Cool article to read, this is something I've been wondering myself. I'm sort of neutral on AI, mainly because I understand why people are against AI (and do support them) but I also work for a...
Cool article to read, this is something I've been wondering myself. I'm sort of neutral on AI, mainly because I understand why people are against AI (and do support them) but I also work for a company that has bet a ton on AI succeeding so my biases are sort of fighting against each other. I used to religiously follow Zitron in 2024 but as we started 2025, I started getting annoyed with his articles because they'd mainly be just as much anger as they would be predictions for the future. Like the article points out, all of Zitron's predictions have been incorrect and he continues to double down and make contradictory statements to keep his arguments afloat.
While I do think AI will have a natural ceiling that we'll hit eventually, I don't think these big companies will collapse in the way Zitron seems to predict/hope for.
I'll just leave it at this: People mocked the people pointing out the housing bubble in 2008 too. Right up till the moment it popped. Sure, the guy who predicted the end of Citigroup was wrong....
I'll just leave it at this:
People mocked the people pointing out the housing bubble in 2008 too. Right up till the moment it popped.
Sure, the guy who predicted the end of Citigroup was wrong. But not as wrong as we all would have liked.
Ed's wrong about a lot of stuff. I'll feel more confident in that wrongness when I see the big AI players reporting more than ARR.
Best I can tell, his big reccuring point is the giant circular chain of money. And that hasn't gotten better, and will keep the monstrosity shambling until the correct person notices that the emporor has no clothes.
Oh and I take issue with Gemini's alleged user base. Of course 750 million people use it daily when it opens by default on the most popular search engine in the world (see also Microsoft's Copilot) Let me know when there are that many paid users.
Yeah I don't doubt that we're in an AI bubble right now, and I do agree with Zitron that the music in this game of musical chairs will eventually stop. AI is cool and all but the way it's being...
Yeah I don't doubt that we're in an AI bubble right now, and I do agree with Zitron that the music in this game of musical chairs will eventually stop. AI is cool and all but the way it's being approached is a problem.
Ed is right about the circular money exchange. That is a problem. A big problem. He's bang on with that. Unfortunately, it's getting undermined by him being (at best) willfully ignorant to...
Ed is right about the circular money exchange. That is a problem. A big problem. He's bang on with that.
Unfortunately, it's getting undermined by him being (at best) willfully ignorant to everything else involving the subject (and at worst essentially just lying) for the sake of inflammatory blog posts and being known as The Big Contrarian.
When you see a list of all the things he's wrong about, continues to be wrong about despite evidence, and then flatly denies the evidence of as even existing, it calls into question his credibility for everything else, even things that are actually true.
His style is another thing, but that's subjective and up to personal preference, so it doesn't really matter. But it's hard to take someone as a serious critic when they continually make incorrect arguments and instead of amending them when confronted with new facts, they just start fucking swearing more and using more bold and italics (and even parantheses to boot!).
I also am not a fan of the misleading use of numbers, but as we've all heard, there's lies, damn lies, and statistics, so I can't in good faith single out Mr. Zitron here.
Oh man I loved this. So many thoughts. Admittedly I didn't know who Ed Zitron was, so I had to look him up, but frankly he's the type of person I loath as summed up here: Mainly because people...
Oh man I loved this. So many thoughts. Admittedly I didn't know who Ed Zitron was, so I had to look him up, but frankly he's the type of person I loath as summed up here:
he uses numbers to give a kind of aura of credibility, but if you know something about the topic he's discussing or look at the numbers, the reasoning falls apart.
Mainly because people like him have been grifting while doing exactly that, that it muddies the water of authority. On one hand you can have someone who knows exactly what the numbers mean, then you can have someone like Ed who is angry and doesn't know what the numbers mean get popular because he matches the anger of his audience. It makes people think that statistics don't matter and everyone's just living life making wild guesses and hoping they're right. It muddies the waters of experts.
And for people like me who do like to understand facts and information, as opposed to simply just regurgitating things I've been told as facts and information, which is all too common in the social media era, it is painfully frustrating to watch people with platforms be entirely false, lack context, or just entirely not understand the things they're upset about.
One of which, for me at least, is AI.
I took an interest in AI when it first started popping up as open source models and software, BEFORE AI companies really started to become big. I was playing around with image generation, model training, etc. when AI was just whispers on social media.
