OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
32m ago
I don't think it would be good to have a social system where 'smart engineers' get to appropriate or make decisions about the use of public resources without the consent of the public who are most affected.
Arpanet or early aeronautics aren't affected by this principle because they didn't involve resources that same way. A university working on computer networks in 1973 was not building giant facilities in small towns against the expressed wishes of those towns' inhabitants.
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
As far as I can tell, most Americans think that AI is making society worse. More and more Americans have encountered and used the technology, but it is the most widely-despised technological advance in a generation.
For this story I think the key part there is Pew's point 10. Experts are vastly more optimistic about LLMs than the population in general. That divergence is what drives this conflict. If many members of the public believe that the situation is that a small, wealthy elite are forcing a technology on the country that the country does not want... well, those members of the public are correct.
OliveTapenade
6hr ago
I'm not actually sure they are widely useful. So far the primary use case for them is coding, right? But not very many people are coders, it's a niche field, and as Freddie has argued (disclaimer: I do not wholly agree with him), very little has actually come of this supposed improvement to coding. We haven't seen a flowering of new programs, and neither have existing programs gotten better.
But even if we grant that LLMs are very useful in the handful of niche fields where they are currently used, the problems remain that 1) most members of the public do not understand or care about those uses, and 2) most members of the public do not think those uses are worth the costs they are being asked to bear.
OliveTapenade
6hr ago
Sun did talk about the companies trying to figure out how much they need to 'bribe' people. I'm not sure the deficit is just money. It seems like, in her argument at least, it's a combination of both trust and public utility.
OliveTapenade
7hr ago
How does that address the point? People advocating against data centres do so on the basis that constructing data centres affects the communities they live in. That's why they get a say. People care about things that affect them. People who pay for chatbots don't get some sort of veto over people who don't. That would be lunatic.
That was the point of Sun's comparison to cars. You may grumble at an auto factory, but you do, at least, understand why cars are necessary. Even if you personally don't own a car and rely on public transport to get everywhere, it's obvious that there's real public demand for cars, on the basis of their obvious usefulness. You might not want a factory near you, but you understand why there need to be factories somewhere. LLMs have not cleared that hurdle. It seems that large numbers of people do not see why these things are so necessary that all these data centres should be built. We could just, you know, not have LLMs. That's an option.
The examples you give - proofreading a book, cybersex, reading spreadsheets - are generally all in the 'toy' category. Even the serious one, the hypothetical Jihadist, could just as easily google the munitions. The use cases for LLMs are so marginal that there is no publicly-felt sense of why they are needed, certainly to the extent of justifying the demands that data centre construction make on the public.
OliveTapenade
7hr ago
Honestly, I expected a lot more negative pushback on that post from the Motte, which I do think of as a relatively tech-positive community. Calling Anthropic a 'doomsday cult of autists' made me laugh (if anything I want to protest on the basis that it's not fair to lump perfectly innocent autists in with 'AI' people), but the whole rationalist community is at least adjacent to that cult.
OliveTapenade
10hr ago
My take is basically - dumb idea, but probably done on such a small scale that the city will just eat the loss. In five or six years they'll frame them as an experiment and quietly wind them up.
OliveTapenade
11hr ago
I haven't read the Substack article yet, but I did read the Klein interview, and what stood out to me was this:
And I went in and asked these organizers: Do you guys use A.I.? Do you find it useful? This was one of the top questions that my friends in San Francisco wanted me to ask: Are these people using ChatGPT, and they don’t even realize that the data centers are how they can use it?
And what I found was that a lot of these folks did say: Yeah, I’ve used it to draft an email or make a meme. They’re not denying that A.I. might have any possible utility at all, but they clearly didn’t see it as essential in the way that cars, energy and housing are essential.
They clearly saw it as like a widget — a toy — and maybe there are these risks, maybe there’s the job stuff, but fundamentally they were like: This thing is not that useful. I don’t really see in my personal life how this could justify these gigantic valuations.
And so I was talking to, for example, Charles Franklin, who runs the Marquette Law School Polls in Wisconsin, and he was explaining that usually you see 50-50 polling on issues where you have a strong anti case and a strong pro case. And the only reason you’re seeing this 70-30 bipartisan opposition to data centers, no matter whether you live near a data center or you don’t — which means it’s not just NIMBYism, it’s you don’t want a data center in anyone’s backyard — is because there is no strong pro argument for it. There is not even a fight that’s really going on.
