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Is the rapid advancement in Machine Learning good or bad for society?
For the purposes of this comment, I will try to define good as "improving the quality of life for many people without decreasing the quality of life for another similarly sized group" an vice versa.
I enjoy trying to answer this question because the political discourse around it is too new to have widely accepted answers disseminated by the two American political parties being used to signify affiliation like many questions. However, any discussion of whether something is good or bad for society belongs in a Culture War threat because, even here on The Motte, most people will try to reduce every discussion to one along clear conservative/liberal lines because most people here are salty conservatives who were kicked out of reddit by liberals one way or another.
Now on to the question: Maybe the best way to discover if Machine learning is good or bad for society is to say what makes it essentially different from previous computing? The key difference in Machine Learning is that it changes computing from a process where you tell the computer what to do with data, and turns it into a process where you just tell the computer what you want it to be able to do. before machine learning, you would tell the computer specifically how to scan an image and decide if it is a picture of a dog. Whether the computer was good at identifying pictures of dogs relied on how good your instructions were. With machine learning, you give the computer millions of pictures of dogs and tell it to figure out how to determine if there's a dog in a picture.
So what can be essentialized from that difference? Well before Machine Learning, the owners of the biggest computers still had to be clever enough to use them to manipulate data properly, but with Machine Learning, the owners of the biggest computers can now simply specify a goal and get what they want. It seems therefore that Machine Learning will work as a tool for those with more capital to find ways to gain more capital. It will allow people with the money to create companies that can enhance the ability to make decisions purely based on profit potential, and remove the human element even more from the equation.
How about a few examples:
Recently a machine learning model was approved by the FDA to be used to identify cavities on X-rays. Eventually your dental insurance company will require a machine learning model to read your X-rays and report that you need a procedure in order for them to cover treatment from your dentist. The justification will be that the Machine Learning model is more accurate. It probably will be more accurate. Dentists will require subscriptions to a Machine Learning model to accept insurance, and perhaps dental treatment will become more expensive, but maybe not. It's hard to say for sure if this will be a bad or a good thing.
Machine learning models are getting very good at writing human text. This is currently reducing the value of human writers at a quick pace. Presumably with more advanced models, it will replace commercial human writing all together. Every current limitation of the leading natural language models will be removed in time, and they will become objectively superior to human writers. This also might be a good thing, or a bad thing. It's hard to say.
I think it's actually very hard to predict if Machine Learning will be good or bad for society. Certain industries might be disrupted, but the long term effects are hard to predict.
Go to church
Have kids
Buy land
Acquire chickens
Simple as.
I truly think people are almost embarrassingly overstating the importance of the AI apocalypse. Maybe an apocalypse for twitter and other online spaces, maybe an apocalypse “just a barely intelligent warm body” call center jobs, maybe an apocalypse for bootcampers making $300k/yr gluing JavaScript frameworks with cute names together.
Not an apocalypse for anybody with a skill set that can exist completely independent of the internet, not an apocalypse for the people who understand computer programming from first principles.
In the sense the AI will bankrupt the people who have been mining the good out of society while contributing absolutely nothing of value to it, it is a massive net good. I absolutely welcome our AI overlords. Show me who is posting the MOST human-passing-but-totally-useless-garbage on twitter, or trapping the MOST ethical non-monogamist coombrained Reddit atheism posters into pointless time wasting arguments and I will either go work for them for free, or donate compute time to them.
Let’s fucking go.
So... I have a church, yard, kids, and chickens. Also it's Bright Week. Al masih qam!
Yet here I am, typing away on The Motte about AI. And here you are.
Plausibly I should work on my in-person network. A local church has installed ten Russian bells on a new building they've been working on these past two years. I watched the video of the blessing, and it sounds really good. The acequias association is supposed to be flushing the irrigation ditches tomorrow. My husband walked down the street and gave eggs to a neighbor last week, and has resolved to do that again, because it was a good experience. My daughter is now old enough to walk to the village church if we ever get our act together on time. People wave, and are out by the street cleaning their ditches. I can and should make physical art out of wool and wax for next year's local studio tour and art markets.
And yet here we are, even so.
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I’m really getting the urge to grow out my neckbeard and get euphoric up in this bitch. Postrats are converting to Mormonism now, Mormonism! At least with wokeness you have to go outside and observe the world to realize that it’s false. Most of these religions don’t even make sense on their own terms.
It’s cope is what it is, cope. It makes you feel good, and it’s useful (so it seems), so you believe it.
Choosing to believe (or act as if you believe) useful things seems very rational to me. I have an old coworker who was an atheist and cynically became a Mormon in order to marry a Mormon wife and live in a close-knit community. He now lives in Idaho and has 4 kids and by all accounts is very satisfied with the outcome. Who's more rational, him or a depressed medicated outspokenly atheist Bay area tech worker who's the least-liked member of his drama-cursed polycule?
If you rational long enough, you're eventually going to rational about rationality, and you'll see that beliefs are instrumental like anything else. There's no God of Integrity who laid down the law that you must profess true beliefs.
