This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm thinking about the culture war around AI, specifically the whole UBI debate. If AI truly does take over a lot of human work, there's a lot of people who are savagely agitating for a UBI on one side, saying we'll be post work. The other side of course says no that's not how it works, besides we aren't even close to being able to afford that. The left (generally) takes the former, while the right generally takes the latter.
What I'm surprised by is why nobody has so far mentioned what, to me, seems the obvious compromise - we just shorten the work week! As our forefathers did forcing a 5 day, 8 hour work week, why don't we continue there? Go down to a 4 day work week, and/or shorten standard working hours to 6 per day?
If AI truly will obviate the need for a lot of work, how is this not the more rational solution than trying to magically create a UBI out of money we don't have? How come this idea has barely even entered the discourse? I have been talking and thinking about AI unemployment for years and never once have heard someone argue for this compromise.
To be honest the existence and shape of much of this discourse continues to baffle me. There's a discourse around AI causing unemployment, even though AI thus far has not caused any unemployment, and there isn't an obvious mechanism for it doing so. Isn't the evidence so far that incorporating AI into a workplace increases workload, rather than decreases it? It's always possible that this changes, but I'd at least like to see the argument that it will, rather than it just being assumed.
The pattern seems to play out time and time again - Scott's last post about China made me want to scream something. Where is the reason to think that AI is so militarily and economically significant at all? What if this is all nonsense? Isn't this all based on a vision of AI technology that has no justification in reality?
Maybe there's an AI 101 argument out there somewhere that everybody else has read and which passed me by entirely, but right now I continue to be incredibly confused by this discourse. We made systems that can generate text and images, but which are consistently pretty crap at both. Given time I can imagine them becoming somewhat less crap, but where do they pivot or transform into the sorts of devices that could cause massive technological unemployment, or change a war between great powers?
For example, if you / Trump / Xi take ChatGPT5000 and type in
You can turn a text generation chatbot into a do-things AI by just asking it what should be done next and then following its advice… in theory. In practice that seems not to work well, and it’s not clear why.
Because it's just picking statistically likely responses based on its training data, so it can't really suggest anything radically different (or more insightful or creative) than the human-generated information it was trained on.
Yes, but the average human being can't do that either.
Doesn't that just further underscore ChickenOverlord's argument? The position he(?) is arguing against is that AI will somehow get better than any human at this, and CO is pointing out that as currently implemented, AI isn't really analyzing anything except language and so is unlikely to outperform the human-generated data it's trained on. Seems to me you're just giving a further reason to think the bar of what it can do is rather low.
ThisIsSin's argument is that the bar of what AI needs to do is low - not what it can do.
The idea being that even if the AI can't surpass the best humans, it can learn from them in order to be better than the rest.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link