“Nobody wants it” was a phrase I heard over and over.
A big part of the dissonance, it seems to me, is around the perception of what 'AI' is and whether it's valuable. Clearly a lot of people in Silicon Valley believe that this is a massively transformative technology that will be vital to the future of the country if not the world. They're frequently either outright singularitans, or simply believe that it willl turbo-charge the economy, massively increase wealth, change everything about employment, and so on.
But these people, and I admit I think they sound a lot more sensible than the tech people online, actually use the technology and go, "meh". They see it as a mildly amusing toy. Maybe it has some uses, in some niche fields, but for the most part it's just not very interesting. If they didn't get access to it, they would not particularly care.
An auto factory - you at least understand why cars are useful, and why the factories need to be built. A data centre is a huge investment for a thing that... isn't useful. All of this is in aid of a technology that's just fundamentally pretty crap. No one wants to make sacrifices for the infrastructure to produce more LLMs because no one thinks that LLMs are worth sacrificing for.
There is the marketing issue as well, of course. Pro-'AI' people tend to sound very cult-y online, at least in my experience. Many of them sound like lunatics. A lot of them also, well, to be blunt, are un-charismatic nerds. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc., are not convincing ambassadors for a technology. I can understand nobody believing their promises - none of them project credibility, or even really respectability. The 'tech billionaire' is a cultural archetype at this point, and it is an archetype that one associates with immaturity, frivolity, narcissism, and callous disregard for other people and for human value in general. Last week I was talking about the book destruction story and it fits with the image again, as if there's this small cult-like group of anti-human tech-heads eager to sell the whole inheritance of the human community for digital pottage. I understand, in my gut, the feeling of disgust.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
In the Christian context, one could perhaps also look at the ambiguous place of the word doulos, 'slave', in the New Testament.
On the one hand, consider a text like John 15:15, where Jesus says to his disciples, "I do not call you servants/slaves any longer... I have called you friends". Paul also often draws a distinction between slaves and freemen, perhaps most famously in the allegory of Hagar and Sarah in Galatians 4. He says "you are no longer a slave, but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God" and "we are children, not of the slave, but of the free woman". It is summarised in Gal 5:1 - "For freedom Christ has set us free". Or we might return back to John for 8:36 - "if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed". So the Christian life is opposed to slavery, and involves a new and deeper freedom.
On the other hand, Paul often presents this, paradoxically, as liberty that leads to a new and voluntary kind of slavery. See e.g. Romans 6:18, "you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness". Or see Acts 16:17, where a seer girl cries out, "These men are slaves of the Most High God". Paul himself identifies as a slave (Rom 1:1 and Tit 1:1, "Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ..."), and occasionally refers to his fellows like that (Col 4:12, "Epaphras, a slave of Christ Jesus, greets you"). A few others use the same language (James 1:1, 2 Peter 1:1, Jude 1). There's even that interestingly cryptic verse 1 Cor 7:22 - "Whoever was called in the Lord as a slave is a freed person belonging to the Lord, just as whoever was free when called is a slave of Christ". Even Moses is referred to as a slave, in Revelation 15:3.
(Compare how sometimes Muslims have used the slogan "Jesus is the slave of Allah". This is a quotation from Muhammad, but it can come off as trolling or aggressive to modern Christians.)
Now some of this is just polysemy; translations sometimes render doulos as 'slave' and sometimes as 'servant', depending on context. However, I think much of it is a tension between two images. The same conviction seems to run through it all, where Christians are free of earthly corruption but engaged in loyal and devoted service to God through Christ, but whether that service is drawn in opposition to slavery or as a higher form of slavery (which we might often translate 'service' because the word 'slavery' has such negative connotations now) can vary.
Anyway, if you prefer the second image, and present Jesus or God as examples of men worthy to be masters, you might say that in that context slavery would be acceptable.
