasingly true as inequality grows (so, for instance, if you were lucky enough—and I do mean "lucky"—to be or know someone who made it out 20, 30, 40 years ago, you cannot assume that similar options remain available today).
When households are already spending literally every penny that comes in to afford rent, food, clothing, heat, medical care...which of those gets sacrificed on the off-chance that it might, some day, be enough to bootstrap themselves up out of that bottom quintile?
No. That is not a realistic or compassionate way to view the situation at all.
The bottom quintile is where many people will be their entire lives, and that is not going to change, so we as a society must ensure that it is a "place" where people can live healthy, comfortable lives, rather than a constantly-stressed squalid scramble.
So you're not actually complaining about politics in sci-fi. You're complaining about bad writing in sci-fi.
Because apolitical they were not. Like, emphatically. Sometimes they were subtle, other times they were pretty heavy-handed.
Sci-fi has never, ever, been apolitical.
This is ahistorical, and plays into eugenicist propaganda.
Humans have been expending valuable resources caring for "economically useless people" for tens of thousands of years.
Caring for those who can no longer "contribute" is one of our greatest strengths as a species.
You think that this high a percentage of people should expect to be sharing a room not by choice, for the rest of their lives?
With the Finder open, go to Settings > Advanced, and change the drop-down at the bottom to "Search the Current Folder". This is something I do on the first run of every new Mac I set up.
...I've been seeing this search style in more and more places recently, and I hate it. Let me type my search, then hit enter, then you can go find what I asked for. Don't slow everything down by searching on every character I type.
Not at this scale and price and convenience.
We can absolutely do so for higher prices. And with solar panels becoming more efficient, cheaper, and more ubiquitous with each passing year, we may find that a lot of those "higher prices" were really just "higher energy input costs", and we will be able to come very close to what we have now. (I don't know for sure—this isn't an area I keep abreast of.)
I recently moved to Ireland (an EU country).
When I wanted to get set up with a new GP, I was offered an appointment the same week. I wasn't ready to actually go in yet, so I asked for one the following week. My wife needed some specialty care, and when we made the appointment they were very apologetic that they could't give us an appointment until 2.5 weeks later. (For a non-emergency consult, preparatory to a specialty surgery.)
Meanwhile, in the US, when we tried to make GP appointments, they were routinely not available until 6-8 weeks later. And that's if it was even possible; we had 2 GPs just leave the area over the course of a few years, and in both cases we were left to find our own replacements, despite the fact that both were part of larger medical practices with at least a half-dozen GPs each (plus others).
The reason it's bullshit is that we don't have a free market. There are constraints and asymmetric information and inelastic demand and all kinds of other forces at play that completely negate any supposed wisdom you might hope to find in free market theory.
And if the market is not free—if consumers do not have a fully open choice, where every possible feature and option (including things like "lower price in exchange for constant surveillance") is individually selectable, or they don't have enough access to different options, or they don't have enough time and brainpower to exhaustively research every option—then what consumers buy in aggregate is not reflective of what they choose.
It's reflective of what the manufacturers choose to push.
They believe the sci-fi, rather than the reality. They've bought their own hype, and abandoned their critical thinking skills.
They're the guy saying to the computer "Say you're alive", and then being astonished when the computer says "I am alive."
This shows fairly clearly that (as I already suspected) this was not, remotely, an LLM "going rogue." This was humans planning poorly, not thinking of the consequences of their actions, and giving LLMs too much scope and a lousy prompt.
So sure! This fictional thing can totally piece together things humans can't! It can count the atoms in a cloud, understand them all, predict their motions; it can develop faster-than-light travel and matter replication.
And it can do these things because it is fictional.