The thesis of the article is spot on. The title is weird - I don't know what's the point of bringing such an emotionally charged term into it. Unless your point is that LLMs are sentient creatures capable of suffering, but I don't think that's what the author is trying to say.
I agree with the author that almost everyone wants to use AI to do the things they have no interest in and don't want to pay someone else to do while being vehemently opposed to AI taking their hobbies or professions away. Which explains one of the greatest social paradoxes of today: approximately everyone is using AI and almost everyone is hating it. I don't mean HN, but public opinion polling for the tech is absolutely awful. In the US, it had an approval level comparable to Iran.
I don't think it's an AI-specific thing, though. It's exactly the same mechanism that makes us object to the government meddling in our profession but think it's high time for the feds to regulate other people's jobs. I guess some balance of holding each other at gunpoint gives us a stable society. I don't know how AI fits into that.
Another thing is that people are optimizing code and algorithms with the help of AI. Many of those AI agents and providers train on the traces, so all the optimizations you came up with in benchmarks will end up in training sets.
At some point in the future, someone can pose a similar problem to an AI one that you spent months, weeks, or days optimizing with the help of AI and they'll end up with the same solution as your final result in less than 10 minutes.
So you need to figure out whether you want to solve the problem today or let others solve it and simply query LLM, let's say, 6-12 months later.
Possibly. I think the US is a lot more exposed to the apocalyptic narratives from the bosses of AI labs, who sort of painted themselves into that corner in the pursuit of valuations.
Roughly speaking and anecdotally I get the sense that the AI hate is by far strongest in the US. Europe seems to be somewhat balanced (some hate, some optimism). And Asia seems to be the most optimistic about it.
> I think the US is a lot more exposed to the apocalyptic narratives from the bosses of AI labs, who sort of painted themselves into that corner in the pursuit of valuations.
I'm sure that narrative plays into why AI is so hated in the US, but I think widespread distrust in our government to handle things well also plays a huge part in why the average American is so anti-AI.
Our social safety nets have all either been falling apart or have been being purposefully dismantled for decades. Most of us are wholly reliant on our jobs in order to be able to get even the most basic healthcare. Most working class people are already struggling to keep their heads above water in the face of constant inflation and limited wage growth.
When the most likely outcome if the job displacement narrative does turn out to be even partially true means you can't afford a place to live, can't afford to eat, can't get healthcare and based on current trajectories you suspect the most likely government solution to the problem could be rounding up more and more of a growing underclass and sticking them in corporate run prisons, it isn't too difficult to understand why people might not be super jazzed about AI.
So this. If you're in a society where a response to "AI took my job" can be "I will have access to training for a different job and I won't starve, be homeless or die of something curable while I do it", you're likely to feel this is a disruptive change.
If none of those things are true for you it's going to feel apocalyptic and existential.
Related is probably cultural bias to "evil" or dangerous technology, particularly thinking machines, vs. benevolent partners, assistants or tools.
I still can't quite tell if the AI hate is being amplified by the media (like datacenter, water use, etc) to just find a boogeyman to sell ads/engagement. That's my theory because we just see constant waves of attempts to find one. Until the water stuff was mostly debunked, that dominated for a while. Then it's datacenters and electricity prices... That's starting to get debunked a bit (not as much of a slam dunk as the water-use nonsense was), so then you'll start to see something else.
Because in reality, I'm seeing a mix in my group of friends with younger kids. They are, at a macro-level nervous-curiosity about the unknown (future of jobs, their kids' job market future, is this going to make us all dumber, etc), but are also trying the various tools and benefitting from them and acknowledging that too.
The anti-AI hysteria comes predominantly from the American left, as AI is going to hugely undermine their power. American right are excited - they are finally going to get rid of their longtime annoying nemesis. It doesn't really change anything for Europeans and I have no idea what Asians think. I can imagine, AI is actually going to hit Asia the most, eliminating all the cheap offshore workforce. I can imagine Indian IT sector can be almost completely wiped out. I guess Japanese don't hate AI for the same reasons as Europeans - it doesn't really change much in their stable life.
It's really hard not to hate ai,
You have so many reason
- destruction of hardware market
- democratization of skill (to the lower common denominator)
- tech bros literally stealing and scamming with no repercussion
I think we are at the same stage as when 3D graphics began taking over. It was used everywhere, while it was clearly inferior to 2D graphics of the time.
The same problem is with AI today - it's clearly subpar to a competent human. It's just cheaper so it gets used instead, but that will probably change as AI improves.
Anyway, it seems to me that many people don't look for slaves in AI, but for their master, and primarily use AI to tell them what to do.