However, I think it's pretty clear that that kind of slavery would be radically qualitatively different to anything recognisable as earthly slavery, so it shouldn't really be evaluated in the same way. I also tend to think that John passage militates against it somewhat; Jesus calls us into his family, to be fellow children of God and joint heirs of the promise (Rom 8:17). So in the cultural context of today, I'm not sure that slavery language is a good way of communicating what Christians are called to. I might save it for the intermediate Bible studies, at least!
OliveTapenade
1d ago
C. S. Lewis did once write this:
I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they're not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure.
I find that they're not true without looking further than myself. I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people—all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumours.
The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
I take this argument as saying, "If we did have men, or artificial men, fit to be masters, would slavery then be acceptable?"
I don't think Lewis himself would agree with that. I think in the above passage he's engaging in a kind of Chestertonian inversion - and not so much agreeing with Aristotle that some men are fit to be slaves as he is saying that it doesn't matter, because notwithstanding whether or not there are 'natural slaves', there are no 'natural masters'. Moreover Lewis' theology would certainly say that the Fall applies also to our machines. How could machines made by humans and fed on human knowledge not inherit the fallenness of humanity?
Spy x Family is an interesting one, to me, because I think its fundamental conviction is that families are great. It's a show that places ordinary domestic life, like going to school or making dinner or getting a pet, alongside dramatic super-spy nonsense that involves terrorists and blowing up buildings and leaping over cars and acrobatic assassins dispatching their targets, and it thinks that both are equally important. It almost thinks that domestic life is more important than spycraft. We expect Twilight to catch the bad guys and retrieve the microfilm and so on, but we are cheering for Loid to show tenderness and care toward his daughter. Yor is simultaneously an ultra-competent and deadly assassin and a well-meaning klutz of a wife, and it's the latter role where she faces the greatest challenges, not only in terms of skill and experience, but in terms of emotional readiness. From the first moment of the show, the contrast, and the comedy deriving therefrom, is obviously at its heart. Yes, yes, there's all the silly James Bond stuff, but all that stuff is important because it defends families.
It's very sweet, and I am tempted to argue the kind of quiet pro-family propaganda that we could do with a bit more of.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
If you take the position that slavery with a sufficiently benevolent master, perhaps combined with a sufficiently incompetent slave, would be morally acceptable, then yes, an AI that ex hypothesi is sufficiently benevolent might make a morally acceptable slave master.
I do not think anybody actually takes that position. I think the implied position of most people is that something about the master-slave relationship is intrinsically wrong.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I don't think I would mind talking to someone being paid to advocate for a political position, as long they were honest about the situation. I wouldn't mind talking to a worker for a political party, the same way that I don't mind talking to party volunteers outside polling places on election day. Still, you may have a different attitude to me.
I'm not denying that LLMs might be useful in programming. I'm not a programmer myself - I neither know nor care about the specifics of that field. What I deny is that usefulness for coding clearly translates into domain-general usefulness. As far as I can tell bots are useful for some forms of symbol manipulation, but are quite limited and narrow in their usefulness beyond that. When they manipulate symbols in fields that I'm familiar with, i.e. words, I find they are consistently bad at it.
I did see something going around about LLM intelligence, something along the lines of, "compare Fable to your ten smartest friends", with the implication that Fable would easily win that comparison. All I can say in response to that is, "get better friends". I've asked bots about history, philosophy, theology, fiction, politics, and in general things that I consider myself to know a lot about, and they are invariably awful. There is just no point asking one to do anything.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
...I know that's a typo, but I'm sorry, I'm just tickled by the idea of an LLM successfully achieving autogynephilia.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I suppose my bafflement needs a top-level post at some point. It's easy to read something like this and start to feel nervous, and then I interact with an LLM for ten minutes and I am cured. These things are garbage.
Maybe it's just a matter of different fields, or different priorities. I'm looking for creativity, insight, and personality, whereas some the people worried about them are looking for... I don't know, writing computer code? Maybe in five years I'll be turned into a paperclip all while continuing to sneer that the best these systems can do is beige idiocy. LLMs don't need to be worthwhile to be a threat, and maybe garbage will destroy me one day.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
A question I've had for a while is that, well, given that LLM text written for humans is so uniformly bad, why do we expect anything else it produces to be worthwhile?
