Transcript
Title text: This is how you all fucking sound
[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]
Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]
Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]
Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]
Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.
Thats not how it works.
A better example would be "nuclear arms are already here, theres no going back"
Its not a capitalism thing, its an arms race thing.
Once one country starts making nukes you cant stop everyone from following suit to protect themselves.
Same goes for AI, once one country starts doing it, everyone else is gonna need to keep up so they dont lose the arms race.
It would also apply to child labour and slavery. We may have outlawed it locally, but that doesn't change the fact that companies who make use of it will be at an advantage, so we just ended up outsourcing it.
The AI "arms race" as you put it is absolutely capitalism at its core. Replace humans with shitty robots so they don't have to continue paying wages to actual humans. Its just the the first person that makes it work will be able to set the rules for the ones that follow. Getting paid for those rules and making further entrenched in capitalism.
The frustrating part is that we could be on the precipice of an amazing time. We could be in a space where it makes sense to dump tons of resources into rapidly progressing automation because it would enable people to finally stop doing tedious labor.
But a combination of our inability to demand collective ownership of these systems and a similar disdain for social welfare means the prospect is instead terrifying. We need to continue to allow people to work cash registers for well below livable wages because otherwise they’ll starve.
There is an alternate reality where the end result of AI is that people are just free to live how they want, to socialize, to explore art and novel ideas within their passion, engage in social supports, etc. but instead we will continue to prop up the need for mind numbing and tedious labor out of a fear of homelessness because collectivism is scary and bad
I mean we passed that point decades ago, im not an expert but im pretty sure it's literally been decades since we produced enough food for everyone on the planet to be obese and at least in the US I believe we have more empty houses than individual homeless people. AI overinvestment is another step in the wrong direction but it's not the cause of any of our current problems.
Either the collapse of civilization or a literal uprising.
Seeing as we're already heading down the nightmare route, it seems poor risk management.
I think we may very well be on the precipice of the world you imagine, or something like it. But the old world dies hard and takes effort to abolish. We didn't get where we are because we were given what we have - we fought for it. I think we're seeing the beginning stages of people demanding that the benefits of AI and automation flow to them, rather than to just the elite. Won't be without pain, but I think we get there. Partly because we kind of have to. People get over their fear of socialism and collectivism really fast when they get desperate yet there's people making huge piles of money off the automation that stole their job. I can't say for sure what the future looks like, but I don't think we stay locked here forever. To think so is to look at the situation during the first gilded age and say nothing can change. Well, it did and we got the progressive age.
I agree with you, I think the will for change is there. The next challenge is turning will into action.
It's a tool, use it as you wish but you either have it or not.
Tool of your own destruction and a death knell of human logic, reasoning, and creativity.
Yes, but at least at the end of the day you can use nukes to blow stuff up. Presumably your enemies.
If your enemies win the generative AI "arms" race they can use it to, uh...
???
(Yes, I am aware there are military/governmental applications for neural net learning technologies but they're the types of pattern recognition and signals analysis stuff we already do without needing to build a football stadium sized datacenter every 50 miles and burn the entire nation's GDP on electricity generation. Most of the other applications appear to revolve around a regime using it solely to shoot themselves in the foot, e.g. powering a fantasy army of likely to be highly defective murder robots or using it to propagandize at and spy upon their own population in order to ensure a ready supply of destabilizing internal dissent always exists.)
GenAI is really fucking useful for propaganda and disinformation warfare.
That may sound like a compliment to GenAI, it's not.
Unfortunately, the ability to programmatically weaponize false-humanity is real, and really effective.
Which is yet another ethical question that has yet to be widely judged before being deployed everywhere. Just a bunch of greedy, short-sighted exceptionalists.
LLMs are not the final state of AI
But LLMs are not the path to the final state of AI, either. And that's assuming only if — and this is a very big "if" — a true general artificial intelligence can even be created using traditional silicon computing methods in the first place. Blithely assuming that it can be is really rather asking past the sale.
Not only that, it’s basically eating all the resources that could go into making AGI.
There is nooooo way for companies to invest in actual innovation when they are throwing everything at this dead end.
Then you’re well aware of the massive power that AGI will bring to any nation that can harness it. And no, LLMs alone are not the path, and possibly not the path at all.
Yep, by design LLM cannot become 'inteligent', you can only make it more believable but it's still copying humans not really thinking by itself. No amount of development or money invested will change that, it's not a pokemon it won't just evolve into something different one day.
And it's worth reiterating, the current crop of generative "AI" is incapable of producing anything new or novel. All it can do is reassemble existing strings, tokens, and patterns in slightly different ways. Innovation can never come from such a machine. That will have to come from a human.
The current push is the notion that "hyperscaling," i.e. throwing even more hardware and space and power and money at the same concept, will magically make it something it isn't. Obviously that's not going to work. It'll allow grifters to make a ton of money over it, though!
Well said.
Except 90% of what people talk about when they refer to AI is LLMs which have no direct military applications other than vague productivity boost claims. You could say the same thing about sending kids to the mines, “our society is more productive sending kids to dig out coal instead of playing. If we don’t send our kids to the mines China will and then we’ll really be behind”.
The biggest strength of LLMs is in processing a huge amount of text very quickly. I imagine that contributes a lot to military intelligence.
... no I am talking about actual AI as a field as a whole, not just LLMs...
Yall forgetting about Boston dynamics or something?
We got fuckin guns strapped to the back of autonomous robot dogs that can run at over 60 km/h
We got autonomous drones with facial recognition that can fly through dense forests at 90 km/h+
The fuck you think Im talking about lol...
Boston dynamics isn’t building countless data centers and (poorly) replacing peoples’ jobs. OP’s comic is obviously about ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini etc.
Except we did stop. We ended nuclear testing. We downsized our arsenal. We never deployed the high yield, neutron bombs, or other "tactical" variants in subsequent wars. And neither did the French or the Russians or the Chinese. Or even the Israelis.
Our nuclear program is derelict. It belongs in a museum. There's an outstanding question as to how many of the bombs currently in circulation are duds.
Unlike with the F-35 or the Bradley Fighting Vehicle or the Predator Drone or even the Virginia class submarine, we're just not putting any more money into nuclear proliferation and improved first strike capabilities like we were 60 years ago.