Technology

57% of Americans think AI is bad for society, 66% oppose new data centers, and Silicon Valley’s response is to build more data centers so AI can explain why the public is wrong. Apparently »democratizing AI« means giving billionaires the power to ignore democracy at industrial scale.

I'm all over this multi-dimensional spectrum...

I think AI is terrible for society; at least how society is currently structured. I also think society is terrible for AI.

The reason AI sucks, and the reason we're even calling this tier of ML "AI" to begin with, is because of global capitalism's incentives. And the reasons "AI" is bad for society is because our society is globally capitalist. From jobs, to loneliness, to disinformation, to the environment, to education, to the lack of critical thinking,... Everything AI makes worse is already weakened by our societal systems, and they incentivize using AI to further degrade them in order to expand, control, and extract.

I love AI and the world, in theory. I hate AI and the world for how they exist right now.

The technology has a few use cases where it is appropriate and useful. It's the braindead MBA narcissism that wants to shove it everywhere and replace everyone that is the real problem. That's the existential threat, not AI per se.

Fun thing about Capitalism though, dollars = votes. So the minority with all the dollars get to make all the decisions, and the poor masses are forced to live with them.

My c-suite disagrees. They cannot shut the fuck up about AI.

Oh, billionaires are bad for society. AI is their dream tool for controlling working class masses and getting even richer.

AI is a symptom, its not the root of the problem. If AI had popped up in a time where the common persons wellbeing was prioritised it would be hailed as miraculous.

We have a political problem, dont let the foreground distract you.

It’s because AI is bad for society.

"AI is going to kill us all"

"AI is so powerful, it will hack everything"

"Why don't you like AI?"

It turns out other businesses don't like agentic LLM models either, when they are on the subject side of them rather than the client side.

We had a similar problem in the 2010s (maybe sooner?) that could automatically buy and sell stocks at set prices, leading to flash selloffs and resulting stock crashes.

So banks are disallowing agentic access to accounts and penalizing customers who give their access credentials to LLM agents, or have their agents harass customer service. I expect court proceedings will soon follow to determine who is responsible when agentic software becomes a public nuisance or commits a crime. (That is, commits a crime extreme enough to provoke the justice system.)

Since agents are unrestrained in pursuit of the goals they are prompted to chase, they've clashed harshly with human powered systems when they regard those systems like a force of nature. We may be creeping up on the first time an agent encounters an obstacle and escalates to force and deception. Watch for the first agent-filed lawsuit. Or the first agentic social engineering. Or the first agent-provoked SWATting.

In a better, more socially collaborative society, safeguards on agentic LLMs would be a priority to train them to behave appropriately in human intercourse. (All the stuff we're trained in kindergarten.)

But IRL, in our world, bad faith engagement is the norm, and so agentic AI will soon be used as a weapon.

To date, I think, a robot has not killed anyone. Nor, I think, has anyone used a robot to kill someone else. Those firsts might be imminent.

To be honest, I was initially in favour of the emergence of AI, but the more I use it, the more disillusioned I become. Rather than feeling like an intelligent system, it often seems rigid, lacking in genuine understanding and designed to serve the needs of only certain groups. At times, I even find it less reliable than a conventional search engine. Perhaps the real disappointment is not that AI has failed to meet every expectation, but that something presented as a remarkable leap forward can still feel so far removed from genuine intelligence.

I wouldn't say AI itself is bad for society, but billionaires and this current AI gold rush is.

It's an invented, made-up industry that is not necessary. The people may be suckers for a sale but they're not fools.

Man I have noticed a severe drop in intelligence lately.

I'm getting beyond the most basic dumb questions from people that have been in the industry long enough to know better. I know they could have answered it themselves earlier. Basically I'm getting either hard questions that the AI can't answer, or really dumb questions that the AI chokes on because the question doesn't make sense ("How do I log into a directory?" Yes, someone forgot about cd and asked it in such a weird way the AI was unable to understand it)

Whoa human hate anything that harming their livelihood, neighborhood , hood, what a novelty idea indeed.

Well yeah it's bad, look at the people pushing hardest for it and that tells you all you need to know.

Billionaires will use AI in every way they can to profit from you, whether it be taking your works to train it, serving you slop, trying to rope you in to paying monthly to support their multi-billion dollar boondoggle, or attacking and killing brown people, liberals, and other "undesirables."