Deme

Apologies for the very late reply. For some reason I only got a notification about your reply now, probably some federation hickup or something.

Machine learning allows for a much more thorough analysis of all the massive datasets created by surveillance and government records etc… That is new. The whole DOGE charade was most likely just a front to get those kids admin access to the IRS and healthcare databases so those could be scraped over to Palantir. There’s also a reason that the Flock camera epidemic started now and not in the 90’s and that’s that now all that data can actually be used.

The deskilling via automation is now also applying to the last thing that was thought to be safe, human thought. The brain is a muscle, and like any muscle, it will atrophy if not used. A technology that allows people to use their brain less is a technology that will atrophy peoples brains. People being less capable is a bad thing for them and the class they represent. And then there’s the fact that none of this is no longer contained to the workplace either. Kids using chatgpt to do their homework or parents outsourcing the responsibility of parenting (for example in the form of helping their kid to study for a test) to AI are also problems in the very same way.

The fact that late-stage capitalism is predictable isn’t a counterargument to being critical of LLM’s as a technology. Who did you think were going to be the primary architects of how that technology is used? If a mentally ill kid with a documented history of homicidal ideation shoots up a school, should we blame that kid, or the fact that somebody gave that kid a gun? “Guns don’t kill people, people do” am I right? Personally I think that both share the blame, and that OP’s claim that ““AI” is a tool to move towards labor post scarcity. That’s all that it is.” overlooks that completely. Every tool is a weapon and every weapon is a tool.

Well I’m quite certain that they were wrong. Wikipedia has a neat list with pictures of all the species of penguins. King Penguin is the closest, but those have much stronger oranges on the sides of their necks.

Those are emperor penguins. Adults are about 1 m tall. Scale is way off in this slop.

AI has huge potential for surveilance. Palantir exists.

To continue on the nuclear analogy: Yes it resulted in bombs that can kill us all multiple times over, but nuclear energy isn’t completely neutral either. It encourages centralization of infrastructure and the dangers associated with it result in regulation by governments. Both of these shaped societies.

To quote a piece of text I read just recently that I feel put this quite neatly:

We are told that “guns don’t kill people, people do”, or that a component is just a component, indifferent to what its combinatorial potential is. This is a convenient lie. It serves only to allow the builders to wash their hands of responsibility.

But we know better now. We know that architecture is politics, and politics is control. The way you build a system determines how it will be used. If you build a system optimized for mass surveillance, you will get a panopticon. If you build a system optimized for centralized control, you will get a dictatorship. If you build a system optimized for extraction, you will get a parasite.

• The zen of reticulum

The current LLM boom is primed to deskill current and especially future workers and the biggest business case is to invade the workplace with even more technological feudalism through subscription services than is already in place.