From the article: “In particular, five fundamental attributes of social media have harmed society. AI also has those attributes. Note that they are not intrinsically evil. They are all double-edged swords, with the potential to do either good or ill. The danger comes from who wields the sword, and in what direction it is swung. This has been true for social media, and it will similarly hold true for AI. In both cases, the solution lies in limits on the technology’s use.”
To steal an old trope: the tech bros have circled the globe eight times while the government is still putting its boots on. If there’s money to be made via automation, there’s no stopping it (unless we get the guillotines out of mothballs).
Someone will try to sell AI guillotines
I literally just saw they’re testing AI robots in Gaza
Read about drone warfare in Ukraine and how AI drone swarm warfare is just a matter of months away if it’s not already being done.
The problem with any regulation is that it’s going to have unforeseen knock-on effects. It might cripple an otherwise benign use. This can be mitigated by trying to draft smart bills initially by coordinating with leaders in the field who aren’t corporate backers. And then being able and willing to amend laws as these effects take shape.
Unfortunately this is not how the US congress functions right now and for the foreseeable future. Therefore regulation will likely be sparse and when it is heavy handed, unlikely to be amended unless the knock-on effects are massively bad.
Social media is just another scapegoat like Russian bots.
The truth is much worse: most people are, and have always been awful, bloodthirsty ghoulish pieces of shit and they were so before social media, you just know it now.
Technology and policy matter. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-refugee-attacks-germany.html
most people are, and have always been awful, bloodthirsty ghoulish pieces of shit
Most people are empathetic and decent. This sounds like apologia or projection. Evil people think everyone else is just as evil and that’s how they rationalize it.
No friend, no, I’m sorry, but the whole world just wouldn’t work if that were actually the case. Humanity is inherently altruistic. The issue is that people struggle to be that and survive. We just have to ramp down the me:first and push more for society. EU is starting to make those in-roads, so stay positive!
World Hunger is literally a problem of corruption. The vast majority of problems are “we could solve this, but it costs money and we’d rather have another mega yacht”. If humans were truly altruistic, homelessness and hunger wouldn’t be issues at all. Are we savages? Maybe not. But overall altruistic? Bullshit.
There’s a reason we idolize heros instead of treating them as mundane. They are exceptional, not the norm.
I’d say it’s that we all have these elements within us.
We’re all born as selfish idiots, how can we be otherwise? We’re helpless at birth, thrust from perfect comfort and safety into discomfort, utterly ignorant and wholly dependent, with no knowledge there are others, who are just as dependent when they’re born.
There’s the variability in personality, but by and large we have to learn to see others as the same as ourselves.
So while we may not all actively try to be assholes, it takes conscious effort to be better than our base nature.
And, I tend to think we all get to be assholes now and again. We all have moments we can look back on and say “oh, yea, I was the asshole that time”.
Social media just reflects humanity, though the algorithms are certainly designed to increase engagement via the simplest mechanisms - emotional engagement. And which are the easiest to target? Yep - the most basic, they have the broadest appeal, because we all share those base emotions.
Another way to look at this: if we didn’t share these base emotions, would the algorithms have any effect?
So many people on Lemmy are pessimistic as shit, makes it hard to read the comments sometimes
It is one side of us humans. You don’t become top of the food chain by petting the lions.
However, the other side is: We can team up and watch each others backs.
You mean the part where we assume rich People have our best interests at heart and are trying to help?
Meanwhile, reports commissioned by the state department suggesting publishing weights be made illegal, so corporations can have their monopoly of a public technology.
Lmao right; you know this so called “ai” is going to be used and abused for every ounce of gains possible
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When major brands like Uber and Procter & Gamble recently slashed their digital ad spending by the hundreds of millions, they proclaimed that it made no dent at all in their sales.
As Jonathan Swift once wrote, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” Academics seem to have proved this in the case of social media; people are more likely to share false information—perhaps because it seems more novel and surprising.
The incentives in the tech sector are so spectacularly, blindingly powerful that they have enabled six megacorporations (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook parent Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia) to command a trillion dollars each of market value—or more.
The expansive role of these technologies in our daily lives gives for-profit corporations opportunities to exert control over more aspects of society, and that exposes us to the risks arising from their incentives and decisions.
In addition to strengthening and enforcing antitrust law, we can introduce regulation that supports competition-enabling standards specific to the technology sector, such as data portability and device interoperability.
And with a looming presidential election, conflict spreading alarmingly across Asia and Europe, and a global climate crisis, it’s easy to imagine that we won’t get our arms around AI any faster than we have (not) with social media.
The original article contains 2,953 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 93%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do learn from history are doomed to watch as those who did not learn repeat it.
I saw an IBM commercial that depicted an AI personal assistant informing a user that their credit card had been used for a fraudulent charge. It asked the user if a particular charge was legit and they said no. Then the AI informed the user that the transaction had been canceled and a new card had been issued.
I have a couple problems with this. First, what if the AI was hallucinating parts of this interaction? Secondly, at some point the user’s AI will be interfacing with the bank’s AI, then we will effectively be subservient to a bunch of algorithms automatically running the world and we will basically be children with our AI parents taking care of us.
Not to mention how voice assistants can just mishear you. Told google once to put dental floss on my shopping list and it said “got it, I added applesauce.” Good try I guess. Pretty trivial this time, but they expect me to trust that for tasks with financial stakes?
then we will effectively be subservient to a bunch of algorithms automatically running the world and we will basically be children with our AI parents taking care of us.
That’s the plan.
Shareholders think they’ll be excluded because they can call and reach a human.
But it will soon be impossible to be a shareholder over every AI that could possibly fuck you. And we will undoubtedly turn over things to AI that we should have kept control of, to the point of being unable to even help our poor shareholders.
I expect that everyone will need at least a little prompt engineering in their life before this mess is under control.
So there’s that to look forward to.
The good news is AI are just computers wearing fancy pants and can, and will, be unplugged when we learn - the hard way - what uses AI is no good for. I’m sure that’ll be big “who could possibly have seen this coming?!” news, too.
(I’m a shareholder and I don’t think this.)
Bahahahahahha, NEVER gonna happen.
Humanity learning from its mistakes, I mean.
Or… hear me out… we use AI to make social media even more insufferable than it was before.
So excited to have an llm make posts on Twitter for me, so that all my bot followers can think i am funny
Already happening, friend
Unlimited scams and Jesus stuff for everyone!
We haven’t figured out how to deal with social media at all. We will make even worse mistakes with AI, that’s just how we are as humans.
most of social medias ills come from the algorithms which is basically what ai is soooo…
We have two ethics systems:
The first we apply to healthcare and government, and it’s best sunned up by Micheal Scott “Don’t ever, for any reason, do anything to anyone, for any reason, ever, no matter what. No matter… where. Or who, or who you are with, or, or where you are going, or… or where you’ve been… ever. For any reason, whatsoever.”,
The second is applied to private industry, and it’s best summed up by “innocent, until proven guilty”.
And that’s why we let private industry roll along with whatever they want, until we can definitively prove harm, but society found it unreasonable to ask people to vaccinate because there was a minute chance of rare side effects less bad than the disease it was for.
Citizens United
Let’s make different, more disastrous mistakes!
Climb in back and we’ll be off!
Way too late. All of the harmful parts of social media are exploited and promoted by corporate interests, and llms are shaping up the same. Users have already shown they have no interest in policing themselves, so unless something is done to drastically restrain corporations, there’s little that can or will be done to keep the new thing from being even worse than the old thing.