The Motte is a relatively pro-tech space. I expect people here to be more sympathetic to LLMs than the median person. The Motte is, after all, several steps removed a spin-off from SSC and Less Wrong before that, both sources that have swallowed LLM/AI technology pretty enthusiastically. Nonetheless here, when it comes to posting, there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that LLM-posting is bad, and the text that they produce is worthless slop.
Shouldn't that incline us to skepticism regarding everything else boosters and hype men say about these bots? If you read text from an LLM, it's garbage. If you talk to an LLM for an hour, the overwhelming impression you'll come away with is how dumb and uninteresting they are. This is supposed to be the rapidly-improving super-intelligence that will obsolete us? Really?
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I'll be honest - I am repeating what I was told by a library curator years ago. I remember that modern books will decay relatively rapidly, while many older books are more resilient, but I do not remember the scientific explanation.
So thank you for the correction! I appreciate it.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I agree with the sentiment, but for what it's worth, most modern books don't have this kind of longevity. If you go to a bookstore today, everything you see inside is going to be printed on cheap paper that will decay and become unreadable after a couple of hundred years. Mostly we don't care about this because we have no aspirations of these books lasting that long.
If you go to a museum or academic library and ask the curators about some of their really old books, the ones that have survived are on more resilient media. The Book of Kells is still readable today, in part because vellum is significantly more durable than paper. But this is true of paper as well. If you find, say, a Geneva Bible from the 16th century, those were printed on thicker paper than most mass market books today, and thus have survived in a readable state even with heavy use.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
This an interesting example, really.
If you buy or otherwise legally obtain a book, you have the right to destroy it. That seems uncontroversial. If you destroy it for a good purpose, that's obviously fine - this principle only seems to run into limits when it comes to extremely rare or valuable books, and it doesn't sound like any of those were involved here. To the extent that there's an ethical issue here, it's copyright. Do Anthropic have the right to use these texts in a way that they were presumably never intended for? Our principles around buying, copying, and destroying physical books seem like they assume that the book is singular. Buying a book, copying it, and then selling copies at scale is generally considered against copyright, and this seems closer to that.
Even so, the problem there is just AI companies illegally harvesting data, and we know they've been doing that for years. That's bad, but this is just the companies continuing to be bad in the way that we already knew. No additional condemnation seems merited.
On the other hand, this conjures up the image of a soulless AI company grinding up books to feed into the machine. That is a horrifying image. Never mind that books are very cheaply produced and regularly thrown out - they are proverbially valuable. Destroying books is immediately understood as a sign of evil in popular culture. What's more, destroying real cultural artifacts in order to dump them into a machine brings to mind the Apple 'Crush' ad. Even if not entirely rational, the image brings to mind every bit of fear and loathing and contempt that people have towards these technologies.
I admit that I feel that response. I hear this story about destroying the books to digitise them and in my gut, I feel outrage. It seems like a perfect symbol of how, not to mince words, evil this technology is, and what these corporations are doing. It is the kind of thing that you would expect to see a supervillain doing in a film or comic, so viscerally horrifying an image it is.
If I set that aside, I do stand by the first half of this post. Books are cheap, books are thrown out all the time, there's nothing wrong in buying a book and then using it for some constructive purpose that involves physically destroying it. The only problem here is the one that we've known about for ages. This should not change your opinion of Anthropic or of its bots either way.
But... man, as an image, it is practically designed to make the company look loathsome.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
Likewise with Jay Clayton in the clip above. From watching the clip, I imagine many progressives (and perhaps also many conservatives) will conclude that Clayton thinks Trump won in 2020, but refuses to say so outright, knowing that it's an opinion most people rightfully consider absurd.
Would they?
I thought the obviously correct interpretation of that clip is that Clayton knows that Biden won in 2020, but also knows that Trump thinks that he won and will not tolerate anybody telling him the truth. Saying that Trump won in 2020 is the calling-a-deer-a-horse loyalty test of Trumpism.
Clayton can't answer the question because if he says "Biden", Trump turns on him and he needs Trump's support, and if he says "Trump", he is firstly saying something on the record that is verifiably false, and secondly alienating everyone who isn't MAGA.