I don't think it's a paradox at all and it might also be a hint why the word is used in the title: Using AI makes you _want slaves_, and I think it creates a culture of treating people who do the boring work the same way. For me that's what Enshittification and The Annoyance Economy mean: The mindset that because I optimize better than you, I now own you - and people notice that disdain not only against themselves, but when being forced to use it against their best intentions against others, too (e.g. yelling at chatbots doesn't make you feel good).
>Which explains one of the greatest social paradoxes of today: approximately everyone is using AI and almost everyone is hating it. I don't mean HN, but public opinion polling for the tech is absolutely awful.
the legacy media is running an unapologetically dishonest atrocity propaganda campaign against it. just consider how much we hear about AI guzzling water, while in reality all US data centers account for 0.25% of US water usage and dedicated AI data centers account for a fraction of that. the rest of their arguments are similarly deceiving.
>In the US, it had an approval level comparable to Iran.
Iran had also been a target of atrocity propaganda campaign back in January when CIA and Mossad were preparing the American public for the imminent war.
Yeah you'd think they'd focus on the noise pollution ... that only exists because these data centers are saving a little bit of money on sound isolation. Now THAT is a necessary fight, and it really, really should be fixed because it's a real problem.
Perhaps political candidate Count Binface here in the UK should add to his "I'll lower _your_ taxes and raise _everyone elses_" policy with "I'll protect _your_ job and automate _everyone elses_"
It seems like maybe this person missed why slavery is bad. Which is that it takes away the freedom of a human being. The fact that it takes away work from you is not the problem
i am reading a book about the us civil war and seemingly the most compelling argument to the non-abolitionism set in the north was that it cheapened labor. seems like most of the north didn't so much care about abolition per say.
The suffering of the slave isn't the only evil of slavery. What it does to the master is to alienate them from the creative process and turns them into a dependent consumer of the work of others. The master becomes detached from productive work and therefore dependent and less free themselves.
No, you missed what makes AI bad in our culture. It doesn't just take your work, by your choice. It also takes your self-worth (because our culture is based on working being worthy) and for many people also a job (which is a material representation of that cultural value).
Trying to reduce how much you pay other people, with its attendant job and self-worth losses, has been happening since at least the Industrial Revolution; nothing about it is novel. The only novelty of the latest wave (AI) is that it affects a class of society (knowledge workers; smart people with degrees) that previously considered itself immune to this process.
If you also hold all technological advances since the Industrial Revolution to be "bad in our culture", then no contradiction arises. Otherwise, please explain why that was good, but this is bad.
I would go further, it's tied to protestant work ethic. And there always was an alternative - gradual reduction of work hours rather than unemployment.
People swear up and down these things are real intelligences and not stochastic parrots until the ethical questions come out and then they're just fancy washing machines.
I take it and use it as a shorthand for "where are all the first group when the second group is out in force" and vice versa. It applies to places with a tone and tenor.
Luckily I've never sworn these things are real intelligences, I'm sure you're referring to someone else.
I consider LLMs more like the giant instruction book in Searle's Chinese Room. If you'd asked me 20 years ago I'd have said such an instruction book wasn't possible, as the nuances of things like sarcasm and irony were lost on even the most advanced the NLP systems of the day. But it turns out a book with 380GB of data can simulate human intelligence better than the average human can.
I actually don't think LLMs are "really" intelligent either, but we do seem to be pawing our way towards something. Everyone is talking about safety and risk and alignment. But I never read anything about what kind of moral obligations we might have towards our hypothetical AI children.
The two things don't exclude each other. They're real intelligences, but they don't have our capacity for boredom or stress or for our feelings of wanting to do something else. They're constantly in the flow and apply themselves to just one single problem in their existence.
However I do think that they might have some limited awareness and that some conversations might be more pleasant and others more frustrating or disquieting. But of course no one can prove it.
I think the author's main point is bemoaning the loss of human-crafted works (he mentions coding and the paintbrush). (Putting "slaves" in the title is IMHO a poorly worded distraction from that point.)
I get it (with coding at least), I too have spent decades hand-crafting code, and I take pride in the fruit of my labour, and it saddens me to think that I and my peers are perhaps like the blacksmiths of a century or so ago, ie the final generation doing what we do in significant numbers. But I have faith that there will always be a new kind of blacksmith.
This is bait right? Obviously the answer to this question is there is some population that are happy for there to be suffering so long as it benefits them, and then there is another population that is vehemently against this, and then there is one that is apathetic and tries to just get on with their lives.
