Truer words have never been said.
I’d say the biggest problem with AI is that it’s being treated as a tool to displace workers, but there is no system in place to make sure that that “value” (I’m not convinced commercial AI has done anything valuable) created by AI is redistributed to the workers that it has displaced.
Welcome to every technological advancement ever applied to the workforce
The system in place is “open weights” models. These AI companies don’t have a huge head start on the publicly available software, and if the value is there for a corporation, most any savvy solo engineer can slap together something similar.
And yet, he released his latest album exclusively on Apple Music.
The difference is that he has the choice of not participating in that model, obviously.
like most of money
Ollama and stable diffusion are free open source software. Nobody is forcing anybody to use chatGPT
Ollama is FOSS, SD has a proproprietary but permissive, source-available license, but it is not what most people would associate with “open-source”
Fair, it may not be strictly FOSS but I think my point still stands. If people are worried about AI being owned by “the elite” they can just run Ollama.
Like Sam Altman who invests in Prospera, a private “Start-up City” in Honduras where the board of directors pick and choose which laws apply to them!
The switch to Techno-Feudalism is progressing far too much for my liking.
Techno-Feudalism
I’ll say it, yet again. It’s just feudalism. “Techno-Feudalism” has nothing different enough to it to differentiate it as even a sub-type of feudalism. It’s just the same thing all over again, using technological advances to improve the ability to monitor and impose control over the populace. Historical feudalists also leveraged technology to cement their rule (plate armor, cavalry, crossbows, cannon, mills, control of literacy, etc).
Techno-Feudalism is a specific idea from Yanis Varifakous, about places like Amazon, Ebay, AliExpress, Steam, Facebook, even YouTube to some extent. It has to do with the Market Place controlling which prices are promoted to buyers and sellers, and is about price fixing and capturing industries that the bulk of the population require to do commerce.
This is a very important concept to note and understand because it relates to the end of two party Capitalism (where buyers and sellers negotiate prices with each other directly).
So no, the use of fuedalism isn’t to indicate something about old school mechanisms of war, weaponry, brutality, or repression. It’s a reference to the role of economic serfdom and the economic aspects of fuedalism. Comparing those particular aspects to the modern roles of content creators, drop shippers, and consumers. All of whom are forced through the economic lens of markets which are owned or controlled by billionaires who have captured/own these required marketplaces.
I’ve read Varifakous and don’t find his claim that it’s anything new beyond the technologies used to be at all compelling.
So no, the use of fuedalism isn’t to indicate something about old school mechanisms of war, weaponry, brutality, or repression. It’s a reference to the role of economic serfdom and the economic aspects of fuedalism.
Teotihuacan was the center on an empire but it had no military.
What I’m saying is that they even go with divine mandate at this point. Just because their not jousting and are using abstractions that are enabled by modern technology instead of castles doesn’t make it fundamentally a different, new thing. Commerce and who could engage in it was heavily regulated by feudal lords and organizations that they ran or allowed to run.
It’s literally just the same shit with better technology. The far-right isn’t that creative.
Oh it’s the same shit as feudalism, but with technology… Thanks for letting me know that’s what Techno-Feudalism means. So glad we had this enlightening conversation to figure out those two words. I guess we could add “global” to the front of it so you know it’s not just happening in a castle in 14th century Europe, but all across the planet.
Like, how many castles were in Europe? Okay, compare that to how many Amazon’s there are? It’s not the same thing at all
Sorry, I don’t have time for this mind dulling discussion.
“Guns are just metal sling shots with technology! Bullets should be called rocks! They’re just rocks! It’s no different than throwing a snow ball which is why I should be allowed down range at the shooting range!”
“War is just a big fist fight! I wanna talk about swords!”
Yah. Bye!
Oh it’s the same shit as feudalism, but with technology… Thanks for letting me know that’s what Techno-Feudalism means.
Understanding the meaning and context of terms is very important.
… I guess we could add “global” to the front of it so you know it’s not just happening in a castle in 14th century Europe, but all across the planet.
I find “neo-feudalism” more appropriate. The previous incarnation already spanned the known world at the time.
Like, how many castles were in Europe? Okay, compare that to how many Amazon’s there are? It’s not the same thing at all
That’s really a comparison that makes me think that, perhaps, learning more about feudal history would do us all good. A more apt comparison would be “how many Vaticans were there?” (depending on the time period, two).
Rome was the seat of power through much of feudalism in the Common Era in Europe. Castles were extensions of the theocratic empire centered there, providing physical and visual/psychological enforcement of that power. Despite all of the war and megalomaniacal bickering, the feudal lords and kings all had the same boss.
There’s less difference than you apparently think.
Sorry, I don’t have time for this mind dulling discussion.
I’m sorry that you don’t know enough about history to understand how nearly identical the two are and didn’t mean to cause distress, not knowing how attached to the term you were.
G’luck.
Attaching “tech” to everything makes it more palatable. Desirable even. It masks the fact that feudal lords are reinventing everything but with “tech”.
Exactly. And it makes it seem more special or at least a new idea. It’s not. We already have historical knowledge of what has worked in throwing off the shackles of monarchy and what hasn’t.
For some reason the megacorps have got LLMs on the brain, and they’re the worst “AI” I’ve seen. There are other types of AI that are actually impressive, but the “writes a thing that looks like it might be the answer” machine is way less useful than they think it is.
most LLM’s for chat, pictures and clips are magical and amazing. For about 4 - 8 hours of fiddling then they lose all entertainment value.
