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by ramon156 30 days ago
Do tell me how young people can help with AI shaping, as this just sounds like "how cows can help shape the meat industry"
6 comments

Ah, so the students were saying “moo,” not “boo.”
To be fair, if you're a cow, you don't have much say in it, the world continues to revolve, and not around you, but you still need to find your place, or at least find peace with not finding your place.

Every teenager goes through it, some still try to find their place until the day they day, but we all grow up in vastly different contexts and environments compared to what we experience as adults, and stuff keeps happening around us that we don't like, maybe don't even want to participate in, but because of the lack of alternatives, you don't really have a choice.

I guess an optimistic way to look at this would be to treat this as just another layer of abstraction, meaning people could focus on larger scale problems moving forward, similar to how the evolution of programming languages influenced development time, quality and the quantity of software being put out. The question is at what price does all of this abstraction come at, assuming AI continues to evolve at its current rate.
This can not be seen as layer of abstraction as it's non deterministic and not trustworthy. So we still need to inspect and understand that abstraction layer output if we want to have a reliable product
Adding non deterministic layers on top of a painfully deterministic layer to make more betterer deterministic things is an oxymoron.

...and many people choose to ignore that fact.

They can learn the skills to advance research and fill the roles that help determine what sorts of guard rails there should/could be to ensure it’s used in as helpful a manner as possible.
Do you think in the world of the Military Industrial Complex and the zero-sum game that is Great Power geopolitics, we will have any guardrails?
Trying to be optimistic, at least we didn't experience nuclear destruction at planetary scale...
I think it’s possible.
Any why would I want to work as a prompt engineer? or with AI tech at all? when I trained as a software developer using my brain to solve problems with data structures and algorithms, not prompts. I outright refuse to do such a thing.
Okay!
found the prompt "engineer"
If you are naive enough to believe that, the moment you create problems for your bosses, you can be fired and replaced by some other naive person.
They can start by voting for politicians who will rein in big tech
There is no politician who stands against big tech and by extension big money
We are about to test that theory.
not even Bernie Sanders?
probably not
In the US, the politicians need money to be elected in the first place, and a lot of it. Lots of money comes from the big tech (to both parties), and the big tech won't give money to anyone with a plan to "rein them in."
"Citizens United" might be the most ironic name in the history of western democracy.
Every evil propaganda corp has a cutesy brand name like that. Names like Voice of the People, or Electoral Freedom Foundation, or Moms for Liberty, or Free America Foundation or First Amendment Recovery Temple (I definitely made that one up, and some of the others).
Do you know what the Citizens United organization wanted to do? Why didn’t they have a right to do it?
They don't need money they just need votes.

If money can buy votes then the problem rests with an apathetic and distracted electorate.

You change that by giving a fuck and telling everyone you know what you actually think.

> If money can buy votes

It's not that "money can buy votes," but for a given party money can buy facilities (offices, transportation, food, etc.) and people (activists, coordinators, etc.) and that can bring (not buy) votes. Printing one "Rodriguez 2027" sign and putting that on your front lawn can be done for free at someone's office; printing ten million of them is a major financial, logistical and organisational undertaking, all of which costs money. Printers, truckers, warehouses, coordinators don't care how many "fucks" you're giving; they just prefer being given dollars to being given "fucks."

Maybe you have more ... workable (?) solutions than "let's get everybody to give a fuck and vote in a different way"?

That's why political parties were invented, so you don't need to create name recognition for every candidate.

Those signs aren't changing anyone's mind. But a party is something people can talk about and understand. It's unifying.

Giving a fuck means engaging with party politics and making it part of your day to day life (at least during election season).

Signs are the laziest and most inconsequential way of supporting a candidate. By far the best way is to convince everyone that you know in person to vote for a particular candidate.

In 2016, just 400 American families were the source of 50% of all election money that year. If your "candidate" is going to "rein in big tech," how the hell are they supposed to raise money from them? And if they aren't going to do that, where will that money go?

Your views seem to be rather ... idealistic. This TED lecture[0] is only 18 minutes long and it offers rather a chilling perspective on any sensible reform.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g

Now, more than ever, I think young people are cows for the economic meat grinder. It takes me to one of my favourite quotes:

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."

I think we've forgotten this. We are not paying it forward any more as a society.

The world is a significantly better place than it was when my parents were my age.
By what metrics?

Current young generations are the first that will, on average, work harder than their parents and have less to show for it. Affordability is absolutely vile and oligarchs have more decision making power then they've ever had in my lifetime, at least. No. Prospects are poor and governmental debt is absolutely unsustainable.

But I guess they've ve got cell phones and social anxiety, so not all bad.

Basically, what's the state QOL, and first/second derivatives of the that state? What direction is everything going? What's the world state young people are growing into? What advice would you give a young person to enable them to achieve the same success as you? - be realistic. You being the average poster on this forum, enriched by the tech boom of the 2000s-2020s - but not necessarily you specifically.