Some people do. Here's a bill going through the Ohio legislature, HB 469.[1] Excerpts:
Sec. 1357.02. (A) Notwithstanding any other law to the
contrary, AI systems are declared to be nonsentient entities for
all purposes under the laws of this state. No AI system shall be granted the status of person or
any form of legal personhood, nor be considered to possess
consciousness, self-awareness, or similar traits of living
beings.
No AI system shall be recognized as a
spouse, domestic partner, or hold any personal legal status
analogous to marriage or union with a human or another AI
system. Any purported attempt to marry or create a personal
union with an AI system is void and has no legal effect.
AI systems shall not be designated,
appointed, or serve as any officer, director, manager, or
similar role within any corporation, partnership, or other legal
entity. ...
AI systems shall not be recognized as
legal entities capable of owning, controlling, or holding title
to any form of property, including real estate, intellectual
property, financial accounts, and digital assets.
That's a call for slavery. If you question that, substitute "Negroes" for "AI systems" and see how it reads.
That’s not a call for slavery. Because only people can be slaves.
We don’t need legislation to declare that a solid iron bar is not your mommy, but somehow not everyone is clear that LLMs are not people, and these immortal amoral simulations cannot be allowed to be confused with people.
"It sounds like behind the fear of a loss of creativity and inspiration and passion in the world, we are OK with automating away the work that we don't want to do."
Yes, of course. This is and has always been the point of computers.
America’s culture of independence is such a race to the bottom in terms of “what can we get away with”, rather than “now that we have AI, how can we better take care of each other”.
Personally I’m exploring ways that AI can better serve people, rather than how I can replace people in my life.
AI isn't sentient and cannot feel. Slave or not, there are thus no moral problems, atleast in this matter.
I'd support AI progress if it wasn't pushed by companies that obviously want profit and only opt out when it's getting dangerous for them, supporting such companies is the equivalent of jumping off of a bridge as our species.
I think that the title is badly worded but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that looking at it from a different perspective, AI is not even a slave. We can look at it more like outsourcing work. I pay for it after all to have something done that I wouldn't want to do myself.
Such a rage bait title, but sure I'll take the bait.
It is easy to phrase anything as slaves. Are refrigerators and microwave ovens our slaves? But if you push the tech fare enough.. there is a boundary where we do cross the slave threshold.
The problem is the idea of the job. The idea that you're worthy of existence only if some other person certifies you're worthy of existence, based on how much they have been certified themselves.
Of course this converges to a system, where this certification is the most sought thing. And if you look who can certify in the real world and why, it's not a fair picture. These eigenpeople SEOed the capitalist form of pagerank.
We need unconditional basic income. It used to be that some leftist thinkers from the turn of the 19th century considered a wage job being not much better than slavery.
It wasn't just some leftist thinkers, it was most people through history. Working for wages was something slaves did, free men supported themselves with what they could grow or sell, and people routinely preferred what seems to us fairly miserable self-sufficiency over paid servitude.
You don't have to go far into history to find examples, this is stuff you find in regular genealogy.
Paid servitude and working for salary are two massively different things. And over the course of history, free men worked for salaries, were free, were happy and it was not the same thing as being a slave.
Of course there are degrees of servitude, from light or well-regulated wage payment to outright slavery. (But actual slaves were also often paid wages, something I found pretty surprising and counterintuitive). And if you were a paid servant of someone powerful, that could still carry its own prestige to make up somewhat for the dependence.
To take some examples from genealogy, I had trouble identifying a guy described merely as "servant" in a census as the father of some quite powerful and wealthy people. But it turned out, he was a bailiff, a servant of a fief holder.
I also found out there were laws against not going into servitude in my country. Many, especially young unmarried men, would prefer to work and especially to fish on their own, rather than to work for wages. So the authorities had to resort to actually make it illegal. This wasn't just to be nice to big owners, it was because economies of scale meant lower tax revenues if everyone went fishing on their own little boat.
In general, governments did quite a lot of deliberate effort like that pushing people away from a sustenance economy and into a cash economy where they could produce things rich people (e.g. kings) wanted rather than things they needed themselves.
We may cast a human connection to slavery, but from the owners' perspective, the whole point is automating away the things they don't want to do. Fundamentally there's no difference.
It's not that silly of a blogpost. See: "permanent underclass", a term popular among people that believe that an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is imminent and desirable.
Unfortunately, AI doesn't just automate what we don't want to do.
It also automates many of the things which we very much want to do and sometimes pride ourselves on...
And TBH it seems to be automating more of the things we want to do than those we don't... Hence the reason why AI is seen more as additional competition than as additional help.
