Yea, this.

I’d say that whether it’s a big deal is up to what people expect and want. The issue I was citing is that Fedi drama often involves, IMO, a disconnect between what the Fedi offers and what people expect.

Fediverse drama! Even if there is a kernel of truth behind it, the drama around it is always dumber than it should be. IMO a symptom of people wanting control over things as consumers that they simply don’t and never will if they remain consumers. A bit of an insidious trap the Fedi lays for people.

Sighs … writes like a bad AI apocalypse sci fi.

Yep. The old ways are back in, basically. And the conveniences of the Internet mutated into their own monster in AI and broke all the promises information technology made.

Yea, this “data at the edge” approach, not “on the wire” Is interesting to me and makes sense.

Basically regressing on the convenience/power of the internet because it just isn’t safe and easy anymore and for anything personal that isn’t a server -> many users, yoi basically ain’t gonna need it.

What does self hosting look like in a world full of malicious AI agents?

I’m thinking of this post/thread from Veronica explains, where she explains that her hosted services are accessible only locally because tbe security headache isn’t worth it: https://explains.social/@veronica/statuses/01KWJCGV27JVBHP21E2JNWDBFH

As someone who doesn’t self-host but could and would want to, the state of AI has basically scared me off.

I mean … is the singularity a good thing? I’ve never delved into whatever discourse there is around the idea, but it seems strange the way it’s treated as a necessary good. Fanatical even.

Almost like it’s the only way to continue to feel ecstatic about technology the more one uses and builds it. So anyone unable to let go of the “magic” feeling needs to cling to the dream of the singularity when they could, you know, “touch grass” and accept being human.

Thank you!!

I haven’t read the essay, just your extracts.

But I wanted to highlight the possibility of an “automation” (AI, autopilot, robots etc) that are capable of responding in the flexible ways we value about our own minds. Because it can lead to an even greater exile from our world, and personally I think its likelihood is being dangerously dismissed and ignored.

Before any AI apocalypse scenario materialises, one in which truly intelligent automation works well could very well occur. And it would leave little to no room for human participation. A plane that doesn’t even have a cockpit, if you will. A car without a steering wheel. A tech stack that is just alien to humans. Yes, “ideally” we’d be much freer from drudgery and able to pursue happier lives. But there’d be a trade off I think, and no longer being true members of our own society seems to me the start of it.

Thanks again for the essay!

Yea.

Frankly, it may be the core of my anti-AI stance (in the short term) - that it will inevitably make technology inhospitable to humans, uninhabitable and incomprehensible too.

I read a few reactions from security types on the barrage of security issues that came out from AI firms, earlier this year. And the overall sentiment was to lean into using AI more to keep up with AI security discoveries. To go faster and faster and ride the AI more and more.

Which completely amounts to turning our tech over to AI and resigning as “supervisors” who won’t be able to navigate and understand the tech on their own anymore, not because of a lack of skills as many talk about, but simply because they didn’t build it and the process that did build it didn’t do it with humans in mind. Which then becomes a downward spiral with a positive feedback loop leading a mass of technology that just doesn’t need humans any more or is at least uninhabitable for us.

It wasn’t long ago that people lamented not being able to repair their own cars, and computers too. Old fashioned maybe, but I suspect it’s a value system worth evaluating rather seriously.

Yea.

It’d probably help everyone if they considered how hard it is for them to get concessions even when they have levers of power through labour strikes and some form of direct involvement in the economy and government.

What happens you’re just a worthless leech? What happens when they’re not paying enough to sustain you? What will you do? Vote against them? How long will the vote be given to “the leeches”? And then you’ll protest? How long before a massive robot army is both unbeatable and disposable?

I don’t understand how more people aren’t talking more about what mass disenfranchisement broad UBI implies. To be simply exiled from society, not freed from it, seems a natural endpoint. Especially if it’s driven by literal human replacement machines.

I feel like the deeper truth highlighted here is that being pro-nuclear, or anti-anti-nuclear, is very much a “reddit” style opinion.

Whatever the actual truth is, that is. It seems to fall neatly into the “I know something and can make a ‘well actyooally’ argument about it” category without having expertise like being on top of the historical financial performance and context of the technology, about which I personally know nothing.

(edited because my original reply was uselessly mean)

Wow … nice to see!

Yep, and now you will see it everywhere.

And it’s quite insidious too. What’s the woman to do when offered such a position, even if the dynamic is known and Crystal clear?!

At the risk of dogpiling on a well known thing …

I distinctly remember when I first heard the theme, watching Enterprise for the first time, and I seriously thought it was either a joke or a blatant rip off of Trek.

I really didn’t believe it was Star Trek by the same people who’d made 90s TNG era trek. It being a prequel was part of that (like how is Star Trek about looking backwards?!). But so obviously US hokey populism was just a major turn off … as a youngster then I “knew” that’s not what Trek was. And while I was somewhat wrong (US idealism is kinda what it’s about), I think I was right in the right way.

More “Software brain” BS. Sure, many/most people are unthinkingly consumeristic. But it’s been a weird few decades for the tech industry where a lot of its ideas have been taken up as “the inevitable future”. There’s no guarantee that that relationship between the population and the industry holds, and the industry sure is full of people that have only lived in that bubble in time.

Cue the pirates of the Caribbean scene/ where captain Barbosa tells you you’re “in one”

You best start believing dystopian sci-fi stories, you’re in one

My hot take is that mainstream software technology hasn’t worked out how to be useful enough to be good in education and is now currupyrd by get rich quick start up mentalities, when really it needs the kind of open ended research that created the PC in the 60s & 70s.

Generally speaking, in a Bret Victor kind of way, enhancing human thinking behaviours and practices just feels like a purpose that has been left behind, probably since web and big data took over.

What do you think has changed in a year?

My take would be that many average office workers are pretty accepting of being told what to do, and are being told to use AI, and that the technology is more or less sticking the landing, at least enough to get used.

Interestingly, I don’t think I share this sentiment.

I’m no fan and personally don’t use AI (I barely touched it early ChatGPT days). But people use it to do things in successful fulfilment of their initial purpose.

I’ve seen it. Maybe I’ve seen the successes and not the failures in some cases. And I’ve certainly seen badly failed attempts to use it, but in those cases I’m happy to ascribe the failure substantially to a misapplication of the tool (which to be fair certainly invites gross misapplication).

My point though is that I don’t think an absolutist “AI is never useful” position is persuasive any more nor absolutely accurate.

Which, in my view, makes addressing the “rest of the situation” all the more fundamental. Indeed, I think everything g other than its efficacy was always the important part.

Part of the problem is that ethical arguments are difficult for people and many just switch off when it comes to the common good. Which is all of course part of the problem too.

But I think that’s gravity of the situation right now: our collective instincts may be misaligned for the moment. Our personal habits vulnerable from our prior corruptions. And our societal architectures already mutated, perhaps beyond repair, and therefore ill equipped for this.

Doomy, yes, but you’ve got to fight the fight you’re in, not the one you’d wish you’d won.

Another way I could put this counter, is that I feel like so much of what’s bad about AI was bad before AI, and that society from 2005-2020 badly mishandled technology. Whether AI “works” or not doesn’t matter. So long as it can fit into the same shape and meet the same urges that tech did 2005-2020, it will be adopted. But if the consequences of its adoption are graver than what came before, then the whole stack of that history needs to be addressed.

And with how this particular AI technology only works by consuming all of the internet’s and our libraries’ data … it’s not just a transfer, it’s pretty much theft.