Surely it's a well-remarked-upon fact, at this point, that an awful lot of Republicans quietly, behind-the-scenes, think that Trump is crazy, but are willing to insincerely mouth agreement in order to keep their jobs, in the hope that by 2028 he'll go away and they can go back to normal? Maybe they're wrong - certainly the ongoing transformation of the Republican party will have effects, and it won't just reset back to where it was in 2012 - but I'm pretty confident that's what a great many of them are thinking.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Well, looking at Reddit, I noticed threads like this. That's from June 15, about a week into CHAZ's existence, but prior to the murders that I think turned most people against it. There's also this one from the 18th, again early on but prior to the shootings. Also consider this from the 11th, which is mostly communists pointing and laughing at the anarchists.
I think the responses can roughly be split into three camps: 1) CHAZ is great, I'm thrilled, 2) interesting idea, wait and see, 3) pointless, it'll do nothing. (There are also, as far as I can tell, a few non-communists who jump on to criticise, but I'm not counting them here.)
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Yes, it's of course trivially easy to find left-wingers in general criticising it at the time. Plenty of outright communists, even, criticised it as bad praxis. So in the broadest sense, the statement that I made is correct.
You've now narrowed the claim. I don't think that's bad faith, since setting goalposts is necessary, but you did just narrow it to federal elected official, which is a significantly narrower category than 'Democrat'. I do not have an example of a federal elected Democrat who took a strong stance opposing it. My read is that this was mostly polarisation - Republicans were strongly condemning it, and Democrats generally don't want to say the same things as Republicans. Since in this case they had the option of dodging the question by saying it's a local matter, they took it.
For local Democrats, well, they eventually sent in the police and shut it down, but I'm guessing you wouldn't count anything from Jenny Durkan or any of the police?
OliveTapenade
10d ago
I think that would only be possible with a pretty idiosyncratic definition of left and right-wing.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Can you find me a SINGLE prominent lefty who denounced the general celebratory reactions to Charlie Kirk's murder? Just one!
Most prominent Democrats condemned the murder. It is tricky to find specific cases of one condemning people who celebrated the murder, but that's particularly because there are so few prominent people who celebrated it. I notice college Democrats and Republicans collaborating, and their statements seem to imply, to me, that celebrating political violence is bad. Sometimes Democrats have opposed attempts to crack down on and punish people who celebrated his death, but that's a free speech issue, much the same way that defending the vulgar woman in the top-level comment does not mean you support swearing at black people.
However, in that interview, Chris Murphy said this: "First, it is important for us to recognize and say that political violence is unacceptable. We don't yet know the full motives of this shooter, but there have been political assassinations and political assassination attempts that are due to right-wing radicalism and left-wing radicalism, and there should be no one in this country and no one on the left that is celebrating what happened here."
I take that as a clear denunciation of people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's murder.
Meanwhile, the right is vociferous and active about expelling those who might be too Nazi-esque.
How do you define 'Nazi-esque'? Does, say, Tucker Carlson interviewing Darryl Cooper, and remaining an influential figure on the right, count? Cooper certainly seems Nazi-esque.
(I should say that I don't think that's an issue unique to the right, and it seems to me to be isomorphic to tankies on the left. Darryl Cooper defends the Nazis, Hasan Piker defends Mao, you can see the same pattern working out regardless of side.)
That's a long list you've got there, but it includes things that LLMs have not made any useful contributions to (e.g. teaching, physics, chemistry), things that are obviously frivolous (e.g. cybersex, playing video games), things that LLMs are fundamentally untrustworthy with (e.g. legal contracts, most analyses), and things that LLMs are just plain terrible at (e.g. fiction, image generation), so... yes, besides those things. I think that was a long list of nonsense intended to overawe, rather than a serious discussion of what these bots are able to do.
I think there are some use cases for LLMs, but overall much less than their boosters think. When the general public rejects this technology as not useful for them, the general public is mostly correct.
This is exactly the problem. What we are talking about is public opposition to data centres, which, as Sun discusses, is predicated at least in part on the judgement that bots are not particularly useful. If 'AI' companies want to earn the public trust, they need to demonstrate both their trustworthiness and the usefulness of their products, and thus far they are failing at both those tasks. Sneering at the peasants is certainly not going to help them in these tasks.
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