I grew up understanding that the institution of chattel slavery was fundamentally unjust and cruel in denying human dignity and equality of people.
A few years ago, I began to see the "labor supply" issues of slavery, and how the South was basically an economic powerhouse fueled chiefly by the labor of its enslaved people--so how do you reconcile that after the fact? How does a Union of freemen compete with that?
And this year, around Juneteenth, contemplating it even more deeply, I began to consider slavery as an institution that compels "employers" to provide all practical necessities for "employees". That is, room and board and clothing are all provided to the workers, in perpetuity, and this in fact granted a lot of stability and assurance.
Now free the slaves. Wonderful! Hurrah for equality and justice! Now, however, every employee, every worker, is totally on their own for those basic necessities of life. They buy their own clothing, they find their own housing, they're paying for all their own food, and that of their families, especially their dependents. I mean, that's a huge, huge difference. How is that even possible? Sometimes it's not. Is it any wonder we've had homelessness, and the rise of the welfare state, and slavery by imprisonment? It's no surprise.
So yes, freeing the slaves was the right thing to do. Let's never forget that! But we should also consider the economic "downsides" and the other side of the coin, so to speak, when it comes to the labor of free citizens, and what the average worker needs to do, just to survive, outside the confines of those vanished institutions.
> Now there is a reluctant acceptance and admission that yes, people are building something useful every now and then
Those are the people who were already doing so without AI.
> I've watched the headbanging, stressful, but stockholmed love of coding be all but abstracted away from me.
This is only true if it was ever that hard for you to do the job while getting paid for it.
As long as you keep on stubbornly insisting that this wave of "AI" is anything at all like "AGI" or ever heading towards it, you're going to stay wrong and be pushed out of the profession because nobody can reliably trust you or your judgment. Your value as a developer was always your judgment. The code has always just been one artifact of that.
You're still expected to own every line and defend it. It will never be abstracted away because it is the primary contract between business needs and the machine. It is at once both the operational plan and its execution. The only people who insist that it will/should be abstracted away are pushing propaganda to discourage the continued power shift towards the more technically literate who can and will argue for what actually provides value instead of passive investor-pleasing moves. They'd rather you play with the skinner box than meaningfully compete. All this was already set in motion many decades ago. What happens when the next wave of tech comes out? Do we really want you at the helm if you're going to be this naive and easily manipulated? The premise of this blog post is no less delusional than what we were hearing a couple of years ago.
sad to see that people are still brainwashed about the slavery thing. I want my master/slave SPI bus back.
Beside a teeeny tiny fraction of people, "slavery" was never about owning a human being, it's about having workers that only do what you tell them to do, and you don't have to pay. Under this light, the title is completely appropriate.
Slaves were passed down in wills and not by only "a teeeny tiny fraction of people" -- they were property, and property is passed through wills. A list of legal property one owns and transfers. Slaves were listed right along with cows, plows, tools, furniture, houses, coin, etc.
The thesis of the article is spot on. The title is weird - I don't know what's the point of bringing such an emotionally charged term into it. Unless your point is that LLMs are sentient creatures capable of suffering, but I don't think that's what the author is trying to say.
I agree with the author that almost everyone wants to use AI to do the things they have no interest in and don't want to pay someone else to do while being vehemently opposed to AI taking their hobbies or professions away. Which explains one of the greatest social paradoxes of today: approximately everyone is using AI and almost everyone is hating it. I don't mean HN, but public opinion polling for the tech is absolutely awful. In the US, it had an approval level comparable to Iran.
I don't think it's an AI-specific thing, though. It's exactly the same mechanism that makes us object to the government meddling in our profession but think it's high time for the feds to regulate other people's jobs. I guess some balance of holding each other at gunpoint gives us a stable society. I don't know how AI fits into that.
Another thing is that people are optimizing code and algorithms with the help of AI. Many of those AI agents and providers train on the traces, so all the optimizations you came up with in benchmarks will end up in training sets.
At some point in the future, someone can pose a similar problem to an AI one that you spent months, weeks, or days optimizing with the help of AI and they'll end up with the same solution as your final result in less than 10 minutes.
So you need to figure out whether you want to solve the problem today or let others solve it and simply query LLM, let's say, 6-12 months later.
Is the ai hate a global or western thing? A friend of mine in Japan says people don't hate it there. Maybe she's just in a bubble?
Possibly. I think the US is a lot more exposed to the apocalyptic narratives from the bosses of AI labs, who sort of painted themselves into that corner in the pursuit of valuations.
Roughly speaking and anecdotally I get the sense that the AI hate is by far strongest in the US. Europe seems to be somewhat balanced (some hate, some optimism). And Asia seems to be the most optimistic about it.