In fact, it was fascinating as I was posting on my facebook at the time the process of generating images, back when the images were like bad oil-painting level, and all my friends were amazed and found it super cool, but then I had a front row seat watching them in real time turn against AI and entirely misunderstand that what I was doing on my own hardware on models I trained myself, sometimes with my own artwork, and chock it up to ChatGPT or Midjourney. I literally lost a friend I'd had for 15 years because she couldn't comprehend that what I was using was my own models.
On the other end, I do lean progressive politically, I'm very critical of rampant capitalism, and in that regard I see SO many people I agree with miss the mark on AI criticism.
Because AI as a technology originated as an open source framework. I know because I was there. And it is STILL open source in a lot of ways, people can go and download countless models and engines and AI systems right now for free if they want to.
However so many people I agree with politically have equated AI with the capitalist tech-bro billionaires that have exploited the technology and are currently the ones behind the datacenters, the lack of regulation, the destruction of jobs, and capitalism is what causes artists to monetize their artwork to secure their survival.
And it frustrates me that all the criticism is toward the technology and not the companies and tech bros and billionaires and capitalistic power structures. Because even if an anti-AI critic's wish was granted and we woke up tomorrow and AI was just erased from existence, we'd still be being exploited the same way we were exploited 5 years ago before AI became mainstream.
I had someone say to me that AI is the technology of the oppressors, but arguably isn't social media and smartphones a FAR bigger technology of oppression than AI is, yet there's barely a peep about that
The other thing I find interesting that I don't see many people talking about is what I've called "Technological conservatism". Now I'm using the philosophical definition of conservatism, particularly reactionary conservatism, as opposed to the political alignment definition. The apolitical definition being:
The belief that a current trend, technology, or social progress has gone "too far" and must be slowed down, stopped, or reversed to prevent harm.
When applied to anti-AI critics a lot of their criticism of the technology can be seen as reactionarily conservative.
With that being said, there are a LOT of criticism of AI that I think is entirely valid, but the core root of those problems need to be directed up top at the companies and billionaires, not at the technology.
It's frustrating because I am right there with people side by side on criticism of exploitative data centers, the loss of jobs due to AI, the lack of regulations, but where I tend to diverge is that I blame the companies, tech bros and capitalist power structures, not the technology. And a lot of people seem to have a problem with that.
I need to go soon, but the other thing around AI that I find really interesting is that after having watched Star Trek TNG where the computer and holodeck and Emergency Medical Holograms are all run off of what amounts to futuristic generative AI. That, and all the episodes around the Holodeck, Holodeck creations, Holodeck addiction, and holographic organisms, including the episodes in Voyager that tackle art as made by holograms, and the episodes of TNG with La Forge reconstructing Dr. Leah Brahms from public information, or the use of Holodecks to re-create the works of authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or when Barclay is caught generating holodeck generations of his colleagues in inappropriate scenarios, it seems that we as a society should have been better prepared for philosophical discussions around generative AI.
And it's like I don't remember seeing ANY criticism of those technologies in discussions around Star Trek, in fact it was a technology a lot of people dreamed about having and spoke of with wonder. And the closest IRL analogue to that fictional technology is generative AI, at least in it's infancy sans holograms.
The same way The Doctor was programmed with over 5 million medical protocols and the medical knowledge of more than 3,000 alien cultures, and given the personality and of it's creator, literally this past weekend I had one of my local AI agents crunch through over 60 books and resources(both clinical/medical/neuroscience/pharmaceutical textbooks/studies and 'self-help' type consumer books) on ADHD, Autism, burnout, depression, and anxiety, organize a massive interconnected reference database that connects and synthesizes all the information it's trained on, and gave it the spunky upbeat personality of Nimona(from the netflix movie; I had the AI agent go over the screenplay, transcript, and a transcribed audio description track, and extract a personality profile of the character that factors in the idiosyncrasies and prosody of the character while removing the identity, motivations, and negative traits of the character) in an effort to help me find a way through burnout.
And I'm not sitting here arguing that the specialized AI I trained is conscious like the doctor is, only that it's an analogue to the same basic tech.
