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by JKCalhoun 40 days ago
I find the backlash kind of saddening.

As an engineer, as most of you are, I am as blown away by the achievement that is the LLM in a way not too dissimilar to how I feel about the Apollo Moon program. And furthermore, I have found it wildly useful for me (if used within contexts that play to its strengths).

But I think that kind of gets to the point perhaps of the schism. I like the tech and like using it. I enjoy "testing" its capabilities—finding its boundaries…

In absolutely no way am I scheming on how I might leverage it to shut down whole industries. I use it, for personal use, not unlike I used the first personal computer as a tool—dare I say, "A bicycle for my mind…"

The people hating AI (and I'm looking at my entire family, ha ha), I think hate AI as it is wielded as a tool by corporations. They hate Musk, Bezos, the whole lot of them—and, perhaps rightly so, they lump AI in with all that lot.

Perhaps my diplomatic stance then is that AI may turn out to be empowering for the individual, might be used in a way crippling to society.

2 comments

It sounds like you're championing labor using ai. But capital will also use it and leverage it more.

There's no mechanism for only labor to exploit a technology, apart from common ownership at a world level. Achieving this is left as an exercise to the ambitious.

"In absolutely no way am I scheming on how I might leverage it to shut down whole industries"

I don't think even the ultra rich who own the technology are directly scheming to do that. But they do accept it as a side effect of them getting more money and power.

Yes, the technology is a tool, it's an impressive tool but we cannot ignore who wields it and what they incentives are.