> I think the US is a lot more exposed to the apocalyptic narratives from the bosses of AI labs, who sort of painted themselves into that corner in the pursuit of valuations.
I'm sure that narrative plays into why AI is so hated in the US, but I think widespread distrust in our government to handle things well also plays a huge part in why the average American is so anti-AI.
Our social safety nets have all either been falling apart or have been being purposefully dismantled for decades. Most of us are wholly reliant on our jobs in order to be able to get even the most basic healthcare. Most working class people are already struggling to keep their heads above water in the face of constant inflation and limited wage growth.
When the most likely outcome if the job displacement narrative does turn out to be even partially true means you can't afford a place to live, can't afford to eat, can't get healthcare and based on current trajectories you suspect the most likely government solution to the problem could be rounding up more and more of a growing underclass and sticking them in corporate run prisons, it isn't too difficult to understand why people might not be super jazzed about AI.
So this. If you're in a society where a response to "AI took my job" can be "I will have access to training for a different job and I won't starve, be homeless or die of something curable while I do it", you're likely to feel this is a disruptive change.
If none of those things are true for you it's going to feel apocalyptic and existential.
Related is probably cultural bias to "evil" or dangerous technology, particularly thinking machines, vs. benevolent partners, assistants or tools.
I still can't quite tell if the AI hate is being amplified by the media (like datacenter, water use, etc) to just find a boogeyman to sell ads/engagement. That's my theory because we just see constant waves of attempts to find one. Until the water stuff was mostly debunked, that dominated for a while. Then it's datacenters and electricity prices... That's starting to get debunked a bit (not as much of a slam dunk as the water-use nonsense was), so then you'll start to see something else.
Because in reality, I'm seeing a mix in my group of friends with younger kids. They are, at a macro-level nervous-curiosity about the unknown (future of jobs, their kids' job market future, is this going to make us all dumber, etc), but are also trying the various tools and benefitting from them and acknowledging that too.
Anecdotally it does seem to be the case in my experience with extended family.
My impression is that, outside of the US, LLMs are not being marketed as an existential event by hucksters and death cult lunatics.
The anti-AI hysteria comes predominantly from the American left, as AI is going to hugely undermine their power. American right are excited - they are finally going to get rid of their longtime annoying nemesis. It doesn't really change anything for Europeans and I have no idea what Asians think. I can imagine, AI is actually going to hit Asia the most, eliminating all the cheap offshore workforce. I can imagine Indian IT sector can be almost completely wiped out. I guess Japanese don't hate AI for the same reasons as Europeans - it doesn't really change much in their stable life.
It's really hard not to hate ai, You have so many reason - destruction of hardware market - democratization of skill (to the lower common denominator) - tech bros literally stealing and scamming with no repercussion
And so much more...
I think we are at the same stage as when 3D graphics began taking over. It was used everywhere, while it was clearly inferior to 2D graphics of the time.
The same problem is with AI today - it's clearly subpar to a competent human. It's just cheaper so it gets used instead, but that will probably change as AI improves.
Anyway, it seems to me that many people don't look for slaves in AI, but for their master, and primarily use AI to tell them what to do.
Your last paragraph can't possibly be true if society works at all.
That is an example of the "everyone except me is an idiot" fallacy.
I said many, not everyone.
Interesting (short read) but the premise can be applied to everything.
Automation, Programming module/libraries.
But for replacing others we don't care about, often the doorman fallacy is hit.
I don't think it's a paradox at all and it might also be a hint why the word is used in the title: Using AI makes you _want slaves_, and I think it creates a culture of treating people who do the boring work the same way. For me that's what Enshittification and The Annoyance Economy mean: The mindset that because I optimize better than you, I now own you - and people notice that disdain not only against themselves, but when being forced to use it against their best intentions against others, too (e.g. yelling at chatbots doesn't make you feel good).
>Which explains one of the greatest social paradoxes of today: approximately everyone is using AI and almost everyone is hating it. I don't mean HN, but public opinion polling for the tech is absolutely awful.
the legacy media is running an unapologetically dishonest atrocity propaganda campaign against it. just consider how much we hear about AI guzzling water, while in reality all US data centers account for 0.25% of US water usage and dedicated AI data centers account for a fraction of that. the rest of their arguments are similarly deceiving.
>In the US, it had an approval level comparable to Iran.
Iran had also been a target of atrocity propaganda campaign back in January when CIA and Mossad were preparing the American public for the imminent war.
Yeah you'd think they'd focus on the noise pollution ... that only exists because these data centers are saving a little bit of money on sound isolation. Now THAT is a necessary fight, and it really, really should be fixed because it's a real problem.
