Ask Lemmy

that I actually give a fuck.

I don't.

Most people here have been using AI in some form for their entire lives without knowing it. It just did its job quietly with nobody noticing. Then venture capital (or just capitalism itself) ruined everything and broke the contract: publicly acquired data must be given back to the public for free.

I could pontificate at length about the terminology and how it has gotten fucked. The blending of the terms itself is part of what makes it difficult to have a reasonable and nuanced discussion.

Let's take a moment to separate out AI from machine learning from deep learning from LLMs.

AI is fucking old. It used to mean "any algorithms that create intelligent behavior". Not a particularly useful definition these days, but it used to mean things like pathfinding and searching.

Machine learning is a more useful phrase: a set of algorithms to solve problem where we don't know "how", but we have examples of inputs and outputs. For example, I don't know how I would define cute, but if someone showed me a bunch of photos I could probably say which ones were cute, not cute, and unsure.

Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that uses a specific set of algorithms: neutral networks.

LLMs are a subset of deep learning that use "transformers". Which is a specific architecture that does a lot of things quite well, like determine how proteins fold, how drugs interact, how words interact in a sentence, etc.

If you've used Google Maps at any point since it was created, you've used classical AI.

If you've used email, you've used machine learning.

If you've used a photos app that lets you search for similar pictures of people, you've used machine learning.

If you've had more than one prescription filled in the past five years, your pharmacist has used AI (even if they don't know it) to check potential drug interactions.

Don't get me wrong, I fucking hate that the field I spent my whole life researching has been coopted into a way to siphon money from people into the coffers of the richest fucking parasites, but when people say "fuck AI" they have either lost the nuance or never had it. Everyone that hears the message experiences on the surface and it does them a disservice.

When the luddites broke the textile looms, did they hate the machines or did they hate the loss of their livelihoods?

When the early industialists broke into factories and smashed their equipment, did they hate the machines or did they hate the captains of industry that forced them to work inhumane hours in terrible conditions?

When people say "fuck AI" do they hate the math that, until this point, has led to a better world for us all, or do they hate the system that has enshittified it into one of pure exploitation?

This whole mess feels like a distraction to me. Tech should be a social good. It should be helping people. Not to say it's without problems, but now when we say "fuck AI" it leads us to pushing back against technology itself rather than the system that's using it to hurt people.

many people still ignore, or dont believe white privilege is still pervasive in western countries. aside from the racists, some people of those groups do not want to discuss it ever because they still benefited fom all that abuse, strip mining of resources centuries ago.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that internet discussion is political action.

Conservatism.

Just...all of it lol.

Being hesitant to change and wanting to temper out things and make sure things are imolemented effectively is one thing. And ensuring we respect tradition and culture is another (though progressives are more in line with that lol.)

Today's conservatism is just hate and bigotry. And they don't even recognize it as such.

That they need to buy cases and cases of water in plastic bottles and throw them in the landfill instead of just drinking their perfectly good tap water.

Pandas reproduce just fine in nature. The myth of them being bad at fucking and making babies was a myth started from before we understood zoochosis. No animal wants to have babies in a prison, it’s not just pandas.

Money is real.

Either a strong religious belief or the belief that success is the result of hard work.

That the world is a zero sum game. That in order to have something, someone else has to go without. That in order to be great you have to drag others down.

Tax Brackets. "I got a pay raise and will now be taxed more and make less money than before the raise"

If <=30k was taxed at 25% and 30+k taxed at 30% and you go from 30k to 31k a year, only the 1k is taxed at the higher rate.

People tend to assume if someone is smart in one thing, they're smart with everything else too.

That's not usually the case.

That science is rational and objective.

In reality, the way that science works is much muddier than most realise. It's full of subjectivity, and this isn't a bug, but a feature. Intuition and tacit knowledge play a big role in basically any research (and this is why I am confident that AI can't replace scientists). Politics are also present at every stage of the process. Science is at its least objective when scientists convince themselves that they're being objective. We can't escape our biases, so we need to actively acknowledge them and embrace the subjectivity of our situated perspectives.

The problem is that talking about this is a great way to piss off other scientists. I've been accused before of "betraying the side", by a scientist who was aware that science has a disproportionately large epistemic platform (epistemic means pertaining to knowledge — basically just that as a result of the huge benefits of scientific advancements in the last century or so, science has been on a bit of a pedestal in terms of trusted expert knowledge in society. Criticising this is seen by a betrayal by some because of the concerning rise in psuedoscience and anti-scientific rhetoric.

However, I'm of the belief that some of what has driven the rise of psuedoscience is that the average person doesn't like to be told "shut up and do what the smart people say". They feel a lot of mistrust towards society (which, in many cases, is entirely reasonable, especially in the case of marginalised groups who have been heavily exploited by science and scientists),

The problem goes far beyond just science, but I think this is certainly an aspect of it. I sympathise with scientists who want to continue to have the privileged position they hold, but I don't think that's helpful in the long term.

High price = high quality.

The luxury pricing model has totally enveloped markets at this point and the correlation rarely applies now.