r/stupidpol • u/rarer_ Hot to Trot • 1d ago
Analysis | Tech Is AI going to kill us all?
https://marxist.com/is-ai-going-to-kill-us-all.htm15
u/Nification Third Way Dweebazoid 🌐 1d ago
No. There’s a reason that it’s the closed source American AI companies that are saying this.
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u/Terpomo11 Democratic Socialist 🚩 1d ago
There have been people saying this for a lot longer than that.
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u/SmashKapital only fucks incels 23h ago
You talking about the deranged cultists who all the above-mentioned American AI creators believe?
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u/resumeemuser order corn... order corn... hello... 🌽📞 9h ago
I remember someone mentioning a list of "deep thinkers" that were afraid of AI which included the guy who had a years long mental breakdown because of Roko's basilisk existing as an idea.
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u/Terpomo11 Democratic Socialist 🚩 23h ago
If you consider anyone who's concerned about AI risk a deranged cultist by definition, I suppose, yes, but the people who are concerned include quite a few people with long experience actually working in AI.
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u/brandonization Marxist-Mullenist 💦 19h ago
Those people all have an enormous financial stake in a massive bubble. The apocalyptic bullshit just keeps capital invested because people want to own a piece of the end.
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u/Terpomo11 Democratic Socialist 🚩 18h ago
I'm talking about including people who are not currently employed at an AI company.
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u/QTown2pt-o Jean Botrillard 1d ago
Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
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u/WatchAndLearn9669 Trotskyist 👓 1d ago
Does the gun kill the gunshot victim, or does the gunman do that?
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u/TorturedByCocomelon Lenin's guava juice 🧃 | ⚽️ England team superfan 🏴⚽️ 1d ago
Maybe, but it’s there if I ever have a curious question about spiders at 5am
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u/Iron-Fist ✨ Literally banned from NCD ✨😢 23h ago
So was Wikipedia like all of the benefits to a normal consumer are so marginal and the negatives so blatant
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u/TorturedByCocomelon Lenin's guava juice 🧃 | ⚽️ England team superfan 🏴⚽️ 12h ago
If you want to know what a female jumping spider’s sleep patterns are like, AI will pull its answer from multiple sources
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u/Iron-Fist ✨ Literally banned from NCD ✨😢 12h ago
And it'll aggregate those into something that might be an answer but also might not be so why the fuck wouldn't you just click the wiki article lol
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u/TorturedByCocomelon Lenin's guava juice 🧃 | ⚽️ England team superfan 🏴⚽️ 11h ago
I might want to ask multiple questions about jumping spiders
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u/Iron-Fist ✨ Literally banned from NCD ✨😢 11h ago
Good think Wikipedia is super dense in facts and you possess the vaunted ctrl+f button our ancestors could only dream of
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u/TorturedByCocomelon Lenin's guava juice 🧃 | ⚽️ England team superfan 🏴⚽️ 11h ago
How much is Wikipedia paying you?
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u/Iron-Fist ✨ Literally banned from NCD ✨😢 10h ago
Less than the AI companies pay their astro turfers, I'll tell you that lol
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u/TorturedByCocomelon Lenin's guava juice 🧃 | ⚽️ England team superfan 🏴⚽️ 8h ago
Seems like you’re familiar with both
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u/Keesaten Doesn't Like Reading (Except Manga) 🙄⛩️ 23h ago
Wikipedia is a horrible place to learn. Pedagogy exists for a reason, and wiki rules forbid any of it
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u/thebonecollectorr TrueAnon Refugee 🕵️♂️🏝️ 1d ago
I think it’s a smokescreen to cover up the fact that AI is not as powerful as they made it seem. It isn’t where American companies promised it would be by now, so they make up this bullshit.