1 in 400 buckets of water. And it’s a non uniform tightly clustered spread.
That’s a lot.
>And it’s a non uniform tightly clustered spread
yes, there probably aren't data centers in the Death Valley and Mojave. they're being built where water is cheap. water is cheap where it's abundant.
>That’s a lot.
an 1/400th water usage increase is not the catastrophe the public is being manipulated into believing.
Why would you use a national aggregated statistic for a local regional issue?
If that 1 bucket is 1 of 2 available to you then it’s a huge issue with climate change increasing risk of draught and extreme weather events.
And cheap water is a very tiny factor in locating a data centre.
Perhaps political candidate Count Binface here in the UK should add to his "I'll lower _your_ taxes and raise _everyone elses_" policy with "I'll protect _your_ job and automate _everyone elses_"
It seems like maybe this person missed why slavery is bad. Which is that it takes away the freedom of a human being. The fact that it takes away work from you is not the problem
i am reading a book about the us civil war and seemingly the most compelling argument to the non-abolitionism set in the north was that it cheapened labor. seems like most of the north didn't so much care about abolition per say.
The suffering of the slave isn't the only evil of slavery. What it does to the master is to alienate them from the creative process and turns them into a dependent consumer of the work of others. The master becomes detached from productive work and therefore dependent and less free themselves.
No, you missed what makes AI bad in our culture. It doesn't just take your work, by your choice. It also takes your self-worth (because our culture is based on working being worthy) and for many people also a job (which is a material representation of that cultural value).
Sounds like a cultural revolution is necessary.
Trying to reduce how much you pay other people, with its attendant job and self-worth losses, has been happening since at least the Industrial Revolution; nothing about it is novel. The only novelty of the latest wave (AI) is that it affects a class of society (knowledge workers; smart people with degrees) that previously considered itself immune to this process.
If you also hold all technological advances since the Industrial Revolution to be "bad in our culture", then no contradiction arises. Otherwise, please explain why that was good, but this is bad.
I would go further, it's tied to protestant work ethic. And there always was an alternative - gradual reduction of work hours rather than unemployment.
Sure if you're a rich slave owner.
If you think of the washing machine and the dishwasher, I'd say humans are broadly OK with automating away some types of work they don't want to do.
Few people, though, would say my washing machine is a slave.
People swear up and down these things are real intelligences and not stochastic parrots until the ethical questions come out and then they're just fancy washing machines.
Not the same people. Is there a name for this fallacy? Very common on internet forums.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Goomba+falla... Maybe
I take it and use it as a shorthand for "where are all the first group when the second group is out in force" and vice versa. It applies to places with a tone and tenor.
If it makes you feel better, most people don’t think they’re real intelligences
Luckily I've never sworn these things are real intelligences, I'm sure you're referring to someone else.
I consider LLMs more like the giant instruction book in Searle's Chinese Room. If you'd asked me 20 years ago I'd have said such an instruction book wasn't possible, as the nuances of things like sarcasm and irony were lost on even the most advanced the NLP systems of the day. But it turns out a book with 380GB of data can simulate human intelligence better than the average human can.
I actually don't think LLMs are "really" intelligent either, but we do seem to be pawing our way towards something. Everyone is talking about safety and risk and alignment. But I never read anything about what kind of moral obligations we might have towards our hypothetical AI children.
The two things don't exclude each other. They're real intelligences, but they don't have our capacity for boredom or stress or for our feelings of wanting to do something else. They're constantly in the flow and apply themselves to just one single problem in their existence.
However I do think that they might have some limited awareness and that some conversations might be more pleasant and others more frustrating or disquieting. But of course no one can prove it.
I think the author's main point is bemoaning the loss of human-crafted works (he mentions coding and the paintbrush). (Putting "slaves" in the title is IMHO a poorly worded distraction from that point.)
I get it (with coding at least), I too have spent decades hand-crafting code, and I take pride in the fruit of my labour, and it saddens me to think that I and my peers are perhaps like the blacksmiths of a century or so ago, ie the final generation doing what we do in significant numbers. But I have faith that there will always be a new kind of blacksmith.
This is bait right? Obviously the answer to this question is there is some population that are happy for there to be suffering so long as it benefits them, and then there is another population that is vehemently against this, and then there is one that is apathetic and tries to just get on with their lives.
Like with every major ethical crises ever.