The short answer is, it fucks up your epistemology. It’s probably worth a whole post going through exactly why that’s so bad. Perhaps the old atheism arguments from the early 2000s need updating for the TikTok generation.
It definitely deserves a longer treatment than one sentence, but I'm fond of "once you've told a lie all truth is your enemy". Or something about lightning, I guess. Intentionally professing beliefs in falsehoods because they are useful is the epistemic equivalent of the doctor killing their patients to donate their organs -- it may sound like it does more good then harm in the short term, but you wouldn't want to live in a place where that's the rule.
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I disagree. You can be rational when the situation calls for it, and be religious on a meta level.
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I can't tell if this comment is a spoof?
Sure, go back to your farm and use tools like tractors, fertilizers, modern crop rotation techniques, plates, silverware, cups, etc which have been created by the larger society. Created, distributed and improved by people who are supposedly 'mining the good out of society.'
Society is a team effort, bud. Your fantasies of living scott-free totally 'independent' on your plot of land are just that - fantasies. You wouldn't make it a week without the collective wisdom and knowledge society has gifted you and your family. Have some respect for the people who came before you, and the people who help you live a cushy life now.
I say:
And you internet this as “isolate yourself from society and pay no respect to the people who came before you”?
Just to be clear when i say “go to church”, I mean specifically a Catholic Church. There could not exist another institution on planet earth that is more of a strong indicator that you should stand in the shoulders of the people who came before you.
The people mining the good out of society are people running porn websites, and AB testing headlines and algorithmic content feeds to see which ones make people hate each other more, and then buy the products that they’re selling. Onlyfans is mining the good out of society, blackrock is mining the good out of society, McKinsey consulting is mining the good out of society
Porn websites and management consulting agencies did not invent pottery, crop rotation, iron smelting, or anything else. The fact that you either think otherwise or think that “go to church and start a family” somehow means “throw away every good discovery ever made by mankind” is certainly telling of something.
I think this comment is an example of "inferential distance." Your meaning of "people mining the good out of society" is porn sites, investors, and engagement-optimizers, whereas Dag's interpretation was "all the smart people who brought us modern technology."
@firmamenti also engaged in the classic Motte and Bailey to my mind. His Bailey is:
Basically claiming that anyone who relies on the Internet is gonna get fukt, and they should cry about it.
Then when challenged he retreated to the much more specific claim of:
I'm not impressed with this sort of rhetoric.
You cut one of my sentences in half to make your point, and then you accused me of bad faith argument.
The rest of the statement which you cut off was: "not an apocalypse for the people who understand computer programming from first principles."
This is not a motte and bailey. You either didn't read the rest of my comment, or you are being deliberately misleading in your characterization of it.
Either way: don't do this.
Eh, I cut it out for brevity but I see where you’re coming from. Either way I see you slicing the populace into such a chunk as to be making a ridiculously callous and egotistical statement.
I’m happy to discuss further which chunk of humanity deserves to have their lives be destroyed and suffer unnecessarily, but I generally find that type of rhetoric to be unsavory. I apologize if I mischaracterized your stance.
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Just pointing out, your interpretation there doesn't quite check out logically. It would only be a motte/bailey when mischaracterized like that.
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Those people will be doing more of all that and better (or rather "more efficiently" - nothing about it will be better for the audience), with higher profit margin since they'll no longer need to pay the grunts in call centers.
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This is a small fraction of people in modern society, and if history tells anything I'd imagine they will be hurt less by AGI because this class of people is good at finding BS niches to milk value out.
I'm just not a fan of broad statements talking about how an ill-defined outgroup is milking everything from society while you and yours are the ones building it. Thanks for clarifying.
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Skipped 1, but I'm on 4. Chickens are about 2 weeks old, and I'm assessing the plans for the coop I plan to build. At least, after I finish ripping out the stupid Cyprus trees the last owner planted everywhere.
Based and eggpilled.
Seriously love chickens. They are equally stupid and annoying, and beautiful. They also make fantastic babysitters for #2 and will entertain them for HOURS. Highly recommend.
Chickens are raging assholes that go everywhere they're not supposed to and refuse to die when their time is up.
Ducks are much easier to manage. The eggs are tastier, too.
Has anyone considered…pet pigeons?
Pigeon eggs can be eaten too!
coo coo
I had about twenty white homing pigeons as a teen for 4-H. They're great, but are terribly difficult to get rid of. Homing ability is both impressive and obnoxious.
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Ducks require too much feed. Geese can graze most of the day.
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Nah, ducks turn their ponds into swamps and give you a rash when you cuddle them. Chickens are much more convenient. (We have both.)
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I was wondering if we were going to get the chicken vs duck argument going. I have a coworker who has ducks and recommends them. I have a neighbor with chickens, although they might have gotten rid of them, or at least the roosters.
I didn't know such arguments were infamous.
All I know is, after having to deal with both, I'll take the ducks.
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I want to try guinea fowl next year.
Our previous neighborhood had feral peacocks, and they give off this great jungle call in the middle of the night, and every once in a while I hear them here too, from a half mile or so away.
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