[sp527]

AI is turning into a kind of Rorschach test for people's deepest misgivings about how the world works. Ted Chiang's New Yorker piece was executed similarly, though that at least had the benefit of being focused on the big picture near term economic repercussions. Almost all of us are going to suffer, irrespective of our gender or skin color.

[ChatGTP]

I just read that piece by Ted Chiang and I have to say it’s one of the more important articles I’ve read for a while. [1]. I’ll share this around. Thanks.

All I can say is that I’m quite happy many many people are starting to see the same issues as each other.

For me personally, I was told that “tech” and progress would make us all better off. That seemed true for a while but it has backfired recently. Inflation is up, food prices up, unemployment up, energy prices up, salaries stagnated.

We can’t blame tech for this, but we’re fools as “tech people” if we can’t see the realities. Tech is the easy part, building a better world for all is hard.

1] https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intel...

[wpietri]

Whittaker's point around minoritized groups is twofold. One, when non-white, non-men raised the alarm about LLMs previously, they got much less media coverage than Hinton, et al, are getting. Two, the harms of LLMs may fall broadly, but they will fall disproportionately on minoritized groups.

That should be uncontroversial, because in our society that's how the harms generally fall. E.g., if you look at the stats from the the recent economic troubles. Or if you look at Covid death rates. (Although there the numbers are more even because of the pro-disease political fashion among right-wing whites.)

There's a difference with a Rorschach test. That test is about investigating the unconscious through interpretation of random stimuli. But what's going on here isn't random at all. The preexisting pattern of societal bias not only means the harms will again fall on minoritized groups. But it also means the harms will be larger, because the first people sounding the alarm about these technologies weren't listened to because of their minoritized status. Whereas the people benefiting from the harms tend to be in more favored groups.

[kortilla]

> That should be uncontroversial, because in our society that's how the harms generally fall.

This is just talking past the conclusion though. Have you considered that the reason people are freaking out is because this is the first technology directly displacing a bunch of white collar work and not blue collar work?

ChatGPT is much sooner going to wipe out a paralegal than a construction worker.

> E.g., if you look at the stats from the the recent economic troubles

Are you referring to the record low unemployment for African Americans?

[wpietri]

> this is the first technology directly displacing a bunch of white collar work

That isn't true at all. IT has been displacing white-collar work since the 1960s. Perhaps the reason you missed it is that a lot of that white-collar work was seen as women's work? E.g., secretarial work, administrative work.

> Are you referring to the record low unemployment for African Americans?

I think we both know I wasn't.

[kortilla]

>secretarial work, administrative work.

That’s not the work I’m referring to. I’m referring to higher paying jobs that required significant training. This is the first foray into threatening people with under grad and graduate degrees.

ChatGPT will mean the admin assistant stays and types stuff into ChatGPT and the paralegal goes.

The very threat of this, realistic or not, is what all of the handwringing is about.

>think we both know I wasn't.

Then what are you referring to, because the economic trouble TODAY is persistent inflation and the high interest rates to combat it, which does not disproportionately hit minorities.

[wpietri]

> This is the first foray into threatening people with under grad and graduate degrees.

That's not true either. Journalism, for example, has been devastated by the internet. It and many of its related professions require degrees. A lot of commercial art has been severely impacted as well. There have been many bumps in publishing too, making those jobs more precarious.

> The very threat of this, realistic or not, is what all of the handwringing is about.

Sure. And I think what has changed here is not that it's coming for white-collar jobs. It's that groups who previously benefited from technological change or were at least insulated from it, now can see themselves as under threat as well. So although I expect the harms will still fall disproportionately on the less privileged groups, what has changed is that some of the previously privileged groups are now under threat.

[mindslight]

Maybe "managerial" is a better criteria than "white collar" ? US culture has long preached that you are a stupid sucker if you perform direct work. The common sense recommendation for being successful is to seek out a meta position - directing poorly paid less skilled/educated/powerful people under yourself, and taking some of their production for yourself.

With information technology as the substrate, the meta-managerial class has continued to grow in size as ever more meta-managerial layers have been created (real world software bloat), allowing this type of success to be seen as a viable path for all.*

The meta-managerial positions and the upper class had a symbiotic relationship, with the upper class needing the meta-bureaucracy to keep everyone in line - some human-simulating-a-computer has to answer the phone to deny you health care. But LLMs simulating humans-simulating-computers would seem to be a direct replacement for many of these meta positions.

* exclusions may apply.

[iinnPP]

> This is just talking past the conclusion though. Have you considered that the reason people are freaking out is because this is the first technology directly displacing a bunch of white collar work and not blue collar work?

I've been looking for a way to explain this and I think you nailed it. Something about this feels different. I'm sure the same feeling struck the people in history, but there's also nothing guaranteeing the outcome here will be the same.

There's also scale.

A very simplistic comparison would be Netflix DVD and Netflix streaming.

[jahewson]

Hinton has a much, much higher profile and much, much larger contribution to the field than those axe-grinding self-appointed “ethics” researchers, who got more than enough media coverage.

[dragonwriter]

> Hinton has a much, much higher profile and much, much larger contribution to the field than those axe-grinding self-appointed “ethics” researchers

They were appointed by the same kind of people who appointed Hinton, corporate management (in several cases, the exact same corporate management who appointed Hinton.)

The primary difference (leaving aside the demographic difference that has alread been raised) is that they were pointing out real, current, measurable harms that are inconvenient for people selling the technology, and Hinton is pointing out the same fantasies that are being used by major players in the field to argue for anti-competitive regulation and against openness.

[intimidated]

> One, when non-white, non-men raised the alarm about LLMs previously, they got much less media coverage than Hinton, et al, are getting.

Mainstream (e,g. CNN, BBC) and mainstream-adjacent (e.g. Vice, Vox) journalists have spent years pushing the "AI will harm POC" framing. AI companies are endlessly required to address this specific topic—both in their products and in their interaction with journalists alike.

Dr. Hinton is getting a lot of coverage right now, but this is the exception, not the rule.

[int_19h]

The big difference between earlier alarms and current ones is that the media and the general public hasn't seen ChatGPT before, so the earlier warnings were much more hypothetical and abstract for most of the audience.

[wpietri]

Sure. And I think that's because previously many comfortable people thought that they meant the harms of tech would fall, as usual, on people they saw as lesser. They've realized now that this time what happened to others might happen to them.

[nullsense]

>when non-white, non-men raised the alarm about LLMs previously, they got much less media coverage than Hinton, et al, are getting

This is a direct instantiation of "the medium is the message".

[skybrian]

Yes, the most vulnerable are vulnerable in many ways, and here’s another one.

I think that’s independent of whether it’s corporations or not, though? There’s a large libertarian contingent that’s thrilled to see LLM’s running on laptops, which is not great if you’re worried about hate groups or partner abuse or fraud or any other misuse by groups that don’t need a lot of resources.

Egalitarianism and effective regulation are at odds. To take an extreme example, if you’re worried about nuclear weapons you probably don’t want ordinary people to have access to them, and that’s still true even though it doesn’t do anything about which nations have nuclear weapons. (Although, it might be hard to argue for international treaties about a technology that’s not regulated locally.)

Keeping the best AI confined to data centers actually would be pretty useful for regulation, assuming society can come to a consensus about what sort of regulations are needed. But that seems unlikely when everyone has different ideas about which dangers are most important.