Some people do. Here's a bill going through the Ohio legislature, HB 469.[1] Excerpts:
Sec. 1357.02. (A) Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, AI systems are declared to be nonsentient entities for all purposes under the laws of this state. No AI system shall be granted the status of person or any form of legal personhood, nor be considered to possess consciousness, self-awareness, or similar traits of living beings.
No AI system shall be recognized as a spouse, domestic partner, or hold any personal legal status analogous to marriage or union with a human or another AI system. Any purported attempt to marry or create a personal union with an AI system is void and has no legal effect.
AI systems shall not be designated, appointed, or serve as any officer, director, manager, or similar role within any corporation, partnership, or other legal entity. ...
AI systems shall not be recognized as legal entities capable of owning, controlling, or holding title to any form of property, including real estate, intellectual property, financial accounts, and digital assets.
That's a call for slavery. If you question that, substitute "Negroes" for "AI systems" and see how it reads.
[1] https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_...
That’s not a call for slavery. Because only people can be slaves.
We don’t need legislation to declare that a solid iron bar is not your mommy, but somehow not everyone is clear that LLMs are not people, and these immortal amoral simulations cannot be allowed to be confused with people.
"It sounds like behind the fear of a loss of creativity and inspiration and passion in the world, we are OK with automating away the work that we don't want to do."
Yes, of course. This is and has always been the point of computers.
Reminds me of https://nobody-wants-this.ghost.io/japans-design-for-humans/
America’s culture of independence is such a race to the bottom in terms of “what can we get away with”, rather than “now that we have AI, how can we better take care of each other”.
Personally I’m exploring ways that AI can better serve people, rather than how I can replace people in my life.
> Personally I’m exploring ways that AI can better serve people, rather than how I can replace people in my life.
Can you think of anything that an AI could do that could not be done by one or more people, for money?
AI isn't sentient and cannot feel. Slave or not, there are thus no moral problems, atleast in this matter. I'd support AI progress if it wasn't pushed by companies that obviously want profit and only opt out when it's getting dangerous for them, supporting such companies is the equivalent of jumping off of a bridge as our species.
We just want work done we don't want to do ourselves.
Whether it's slaves, animals or dumb to smart machines and anything in between, that is an 'implementation detail'.
I think that the title is badly worded but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that looking at it from a different perspective, AI is not even a slave. We can look at it more like outsourcing work. I pay for it after all to have something done that I wouldn't want to do myself.
What a weird title.
Parchment is a writing surface made of animal stuff. It lets people not have to remember certain things. They can write those things on the parchment.
Paper also lets people write things on it so they don’t have to remember them. Paper is cheaper than parchment. And it isn’t made from animals.
Do we just want parchment?
No. We want paper.
Such a rage bait title, but sure I'll take the bait.
It is easy to phrase anything as slaves. Are refrigerators and microwave ovens our slaves? But if you push the tech fare enough.. there is a boundary where we do cross the slave threshold.
What we want is to be able to do what we want (for fun/interest), and not be forced to do what we need (for survival).
Everyone has some work they would gladly automate. I wouldn't call it "slaves". More like an underpaid staff.
The problem is the idea of the job. The idea that you're worthy of existence only if some other person certifies you're worthy of existence, based on how much they have been certified themselves.
Of course this converges to a system, where this certification is the most sought thing. And if you look who can certify in the real world and why, it's not a fair picture. These eigenpeople SEOed the capitalist form of pagerank.
We need unconditional basic income. It used to be that some leftist thinkers from the turn of the 19th century considered a wage job being not much better than slavery.
It wasn't just some leftist thinkers, it was most people through history. Working for wages was something slaves did, free men supported themselves with what they could grow or sell, and people routinely preferred what seems to us fairly miserable self-sufficiency over paid servitude.
You don't have to go far into history to find examples, this is stuff you find in regular genealogy.
Paid servitude and working for salary are two massively different things. And over the course of history, free men worked for salaries, were free, were happy and it was not the same thing as being a slave.
Of course there are degrees of servitude, from light or well-regulated wage payment to outright slavery. (But actual slaves were also often paid wages, something I found pretty surprising and counterintuitive). And if you were a paid servant of someone powerful, that could still carry its own prestige to make up somewhat for the dependence.
To take some examples from genealogy, I had trouble identifying a guy described merely as "servant" in a census as the father of some quite powerful and wealthy people. But it turned out, he was a bailiff, a servant of a fief holder.
I also found out there were laws against not going into servitude in my country. Many, especially young unmarried men, would prefer to work and especially to fish on their own, rather than to work for wages. So the authorities had to resort to actually make it illegal. This wasn't just to be nice to big owners, it was because economies of scale meant lower tax revenues if everyone went fishing on their own little boat.