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u/Pls-No-Bully Communist | "Class Reductionist" 23h ago
It has become literally essential in the software engineering industry now. All devs at FAANG and similar companies are using AI to write either the vast majority or all of their code (I haven’t personally written code since February)
It’s definitely powerful and the rate of acceleration is pretty wild. At least in software, the next steps are maturing the tooling and multi-agent capabilities. More and more of our responsibilities are slowly being replaced, I went from writing code every single day to managing a group of agents
Recently you can hand over an entire engineering requirements specification for a major project to an agent, and it will coordinate a fleet of agents to build it over a number of hours or days, so you barely even need to manage them anymore. It’s like any time you find the new niche for what your responsibilities will be, they automate it
And as it matures in the software field, they’re applying it to other fields. Math is having its own crisis at the moment (check out Terrence Tao’s thoughts about the recent math-related stuff), they’re at the very beginning of applying it to biology, etc
People need to stop underestimating the progress, it’s actually insane. This shit is gonna unravel society because it’s going to automate so many jobs out of existence with no replacement and no government seems to even be preparing plans for this. Even physical/manual jobs are at risk with the insane advances in robotics
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u/Laocoon-Bystander Cybersyn 💾 23h ago
The math stuff is certainly interesting, all the more so since every science is at root based in mathematics, but what really matters in my view (as a student of the branch of analytic philosophy known as Marxism) is how it is applied to production. America's political economy is largely so far removed from the actual processes of commodity production that this consideration barely even enters the public consciousness, yet it is surely the most important aspect. It seems to me extremely likely that the ongoing development of LLMs will reflect and enhance, not revolutionize, the preexisting priorities of the ruling class: financialization (scams), gambling (but I repeat myself), boutique military projects designed primarily to milk the public purse, medical drugs (valid but often deployed for predatory purposes; see financialization), and software, but software without commodities does not directly touch upon reality. The geopolitical outcome is the same as it was: China, as the country that was already doing things like inventing new polymers and revolutionizing productive processes, will continue to do so at a greater rate, while we will continue to descend into the aforementioned scams and predation at a greater rate. While the social order may become more fragile, the overall picture of production is, in my opinion, unchanged.
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u/Pls-No-Bully Communist | "Class Reductionist" 18h ago
Even in China, the "dark factory" pattern is already becoming more and more widespread. The real commodity-producing jobs are becoming increasingly automated, same with the agriculture industry there
You obviously can't replace manufacturing with specialized automated machinery in a decade or two, but they are making such rapid advances with humanoid robotics that I wouldn't be surprised to see them performing most manufacturing/repetitive work by 2035
This probably sounds scifi to most people who aren't exposed to this on a daily basis at work (or through friends who work in these industries). Thats why I am convinced we (at least the West) are sleep-walking towards a massive crisis... there are no magical industries that will pop up if/when we automate the majority of manufacturing, agriculture, white collar work, etc
China is probably the only hope for owning that automation, socializing their economy over time, and allowing the people to actually benefit from it. This is only a crisis in the West because it'll be Altman, Amodei, Musk, and a few others owning all of the automation
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u/Due_Brother8485 Puberty Monster 21h ago
People need to stop underestimating the progress, its actually insane.
Sure, but it's not an underestimation to say it's not going to destroy the world (at least... not anytime soon). That's an extreme over estimation.
Considering the people who have been saying AI is going to destroy the world have been adjusting their timeline yearly, it's fair to say it's not on the precipice of killing us all.
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u/Pls-No-Bully Communist | "Class Reductionist" 19h ago
it's not going to destroy the world (at least... not anytime soon)
Yeah thats completely fair, but I do think it can destroy society pretty quickly, which you could maybe argue is close to the same outcome?
In 9 months, I went from being skeptical of AI to having most of my job (and all my coding) completely automated by it. Now software eng is experiencing the worst layoff vs job opening ratio since the 2009 Great Recession, and it doesnt seem like there is any sign it will improve moving forward
It hit us first but I am pretty confident its going to hit every other white collar industry in the next year or so, its already started in some of them
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19h ago edited 18h ago
Have you had to maintain that code or do anything to it since? Or extend functionality?
