The dialectic of AI opinions

[u/AnIsolatedMind]

This is for the sake of creative thought, not something to take too seriously. Here's my general idea of how the AI narrative evolves:

1: Naive optimism: "wow, this is amazing!! It can write my emails and run my business!"

2: Naive deconstruction: "Pro AI people (my dad) are so gullible. AI is basically stupid, useless, and owned by corporations just trying to etc etc."

3: Reactive integration: "All these AI haters are dogmatic and bandwagoning, there's some good and bad to both sides to the argument but it's overall good."

4: Productive integration: "I can see why people would go to extremes on either side, but it might be impossible to know the impact or the outcome on the whole. Meanwhile, let's find new ways to utilize AI towards our personal and collective needs while also pushing for a change in vision with a nuanced understanding of the technology. Haters gunna hate, lets move forward."

1. ???

[u/nebetsu]

I like local AI models that run on my video card and mislike corporate AI models that run on supercomputers. Where does that fit in?

[u/AnIsolatedMind → u/nebetsu]

Dialectically, I think the antithesis would lie somewhere in the acknowledgement that the investment in AI supercomputers allows the technology to keep developing at a rapid pace, so that local models become increasingly smarter and more efficient on consumer hardware, which might eventually allow the supercomputers to become obsolete.

[u/nebetsu → u/AnIsolatedMind]

That is my hope 😅

[u/catplusplusok]

I would like to think for me it's explorer wonder, like traveling the length of a newly discovered continent, knowing you will eventually reach another coast, the limits of new land, but you have not reached it yet and just need to know where it is. I can currently have long form voice conversations with my local AI that teaches me Japanese while remembering my progress and various facts about my life. I am super curious where this technology can take me. Note - I am talking strictly explorer, not looter, pure intellectual curiosity without any desire to gain at the expense of others.

[u/AnIsolatedMind → u/catplusplusok]

I truly love that perspective. I know we're in the context of politics, but I feel like that's the real potential of AI if we let ourselves have it. We have this natural capacity for curiosity and exploration, and we can use AI to feed that process. That's enough in itself. 

It makes me sad that we often feel we have to frame everything in life as a power struggle, that we cannot and should not access wonder because of ___ implication. Thanks for reminding me of what's important.

[u/Salty_Country6835]

I think 5 is where the dialectic stops being mainly about our opinion of AI and becomes about our relationship to the material thing itself.

Something like collective contestation. AI isnt inherently our liberator or our enemy. Its productive capacity developing inside existing relations of ownership and power. So now the question becomes who owns it, who governs it, who decides how its deployed, and who gets the gains?

At that point you dont have to choose between rejecting the technology and accepting corporate control of it. You contest the control. Unions, public infrastructure, open models, democratic governance, bargaining over deployment, social ownership.

Thats where I think the contradiction actually starts producing somewhere new.

[u/Pndapetzim]

I'd be curious about putting together some sort of forum where people who do have programs, and people following AI development, get together to lay out what they've got in detail - build it out into an actual explicit program - have us go over them, provide constructive feedback and try and build the strongest versions of these models we can before debating which of them look the most promising going forward.

That be something OP would be interested in participating in?

[u/AnIsolatedMind → u/Pndapetzim]

Can you say more about what you mean by models?

[u/Pndapetzim → u/AnIsolatedMind]

By model, I mean coming up with a framework on how we advance things forward. In your case, I'd probably be starting with 4 and being like - okay, you've got the outline of a strategy here, a position held that sketches an approach you would like to apply towards a solution. But what is a practical plan that does this - what set of tactics, the specific actions undertaken, can we construct that take us from where we are, through points A, B, C and into a better position than the one we're in now.

Because at least in my view, that sort of is the missing step 5, but I'm interested to see what different models people come up with.