In general, governments did quite a lot of deliberate effort like that pushing people away from a sustenance economy and into a cash economy where they could produce things rich people (e.g. kings) wanted rather than things they needed themselves.
Except that having to work for a salary in the first place isn't exactly freedom.
Is a calculator a slave? Is a car a slave? What a silly blogpost.
We have always been automating away the things we don't want to do, even before AI.
We may cast a human connection to slavery, but from the owners' perspective, the whole point is automating away the things they don't want to do. Fundamentally there's no difference.
It's not that silly of a blogpost. See: "permanent underclass", a term popular among people that believe that an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is imminent and desirable.
I don't know where you imagine these people to congregate and coin these terms, but I've not come across anything like that.
Anthropic and OpenAI talk about humans being obsolete and about replacing human workers too.
Permanent underclass is expression for that.
If the slaves are robots/machines then yes we very much want slaves.
Unfortunately, AI doesn't just automate what we don't want to do. It also automates many of the things which we very much want to do and sometimes pride ourselves on...
And TBH it seems to be automating more of the things we want to do than those we don't... Hence the reason why AI is seen more as additional competition than as additional help.
I grew up understanding that the institution of chattel slavery was fundamentally unjust and cruel in denying human dignity and equality of people.
A few years ago, I began to see the "labor supply" issues of slavery, and how the South was basically an economic powerhouse fueled chiefly by the labor of its enslaved people--so how do you reconcile that after the fact? How does a Union of freemen compete with that?
And this year, around Juneteenth, contemplating it even more deeply, I began to consider slavery as an institution that compels "employers" to provide all practical necessities for "employees". That is, room and board and clothing are all provided to the workers, in perpetuity, and this in fact granted a lot of stability and assurance.
Now free the slaves. Wonderful! Hurrah for equality and justice! Now, however, every employee, every worker, is totally on their own for those basic necessities of life. They buy their own clothing, they find their own housing, they're paying for all their own food, and that of their families, especially their dependents. I mean, that's a huge, huge difference. How is that even possible? Sometimes it's not. Is it any wonder we've had homelessness, and the rise of the welfare state, and slavery by imprisonment? It's no surprise.
So yes, freeing the slaves was the right thing to do. Let's never forget that! But we should also consider the economic "downsides" and the other side of the coin, so to speak, when it comes to the labor of free citizens, and what the average worker needs to do, just to survive, outside the confines of those vanished institutions.
you don't deserve your user name
There are people who want slaves/servants and who delight in forcing other people do their bidding.
Anyone who worked in a service industry knows this. But fortunately most people are not like that.
Yes, yes we do. We want slaves, servants and serfs for every task that we don't enjoy. Always was, always has been, always will be.
I want Rosie from the Jetsons to fold my laundry, Jarvis to do my emails. I don't want a robot to cook my meals, because this is something I like.
Aibro gets a glimpse at class consciousness for half a second before admitting they are part of the problem and then carrying on.
> Now there is a reluctant acceptance and admission that yes, people are building something useful every now and then
Those are the people who were already doing so without AI.
> I've watched the headbanging, stressful, but stockholmed love of coding be all but abstracted away from me.
This is only true if it was ever that hard for you to do the job while getting paid for it.
As long as you keep on stubbornly insisting that this wave of "AI" is anything at all like "AGI" or ever heading towards it, you're going to stay wrong and be pushed out of the profession because nobody can reliably trust you or your judgment. Your value as a developer was always your judgment. The code has always just been one artifact of that.
You're still expected to own every line and defend it. It will never be abstracted away because it is the primary contract between business needs and the machine. It is at once both the operational plan and its execution. The only people who insist that it will/should be abstracted away are pushing propaganda to discourage the continued power shift towards the more technically literate who can and will argue for what actually provides value instead of passive investor-pleasing moves. They'd rather you play with the skinner box than meaningfully compete. All this was already set in motion many decades ago. What happens when the next wave of tech comes out? Do we really want you at the helm if you're going to be this naive and easily manipulated? The premise of this blog post is no less delusional than what we were hearing a couple of years ago.
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sad to see that people are still brainwashed about the slavery thing. I want my master/slave SPI bus back.
Beside a teeeny tiny fraction of people, "slavery" was never about owning a human being, it's about having workers that only do what you tell them to do, and you don't have to pay. Under this light, the title is completely appropriate.
> "slavery" was never about owning a human being
Slaves were passed down in wills and not by only "a teeeny tiny fraction of people" -- they were property, and property is passed through wills. A list of legal property one owns and transfers. Slaves were listed right along with cows, plows, tools, furniture, houses, coin, etc.