As for practical use, the things can’t do math so they’re useless at work. I write better Emails on my own so I can’t imagine being so lazy and socially inept that I need help writing an email asking for tech support or outlining an audit report. Sometimes the web summaries save me from clicking a result, but I usually do anyway because the things are so prone to very convincing halucinations, so yeah, utterly useless in their current state.
I usually get some angsty reply when I say this by some techbro-AI-cultist-singularity-head who starts whinging how it’s reshaped their entire lives, but in some deep niche way that is completely irrelevant to the average working adult.
I have also talked to way too many delusional maniacs who are literally planning for the day an Artificial Super Intelligence is created and the whole world becomes like Star Trek and they personally will become wealthy and have all their needs met. They think this is going to happen within the next 5 years.
The delusional maniacs are going to be surprised when they ask the Super AI “how do we solve global warming?” and the answer is “build lots of solar, wind, and storage, and change infrastructure in cities to support walking, biking, and public transportation”.
Which is the answer they will get right before sending the AI back for “repairs.”
As we saw with Grock already several times.
They absolutely adore AI, it makes them feel in-touch with the world and able to feel validated, since all it is is a validation machine. They don’t care if it’s right or accurate or even remotely neutral, they want a biased fantasy crafting system that paints terrible pictures of Donald Trump all ripped and oiled riding on a tank and they want the AI to say “Look what you made! What a good boy! You did SO good!”
AI will become one of the most important discoveries humankind has ever invented. Apply it to healthcare, science, finances, and the world will become a better place, especially in healthcare. Hey artist, writers, you cannot stop intellectual evolution. AI is here to stay. All we need is a proven way to differentiate the real art from AI art. An invisible watermark that can be scanned to see its true “raison d’etre”. Sorry for going off topic but I agree that AI should be more open to verification for using copyrighted material. Don’t expect compensation though.
Apply it to healthcare, science, finances, and the world will become a better place, especially in healthcare.
That’s all kind of moot if we continue down the capitalist hellscape express. What good is an AI that can diagnose cancer if most people can’t afford access? What good is AI writing novels if our homes are destroyed by climate change induced disasters?
Those problems are mostly political, and AI isn’t going to fix them. The people that probably could be replaced with AI, the shitty “leaders” and such, are not going to voluntarily step down.
None of it is currently useful to those right now
COO > Return.
The biggest problem with AI is that it’s the brut force solution to complex problems.
Instead of trying to figure out what’s the most power efficient algorithm to do artificial analysis, they just threw more data and power at it.
Besides the fact of how often it’s wrong, by definition, it won’t ever be as accurate nor efficient as doing actual thinking.
It’s the solution you come up with the last day before the project is due cause you know it will technically pass and you’ll get a C.
It’s moronic. Currently, decision makers don’t really understand what to do with AI and how it will realistically evolve in the coming 10-20 years. So it’s getting pushed even into environments with 0-error policies, leading to horrible results and any time savings are completely annihilated by the ensuing error corrections and general troubleshooting. But maybe the latter will just gradually be dropped and customers will be told to just “deal with it,” in the true spirit of enshittification.
The government likes concentrated ownership because then it has only a few phonecalls to make if it wants its bidding done (be it censorship, manipulation, partisan political chicanery, etc)
And it’s easier to manage and track a dozen bribe checks rather than several thousand.
Idk if it’s the biggest problem, but it’s probably top three.
Other problems could include:
- Power usage
- Adding noise to our communication channels
- AGI fears if you buy that (I don’t personally)
Power usage probably won’t be a major issue; the main take-home message of the Deepseek brouhaha is that training and inference can be much more efficiently than we had thought (our estimates had been based on well-funded Western companies that didn’t have to bother with optimization).
AI spam is an annoyance, but it’s not really AI-specific but the continuation of a trend; the Internet was already drowning in human-created slop before LLMs came along. At some point, we will probably all have to rely on AI tools to filter it out. This isn’t something that can be unwound, any more than you can undo computers being able to play chess well.
Dead Internet theory has never been a bigger threat. I believe that’s the number one danger - endless quantities of advertising and spam shoved down our throats from every possible direction.
We’re pretty close to it, most videos on YouTube and websites that exist are purely just for some advertiser to pay that person for a review or recommendation
And those people want to use AI to extract money and to lay off people in order to make more money.
That’s “guns don’t kill people” logic.
Yeah, the AI absolutely is a problem. For those reasons along with it being wrong a lot of the time as well as the ridiculous energy consumption.
The real issues are capitalism and the lack of green energy.
If the arts where well funded, if people where given healthcare and UBI, if we had, at the very least, switched to nuclear like we should’ve decades ago, we wouldn’t be here.
The issue isn’t a piece of software.
Yeah, the AI absolutely is a problem.
AI is noto a problemi by itself, the problemi is that most of the people who make decisions in the workplace about these things do not understand what they are talking about and even less what something is capable of.
My impression is that AI now is what blockchain was some years ago, the solution to every problemi,which was of course false.
AI has a vibrant open source scene and is definitely not owned by a few people.
A lot of the data to train it is only owned by a few people though. It is record companies and publishing houses winning their lawsuits that will lead to dystopia. It’s a shame to see so many actually cheering them on.
So long as there are big players releasing open weights models, which is true for the foreseeable future, I don’t think this is a big problem. Once those weights are released, they’re free forever, and anyone can fine-tune based on them, or use them to bootstrap new models by distillation or synthetic RL data generation.
He’s not wrong.
