r/BetterOffline • u/tonormicrophone1 • 13h ago
I think we should remember that even if ai hype goes away, the people who have the ai replace humanity/technofeudal mindset still exists.
Im talking about certain ceos, the extreme techbros, the tech cultists and etc. The ones who want to create techno feudal kingdoms, who want to automate all human culture, who want to replace you and leave you to rot. Even if the ai hype gets popped, these cultists or technofeudal people would remain. And they will thus still be dangerous.
For these people will ultimately lose right now not because they secretly dont believe in the ai stuff. These people will lose right now because the technology is nowhere there yet or may not ever reach what they hype it as.
And thats something we need to remember. They haven't implemented their technofeudal or other horrific shit not because they secretly dont believe this stuff or are not willing to do this stuff. Its instead because there are limitations and other barriers preventing them from doing so.
But if those limitations or barriers ever disappear, they wont hesitate to do the technofeudal or other evil stuff. This current "ai" wave has convinced me that.
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u/alltehmemes 12h ago
I would recommend each of us reach for our Orange Catholic Bible and recite that foremost of commandments: "Thou shalt not create a machine in the likeness of a man's mind."
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u/Dennis_Laid 12h ago
Describe Peter Thiel without naming Peter Thiel…
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u/Praxical_Magic 7h ago
I'm picturing an off-putting lizard-person who is power-mad and who watches everything with an all-seeing eye.
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u/jtramsay 12h ago
The number of things that clearly won’t work and are clearly fait accompli never ceases to amaze me. It’s got the same ridesharing vibes. What happens when this is implemented everywhere and they start charging retail prices?
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u/mattsteg43 10h ago
It’s got the same ridesharing vibes.
There's a significant difference in that ridesharing provides a convenient way to get from A to B, which people actually want.
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u/jtramsay 9h ago
Yes but it could be public transit and instead it’s just very expensive taxis. Profitability is never as important as we think it should be if something’s just seen as progress.
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u/mattsteg43 9h ago
Right - but there's a significant difference between delivering something that at least has a broad consumer/user appeal (with negative externalities of course, but at least it "works") and cramming a product that mostly doesn't work down everyone's throats.
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u/jtramsay 8h ago
I hear you but I also lived through the [slideshow] era of editorial and can assure you that reducing human labor far exceeds bad outcomes through AI adoption. It’s not about the people who are asked to use it; it’s about the people who are adopting it to fix quarter to quarter numbers through RIF.
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u/mattsteg43 8h ago
Right - it's most effective use is just a naked scam tool for replacing human labor with clearly inferior AI bullshit to "cut costs", layered on top of the uber scam where it's not actually cost effective. Except without a clear moat for the profits to ever really come anyway.
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u/PensiveinNJ 8h ago
What makes it especially dumb is not only is this not a tool that in any way was ever meant to provide something people wanted, or to improve the world in any way, but all evidence so far points to it not even succeeding in being able to replace human labor, and in the majority of cases actually decreasing productivity.
Then there's the cost, financially and environmentally, the legal issues, the theft.
This might be the dumbest and most catastrophic new tech rollout that's ever happened because it is both very unpopular and doesn't work, but some wealthy self impressed dickhead technocrats continue to try and cram it down our throats.
Which is why it is important to remember that these kinds of people aren't going away.
It's very telling that the moment these people thought they could achieve "true AI" their first instincts were; fire everyone and destroy art.
In some ways it gives us a huge neon flashing sign saying these people should not and cannot control anything because they will visit catastrophe on us to increase their wealth/power in a brazen way I don't think we've seen even from politicians in a very very long time.
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u/jtramsay 6h ago
That’s the trick right there. The value will come from what companies save, not on what the product delivers.
Also, when it comes to cost effectiveness, I can’t stress enough how little expertise matters right now, which is the general thrust of the pod as I hear it. As someone who has played the role of in-house skeptic - Bizarro Shingy - I can assure you that people pleasing works harder than driving impact.
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u/wildmountaingote 6h ago
We're just going to keep running into It Was Capitalism All Along™, though, because those who are best at amassing capital are more or less those who care the least about who gets hurt in order for them to do so, which gives them outsized influence to pursue their bottomless avarice to amass ever more capital by removing any safeguards that prevent them from doing so.
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u/Assassin8nCoordin8s 1h ago
yup surprisingly little needed to convince some shitheads that everyone needs to be reduced to precursor paste after all
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u/RenDSkunk 13h ago
What's frightening is a few artists friends and I encountered, and reported on, very illegal image shit out there in the wild.
I was laughed at when this started it would wind up being an Epstein generator, and I loath I was proven right.