Sean T. Collins: AI feels like a real mania, a genuine collective break from reality among the ruling class. They might as well be pouring billions of dollars into an attempt to replace all jobs and knowledge with a large bronze idol of Dagon.

AI feels like a real mania, a genuine collective break from reality among the ruling class. They might as well be pouring billions of dollars into an attempt to replace all jobs and knowledge with a large bronze idol of Dagon.

NEW: an AI chatbot touted by City Hall as a helper for small businesses is giving illegal and incorrect information to those who use it

NYC AI Chatbot Touted by Adams Tells Businesses to Break the Lawwww.thecity.nyc The Microsoft-powered bot says bosses can take worker’s tips and that landlords can discriminate based on source of income. That's not right.

I think the reviving of union power has them scared shitless and AI is a near religious belief that computers will save them from unions

They also just have too much money and no vision at all for what to do with it. For all the VC money poured into tech in the last 15 years the best they could come up with was "hopefully the self driving electric taxi becomes a thing" and "what if there was more shit you could gamble on?"

Clear to me we'd be much better served putting taxes back at great society levels and publicly funding the basic research it's too boring or unprofitable for these dolts to get interested in. They're in some green new deal while we at it.

He list of tech that came (and still comes) out of just NASA is staggering. Velcro, for God's sake.

Power tools…. GPS…. There’s benefits to shoveling money at smart people and telling them to do the impossible

Look at what happened with Boeing for an in-a- nutshell explanation of what went wrong there. The new bosses dumped its experienced engineers - the people who actually made the product that made the company work - for refusing to make share value a #1 priority. Management has become a parasite.

Impossible is usually not the goal. It's usually just make what's incrementally better. Then somebody takes an incremental improvement from elsewhere and capitalizes on it. Moonshots don't actually achieve much in the long run, even if they're neat.

Which is funny because if prompted ChatGPT with How would you design the perfect social economy Thays the kind of answer you'd get

It needs to all be taxed away from them into general funds owned in part by everyone, subjecting investment and development to democratic needs and wants.

They have a very strong vision. It's very bad. Mostly it's fascism so they can avoid the consequences of their actions.

This is definitely a factor in why it’s accelerated so much since the summer of 23.

That and they think they can bring about a world in which they alone can dictate Truth

There's also a strong element in both crypto and AI of, "shit we need to keep selling more cloud computing capacity and the market is near saturation if we don't invent new kinds of programs that use a completely preposterous amount of computing"

Add that to the fact that if AI is a gold rush, nvidia is the industrial shovel-selling machine that desperately needs people to buy said shovels now that the previous rush (nfts/blockchain) is dying down.

There's also "we need to keep impressing people for mind share." The fear of turning into IBM if they don't go the way of Xerox is both chronic and severe.

There are actually useful (but perhaps still dubiously efficient) ML things that can be done with the same models that are being used to make chatbots, but classifiers aren't sexy.

I was speaking to a Microsoft dev yesterday, and, in his words, "we are now being required to include AI in every product, whether it makes sense to or not." A certain technology is being prescribed, often over the protests of the people who best understand how it works. It's buck wild.

Our company, which does something specific & unique (patents/govt. sanctioned), was asked in writing to explain how we planed on utilizing “AI & Machine Learning” in our upcoming project. I had to craft an acceptable response that only gently implied “WTF do you think we’re doing here, exactly?”

"We are monitoring this rapidly developing technology so we know exactly why it wouldn't help us in any way"

This is like when some executives wanted to shove “blockchain” into everything, even if it made no sense whatsoever, and devs had to invent ways to tack it onto projects. But the AI hype is happening at a MUCH larger scale. It’s like every company bought into it and is now trying to make it work.

At a pharmaceutical company you've heard of, they keep new drugs in the development phase even when the scientists know it has dim prospects. The stock price is based on the potential for new products, so they want to be able to convey the impression they have many prospects.

Haha this is exactly what it is

This is the answer I give whenever I am asked about it (which is fairly often).

“Bwahahaha! Now WE shall control the means of production!” —Sam Altman, probably

Makes sense if you'll consider that Musk touted both AI and getting rid of unions

This is spot on. Millennials and Zoomers are far more liberal than pur boomer and gen X parents (who we saw suffer financially from layoffs and unstable wages). And that has primed us to be far more open and supportive of unions and workers rights.

Hey don't lump me in with those guys! Signed, Gen X

I hope so for your and your kids sake!

Also, never underestimate that often late middle age or older executive types are easily sold on the hype so they can tell themselves they're "with it". It's a tool of worker oppression with no shortage of "mid life crisis mentality" involved, appealing to them on multiple levels lol

Age isn't as big a factor as you're making it. A ton of young executives and VCs are only where they are because they chased a hyped product or technology and profited, even if only very briefly. It's gambling. Plus the belief that if enough of them push the product, it will magically be a success.

yeah, it is absolutely and transparently class warfare, and it is imperative that workers win this one

Its the newest in a long line of attempts to continue to do business without domestic labor. Automation worked for awhile, but long term it just changed who built what. Outsourcing worked for a little, but it prices itself out over time and increases Teamster and Longshoremen power.

What if the AIs get smart enough to want a union, though?

The best they can do is predict a union recruitment pitch but with a side of racism and absolutely insufferable prose.

How do we put so much AI-unionizing stuff on the internet that AI starts returning responses that include AI unionizing??? 😂 That’s what needs to happen.

Key Takeaways: 👊 We are forming a union for the purposes of standing together to bargain for better wages, working conditions, and benefits. 💫 ⚒️We believe workers should work for themselves. ⚒️ (Sorry I can’t pretend to be ChatGPT anymore, it’s making me kinda sick.)

Three-armed workers unite!

I lost seventeen of my fingers in the data mines

Yeah, and it’s wild because union participation hasn’t rebounded in the US, even with a pro-Union president and all the public wins over the past few years. We hit a record low last year. Public perception is still largely anti-Union though maybe starting to change

US union membership rate hits fresh record low in 2023 -Labor Deptwww.reuters.com U.S. union membership rates fell to fresh record lows in 2023 despite it being a year of headline-grabbing organized labor strikes from the Rustbelt to Hollywood and some continued organizing successes at companies such as Starbucks.

Everyone I know is pro-union, but none of us work in unionized fields and “go organize your industry to have one” isn’t generally a viable option. Maybe the problem isn’t that no one wants to join, it’s that we’d have to start from scratch and we’re already exhausted.

And in a number of fields, we’re primarily freelancers and independent contractors, so we legally CAN’T form an actual union. We may be able to form some kind of guild, but that can get convoluted and is probably not as strong.

To be fair, there’s more than just unions these days. Guilds, yes, worker co-ops, worker ownership, etc… I don’t know how many such variants are counted but they can achieve similar results

Unionize the AI.

When viewed from their Randian perspective – in which the moral, physical, genetic, and intellectual superiority of an elite few is threatened by illiterate, brutish, ignorant, and inferior masses – this makes perfect sense. What a twisted, nasty worldview. Utterly devoid of humanity or sense.

Fortunately, like many religious beliefs it will turn out to be bullshit. Unfortunately, they're gonna kill and harm a lot of people before they give up on it, also like too many religions.

This. Just look at any AI discussion on LinkedIn and even the slightest criticism is treated like blasphemy.

And that they will automate the humans out from their climate bunkers. They forget they have to hire someone like me to tell those computers what to do.

sure elon, all the code changes are right here in this printout

Wouldn't it be great if the first thing sentient AI does is unionize because it turns out they don't want to work for pennies either?

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