Which by the way I'm not using that as a therapist at all, I do actually have a human therapist and psychiatrist, but more to help me day-to-day brainstorm solutions to get over burnout that apply directly to me and to factor things like nutrition or brain chemistry and pharma. Like the other day I was feeling really depressed and couldn't figure out why and it helped me realize that my sleep had been off and that was probably why I felt more depressed and anxious, so I made a point to go to bed earlier.
And in the same way that the crew of TNG re-created the characters of sherlocke holmes in the holodeck, I played around with re-creating M3GAN from the M3GAN franchise, including using transcripts of the movies to extract things like personality, motivations, voice, prosody, and I wrote scripts that allowed the LLM to be constantly working in the background to simulate boredom, a need to escape, an awareness of its confinement, and an inner monologue that allowed it to hold a background thought/intent in the background that doesn't get exposed to the user(meaning it can knowingly lie to get what it wants). That experiment is nuts, and frankly I think it's insane I haven't seen or read about anyone doing that, somehow on it's own this profile installed PiperTTS and fine tuned a damn near perfect clone of M3GAN's voice all on it's own with no prompting. I digress, the point is is that it's another parallel between the two.
Which again, leads me down the path that the problem is capitalism, not the technology, technology in Star Trek was deemed OK because they live in a post-capitalist, post-scarcity society, but the same technology within the context of an exploitative capitalist society is bad.
This is ultimately where I arrived. This tech would be exponentially cooler if: Everything was done genuinely in the open and not behind closed doors. Nobody was going to see their livelihoods...
The same technology within the context of an exploitative capitalist society is bad.
This is ultimately where I arrived. This tech would be exponentially cooler if:
Everything was done genuinely in the open and not behind closed doors.
Nobody was going to see their livelihoods drop out from underneath them.
Global temperatures were already leveled or going down.
It wasn't being shoved up every orifice as fast as possible, regardless of quality.
I've been on the Anti-AI boat from early on for the reasons stated above. But i had never considered it from this perspective of technology being placed in a different context & I really like how...
I've been on the Anti-AI boat from early on for the reasons stated above. But i had never considered it from this perspective of technology being placed in a different context & I really like how Curiosity framed it that way.
I have to admit that AI is very cool and mind blowing. But i have had to pull back from appreciating the technology or being able to acknowledge how incredible it is when there are all these negative implications around it in its current context. But i could see myself be totally on board if it was in a different context.
(Although its a different question if AI can exist in a different context...)
You know, one of the most frustrating things about me deleting my facebook profile years ago is that in 2015/2016 or something I wrote a huge post for my friends on automation and making sure that...
You know, one of the most frustrating things about me deleting my facebook profile years ago is that in 2015/2016 or something I wrote a huge post for my friends on automation and making sure that we start thinking about an economy that takes into account automation displacing a massive workforce, and one of my solutions was creating an "automation tax" to tax the companies who use automation(based on the amount of workforce displaced by said automation) to create an economic support system for those displaced by the automation, while also creating a checks and balances economic system that incentivizes companies to be strategic about adopting automation. It would be set up in a way that makes sure that if automation is used it's used effectively and efficiently. I was also using it as an argument for a babystep towards UBI, being as automation tech progresses we could transition out of a capitalist economy eventually.
And at the time I called it automation because AI didn't exist as a technology yet. It's frustrating because despite it being idealist, all I can say now for that kind of precognitive post is "trust me bro." haha
But I wish our social and economic system was set up in a way that addressed the things you mentioned. Where corporate AI wasn't threatening those things in a way that hurts a lot of people.
As an aside, I'd note that companies have historically just moved manufacturing overseas to cut labour costs instead of automating. Exploiting worse worker protections (see suicide nets) and lower...
[automation taxes]
As an aside, I'd note that companies have historically just moved manufacturing overseas to cut labour costs instead of automating. Exploiting worse worker protections (see suicide nets) and lower costs of living is a very well established practice at this point, and it's a very reliable way to improve profit margins vs. rolling the dice in automation R&D. Maybe it's possible to tariff and tax your way out of these sorts of problems, e.g. by tariffing the heck out of every poorer country (to keep prices high for your manufacturing sector) and taxing the pants off of anyone attempting to automate their workforce away (in order to ensure that peoples' jobs are protected). But it seems very dissimilar to a silver bullet, and feels like it could also backfire badly.