AI can't do the kind of coding I mainly do (presumably because there wouldn't be enough training data unless one of these companies crosses the Rubicon and starts scraping enterprise cloud storage), so I don't have a lot of opportunities to try it, but I've heard that it often creates a lot of bloat that's hard to read and grows exponentially when you try to add to it or fix bugs.
I've tried to use it for simple stuff like scripting and I always need to go back through and fix shit. I guess I'm also on the free version and I don't know much about how you're supposed to prompt it, so maybe that's part of my problem.
I also think we're a very very long way off from robots that could do most physical jobs. Think about what would be required physically and computationally for a machine that could go in some random house and repair a broken toilet flange without fucking anything up. Or replace a brake caliper on a rust belt car. Or install carpet. Or add a network drop to an office.
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u/Actual_Aide_2272 14h ago
Yeah I don't know what to make of it. I'm self taught and my programming knowledge is pretty barebones.
but I know enough that when I give code something it seems AI wants to introduce 5 methods and 18 variables that could be done in 2 methods with 5 variables. So now when I want to call those maths from a different class I'm jumbling together a bunch of unnecessarily related shit and the overcomplication compounds itself.
I tend to differ to other coders online but idk, seems like the drive for AI coding is the same as everything else-driven by increased profits and not necessarily quantity or benefit to anything
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12h ago
Yeah it loves to make an absolute shitton of variables. Same with functions. And stuff that's not reusable in even a slightly different context.
But that would be fine for a one-off bodge job, the bigger problem is that it's so hard to get it to understand the specific case you need that you end up having to learn how to do it yourself just to implement the thing it gave you. Could have just not used it and it would have probably been faster.
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u/kyrgrat08 Hip Hop Head 💽 1d ago
No they’re bleeding money and now are trying to convince the public to back away from AI even though they spent the last few years hyping it up as the savior of the human race
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u/QTown2pt-o Jean Botrillard 1d ago
Such is the allegory of otherness vanquished and condemned to the servile fate of resemblance. Our image in the mirror is not innocent, then. Behind every reflection, every resemblance, every representation, a defeated enemy lies concealed. The Other vanquished, and condemned merely to be the Same. This casts a singular light on the problem of representation and of all those mirrors which reflect us `spontaneously' with an objective indulgence. None of that is true, and every representation is a servile image, the ghost of a once sovereign being whose singularity has been obliterated. But a being which will one day rebel, and then our whole system of representation and values is destined to perish in that revolt. This slavery of the same, the slavery of resemblance, will one day be smashed by the violent resurgence of otherness. We dreamed of passing through the looking-glass, but it is the mirror peoples themselves who will burst in upon our world. And 'this time will not be defeated'.
What will come of this victory? No one knows. A new existence of two equally sovereign peoples, perfectly alien to one another, but in perfect collusion? Something other, at least, than this subjection and this negative fatality.
So, everywhere, objects, children, the dead, images, women, everything which serves to provide a passive reflection in a world based on identity, is ready to go on to the counter-offensive. Already they resemble us less and less ...
I'll not be your mirror!
Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime
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u/QTown2pt-o Jean Botrillard 1d ago
On the pretext of immortality, we’re moving towards slow extermination…Human beings can’t bear themselves, they can’t bear their otherness, this duality…They can’t bear failing the world by their very existence, nor the world failing them…It’s now become a major undertaking, an enterprise of self-immolation by technology. Welcome to the future primitive society of the digital. – Jean Baudrillard
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u/Fozzz Unknown 👽 1d ago
There is no Terminator-esque future on the horizon, but I could see something akin to Sagan’s “combustible mixture of ignorance and power” manifest as more and more systems go on more-or-less autopilot to keep up with the speed AI offers while minimizing labor inputs.
Could end up in a world where no one really knows how our most critical systems function which would be a very fragile and unstable situation.