> making the OP an outcast for his opinions. Just like he said.
Or the person, like many of us here, who come from diverse backgrounds working diverse jobs, simply thinks OP is a twat because the post is logically inconsistent and whiny.
Indeed. This paragraph from the post could have just been written about the internet and all of the tech and companies it has enabled since ~1999:
> People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.
Automobiles, steam trains, even electricity or the printing press… There has always been a compelling argument for ludditism, the protection of people in that moment (as if that moment would last forever).
And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions.
But we won’t. The skilled artisans that are put out of work from their positions of leverage tend to have the political views of someone with leverage, so instead of communitarian instincts, they want to go back to when they had power.
> And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions.
Agreed.
I don't think it's the out-of-work "skilled artisans" who are to blame though, esp in the US.
Obviously there is no “blame” in complex systems, but over and over, folks with financial leverage tend to move immediately from a position of libertarian meritocracy to a position of regressive intervention at exactly the moment when their skill becomes automated.
A society that promotes risk, plans for failure, and facilitates starting over, all while minimizing wealth inequality is a society that can sprint headlong into every new technology in a way that everyone benefits.
The lining factor I see time and time again, is that folks see the world, philosophically, as static even though in one lifetime we start at the invention of the light bulb and end on the moon, and in the next, we start with the moon landing, and we’ve created artificial thinking with 23 years to spare.
It’s a sad state of affairs. But what do I know, I live in a city with a massive housing crisis because one group finds construction of more homes as ruining their nice static lives.
I am not weighing in on the fundamental issue you are debating with the other person, but clearly Facebook has provided no benefit to society lol wth
It's just a parasitic, largely useless, and often actively harmful advertising machine. The only possible positive it has done is transfer a lot of money and capital to employees who often come from middle-class backgrounds.
Meta’s primary issue is an alignment problem. They’ve built the most valuable human connection network ever and then added a misaligned algorithm on it.
You’re conflating Meta’s alignment issue with its overall benefit / harm to society. There is a singular, obvious thing that you interact with everyday that is very very bad (unless like me you don’t have it). And the invisible parts of what they do that are extremely beneficial are less obvious.
To be fair say from the list Meta is closest to being a net negative, like they’re the worst of the big tech companies and the only one I would refuse to work at. So I get what you’re saying, but to say they’re largely useless signals that you don’t know what they do and how they impact society at large, other than their very evil algorithms.
All of their open source work, facebook marketplace, messenger connecting people, low cost distribution for small business, crises and humanitarian tooling, abuse/spam/threat detection at scale, etc.
The open source stuff is nice and all, but I wouldn't say React, GraphQL, Cassandra, or any of the other stuff is "beneficial to humanity" lol wtf
> facebook marketplace
Craigslist exists, plus other startups were aiming to do that and one would have found its footing if not for Facebook marketplace. Either way, this doesn't make up for any of the negatives people ascribe to Facebook.
> messenger connecting people
This is a fucking joke, as there were and are numerous other instant messaging apps.
> low cost distribution for small business
Yeah, small businesses can have Facebook pages, but this isn't that beneficial. We are talking "extremely beneficial" here, not "some features are useful to some people".
> crises and humanitarian tooling
Yeah I can see it being useful for governments to communicate, but unfortunately outweighed by the misinformation
> abuse/spam/threat detection at scale, etc
Cool that they try to solve problems their platform is susceptible to? They are doing this for themselves and it's proprietary software, isn't it?
IDK what kind of bubble you exist in where people genuinely believe any of the above would constitute "extremely beneficial". Large quantities of people, including those holding down jobs, in the richest country in the world are barely able to put food on the table, people are getting kidnapped by masked Federal agents who are entering homes without warrants, and there are multiple ongoing wars in the world, but, yeah, Facebook, "extremely beneficial", solving the hard problems xd
I am at least objective in my criticism. I'm not going to reply to 5 different emotionally charged strawman arguments, especially because I don't care to defend Meta.
If you're going to engage in discussion, at least try to interpret the other parties argument charitably. You're wasting both our time replying to the dumbest interpretation of what I said.
You gave one sentence statement to try to explain why you think the company does anything that would count as "extremely beneficial" (your words), and it's just a list of stuff you didn't bother to elaborate on (including, laughably, Facebook Messenger, as if anyone could possibly count that as "extremely beneficial"). You didn't even make a cogent argument.
I think it's possible to come up with cogent and principled anti-AI arguments. This post is not example of something like that lol
Numerous problems with it, but fundamentally a lot of their objections could apply to any post-internet tech. It seems like they just don't like AI.
Writer should also entertain the possibility that it turns out they just don't like tech, and AI just makes a lot of the negative aspects of tech more obvious.
It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.
Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. And of course we continue to have the same vision now that X won't be possible for a great many years, if ever. And we also continually carefully refine the generally accepted definition of "intelligence" so that it specifically excludes whatever the current capabilities are, so we can indefinitely continue to say "this isn't intelligence".
> Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have.
I agree with that, but I don't think anyone is moving the goalposts as you imply later in your post.
I think if you showed me LLM AI twenty years ago, I'd be like "what's the trick, what's the catch, how does it work" and then the statistical nature of it would be explained to me and I'd have the exact same reaction as i had when i learned how it worked in ~2021: oh, that's very clever, and maybe even very useful, but idk if it's "intelligent"
Machine learning wasn't unheard of 20 years ago, and statistical text engines were hitting consumer use (iPhone autocomplete probably what 2008-2010?)
I don’t think it’s any more facile to use the term “intelligence” to describe the synthesis engines that we call “AI” when we use the same word to describe the gradient-seeking behaviors of slime molds.
It’s not general intelligence, but it’s a system that’s able to produce novel outputs from its inputs in pursuit of a goal. The fact that the goal is always externally-provided is more related to consciousness than intelligence.
It depends on how you define intelligence. There's a straightforward functional definition: if a system can solve a range of problems that require complex reasoning and it meets objective standards of success across multiple disciplines, then that system is intelligent.
Search algorithms used to be considered a part of AI research. The whole point of the field, from the Turing test onward, has been that mimicry is in some sense all you need. Maybe there's a coherent philosophical position where intelligence is defined as some intrinsic property possessed by conscious agents, but I find it remarkably hard to come up with a precise definition along those lines.
Agree, you're technically correct, and AI it's solving Erdos problems, even if we don't know exactly how or why. More mech interp & other research will help. https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808
Or the person, like many of us here, who come from diverse backgrounds working diverse jobs, simply thinks OP is a twat because the post is logically inconsistent and whiny.
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