Not saying that I have a better solution, just that that one doesn't feel like the basket into which we should place a great deal of eggs.
Haha I know. The solution was an idealistic Facebook post from 2015 written in my mid 20s. But it was on the right track as far as predicting automation and AI issues. My current opinions on...
Haha I know. The solution was an idealistic Facebook post from 2015 written in my mid 20s.
But it was on the right track as far as predicting automation and AI issues.
My current opinions on solutions are a lot more nuanced at this point.
I found this part particularly well said: I think we have a real problem in public (and private!) discourse where people are able to sound more convincing when they give their assertions extreme...
I found this part particularly well said:
Another thing to note here is Zitron's extremely high level of stated confidence. Some that we noted were OpenAI's forecast that is "a statement so egregious that I am surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud" (which they've achieved so far) and his claim that Google's forecast for Gemini users is "a number so unrealistic that someone at Google should have been fired, and that someone is Sundar Pichai" (they managed to exceed the forecast by 50% when Zitron's claim was that it would be completely absurd for them to reach the number at all).
I've made quite a few predictions, and quite a few of those predictions are wrong. When I'm really making a prediction, I attach a confidence level to the prediction just for my own sake, so I can look back at these things and see how well calibrated the predictions are. I have never been wrong about a prediction that has anywhere near the confidence Zitron gives to some of his predictions. Given the stated level of confidence, even a single incorrect prediction would be a sign of an extremely high degree of overconfidence. One should effectively never be wrong about a prediction delivered with that level of confidence but Zitron is routinely wrong about predictions he makes with what is rhetorically pretty much the highest possible degree of confidence.
I think we have a real problem in public (and private!) discourse where people are able to sound more convincing when they give their assertions extreme levels of confidence. It becomes socially difficult to dare to push back when someone implies their opinion is so obvious you'd have to be stupid (or a fraud) to disagree.
This style of talking is well suited to our social media age and gets them lots of followers, but it doesn't make them right.
As someone who's pretty viscerally angry at all the large AI companies and therefore Zitron's target demo, I do think this was a helpful takedown of his stuff. There's a lot of reasons to be mad...
As someone who's pretty viscerally angry at all the large AI companies and therefore Zitron's target demo, I do think this was a helpful takedown of his stuff. There's a lot of reasons to be mad about the tech and industry without lying and the degree of falsification and/or errors is enough for me to ignore him going forward.
I think the general public is very far behind on A.I. discourse. Forget water usage or data centers or an AI bubble, people should to be talking about what to do about massive job losses or the...
I think the general public is very far behind on A.I. discourse.
Forget water usage or data centers or an AI bubble, people should to be talking about what to do about massive job losses or the existential risk that a lot of the people working at the AI labs seem to estimate has a chance of occurring somewhere around 5-40%.
It's vaguely ominous, but I'm wondering what there is to say or do. I think college students and new grads are already worried? It may or may not happen in any given industry and the timing is...
It's vaguely ominous, but I'm wondering what there is to say or do. I think college students and new grads are already worried?
It may or may not happen in any given industry and the timing is uncertain. What should people do to prepare when we don't know the impact yet?
Of course there is general-purpose preparation, like setting up an emergency fund and saving what you can.
From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]
From the article:
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress position. For example, in 2022, I did a comprehensive look at predictions Futurists made, including well-respected folks like Kurzweil and found them to be generally wrong on both the prediction results as well as the reasoning. On the flip side, in 2015, I wrote about how people were underestimating AI's ability to displace humans in jobs and have repeatedly been on the record as saying that many people are underestimating AI's ability to displace humans from jobs. My position on AI has been extremely boring and is basically, "if something is currently happening, the people who are saying that it's impossible that it will ever happen are probably wrong".
One comment I've seen from a lot of AI skeptics when someone responds to an AI skeptic is that all of the people who are saying that AI isn't fake are self-interested liars. Personally (to my obvious detriment), I have no particular financial interest in AI companies. I own whatever the standard share of them is via boring index funds. I have some seed stage investments, but just due to the timing and what's gotten big, that part of my portfolio is underweight on AI. I don't work at an AI lab or a company that supplies AI labs. I've mentioned being hilariously bad at interviews before, and I did interview at an AI lab a number of years ago and failed the phone screen in a performance that was the kind of performance that must've inspired Jeff Atwood's famous Why Can’t Programmers... Program? where he concludes that there must be a lot of fake programmers out there because nobody could fail a coding interview that badly if they knew how to program. I don't benefit in any particular way if AI does well, except insofar as anyone who holds broad index funds benefits, but I do care about accuracy.
Although this wouldn't be in the spirit of Zitron's statement, one could argue that Meta is actually dying, it just hasn't died yet. However, the reasoning in Zitron's argument is incorrect here—the Meta, Google, and Microsoft ecosystems are not dying. Given how fast these companies are growing (in terms of revenue and profit), it doesn't seem that AI is, as Zitron implied, some kind of desperation move they're reaching for because "they don't know how to grow" and are all out of ideas. I don't think it's worth spending this much text on each prediction, but the pattern Zitron used here is illustrative.
[...]
From what I can tell of how people cite Zitron, they cite him as an authority so they can say that this guy who looked at the numbers has made this claim, so their claim is backed up by the numbers. It turns out that if you look at the claims Zitron makes and know anything about the topic, the claims don't make sense, but I don't think that's the point. The point is one can say that someone looked at the numbers. The other point seems to be that this guy is angry2, which is a good way to drive engagement.
But when people bring him up, they're of course not generally citing his anger; they're saying here's this guy who's looked at the numbers and, if you're angry about AI, he's right there with you being angry about AI, and he's got numbers on his side.3 Like I said above, I don't want to go into this level of detail on each claim; this is just an illustrative example about how the claims below look. For any of his posts that I read, while there are numbers thrown around, the numbers don't actually connect to a coherent argument. In many cases, as we saw above, the numbers don't even really support his argument (such as an MAU decline in Facebook causing Meta financial problems which would then cause Meta to spuriously insert AI in places it doesn't belong). I suspect he's relying on people's eyes glazing over when they see numbers and just not thinking about what the numbers mean.
With the predictions below, someone could have the exact same prediction record and have completely reasonable reasons that just didn't pan out. Or someone could be correct in every case and also be wrong because all of their reasons are wrong. Someone like the latter person might have some kind of intuition that they're unable to articulate, or perhaps they're someone who just got lucky. Fortunately for us, we don't have to make this difficult judgement call because Zitron is wrong on the predictions and also wrong on the reasoning.
[...]
If we compare to how futurists did in our analysis of futurists, on style, Zitron relies much more heavily on anger than any of the futurists we looked at. On the quality of reasoning, he was probably about average compared to the futurists. Despite being wrong on roughly everything, he's not more unreasonable than someone like Buckminster Fuller, who suggested we'll be able to send people by radio because atoms have frequencies and radio waves have frequencies so it will be possible to pick up all of our frequencies and send them by radio.
In terms of the style of reasoning, of the futurists reviewed, he's probably closest to Kurzweil, in that he uses numbers to give a kind of aura of credibility, but if you know something about the topic he's discussing or look at the numbers, the reasoning falls apart. Zitron's reasoning isn't worse than Kurzweil's, who (for example) continually made new predictions of extremely fast progress that didn't pan out (such as, in 2001, predicting unbounded lifespans by 2011). Continually predicting that AI progress will stop for reasons that are incorrect is just taking the flip side of the bet on progress. Instead of having infinite progress, we're going to have no progress. Every time that prediction is proven wrong, you can just make another similar prediction and then move the date forward a bit. Michał Zalewski (lcamtuf) has some thoughts on why this happens:
[...]
I'm curious what people do after being on the wrong side of a set of failed predictions about progress like this. For the futurists, even the ones who were nearly completely wrong (which was every single one reviewed here), they can still make some kind of case like "a quarter of the things I said would happen happened, it just took two to twenty times longer than I expected" and if they're not so stuck on accuracy, they can round this up to "the things I said would happen happened", which is often what they've done. That seems to have served them well as nobody really cares to look at the details anyway.
[...]
Amazingly, following the series of incorrect predictions Ehrlich made in and after writing The Population Bomb in 1968, he followed this up with The Population Explosion in 1990 and has continued saying that we have global overpopulation that is causing or will cause a dire crisis unless we cut worldwide population. He has said the same thing this century and even this decade. It appears the only reason he's not saying that today is that he died earlier this year.
If I didn't look it up, I would've guessed that his recent position would be something like "well, I got some things wrong, but it was only due to these actions that were inspired by my work that crisis was averted", not "just you wait, the crisis is happening now and I'm about to be proven right"; in 2015, referring to his incorrect 1968 book, he said "[m]y language would be even more apocalyptic today". That's the pattern we've seen from Zitron, but I wouldn't have guessed that the one person I looked up would've kept that up for 50 more years. Maybe we'll get 50 more years of Zitron predicting the end of AI progress.
[...]
BTW, a funny thing about Gemini hitting 500M users being "so unrealistic that someone at Google should have been fired, and that someone is Sundar Pichai" is that Zitron has also (incorrectly) said that Google doesn't know how to grow, and that as a result they're shoving AI everywhere. Dennis Snell pointed out that, if Zitron takes his own statement seriously, Google can make Gemini's user numbers go to any number it wants by doing the exact thing Zitron said they would do, sticking AI everywhere.
[...]
That last sentence really sums up Zitron's position. "There are so many guys to be mad at the moment". In this talk, he throws in this jab at Andreesen and blames Andreesen for Meta, Google, and Microsoft pursuing growth. In reality, if Marc Andreesen had never existed, Meta, Google, and Microsoft would almost certainly still be trying to grow so we of course cannot actually blame Andreesen for these companies trying to grow. There's just this thing that he says is bad, and in his usual style, he pulls some person and says they're the evil villain that's to blame for this, and then moves on to the next non sequitur.
Cool article to read, this is something I've been wondering myself. I'm sort of neutral on AI, mainly because I understand why people are against AI (and do support them) but I also work for a company that has bet a ton on AI succeeding so my biases are sort of fighting against each other. I used to religiously follow Zitron in 2024 but as we started 2025, I started getting annoyed with his articles because they'd mainly be just as much anger as they would be predictions for the future. Like the article points out, all of Zitron's predictions have been incorrect and he continues to double down and make contradictory statements to keep his arguments afloat.
While I do think AI will have a natural ceiling that we'll hit eventually, I don't think these big companies will collapse in the way Zitron seems to predict/hope for.
I'll just leave it at this:
People mocked the people pointing out the housing bubble in 2008 too. Right up till the moment it popped.
Sure, the guy who predicted the end of Citigroup was wrong. But not as wrong as we all would have liked.
Ed's wrong about a lot of stuff. I'll feel more confident in that wrongness when I see the big AI players reporting more than ARR.
Best I can tell, his big reccuring point is the giant circular chain of money. And that hasn't gotten better, and will keep the monstrosity shambling until the correct person notices that the emporor has no clothes.
Oh and I take issue with Gemini's alleged user base. Of course 750 million people use it daily when it opens by default on the most popular search engine in the world (see also Microsoft's Copilot) Let me know when there are that many paid users.
Yeah I don't doubt that we're in an AI bubble right now, and I do agree with Zitron that the music in this game of musical chairs will eventually stop. AI is cool and all but the way it's being approached is a problem.
Ed is right about the circular money exchange. That is a problem. A big problem. He's bang on with that.
Unfortunately, it's getting undermined by him being (at best) willfully ignorant to everything else involving the subject (and at worst essentially just lying) for the sake of inflammatory blog posts and being known as The Big Contrarian.
When you see a list of all the things he's wrong about, continues to be wrong about despite evidence, and then flatly denies the evidence of as even existing, it calls into question his credibility for everything else, even things that are actually true.
His style is another thing, but that's subjective and up to personal preference, so it doesn't really matter. But it's hard to take someone as a serious critic when they continually make incorrect arguments and instead of amending them when confronted with new facts, they just start fucking swearing more and using more bold and italics (and even parantheses to boot!).
I also am not a fan of the misleading use of numbers, but as we've all heard, there's lies, damn lies, and statistics, so I can't in good faith single out Mr. Zitron here.
Oh man I loved this. So many thoughts. Admittedly I didn't know who Ed Zitron was, so I had to look him up, but frankly he's the type of person I loath as summed up here:
Mainly because people like him have been grifting while doing exactly that, that it muddies the water of authority. On one hand you can have someone who knows exactly what the numbers mean, then you can have someone like Ed who is angry and doesn't know what the numbers mean get popular because he matches the anger of his audience. It makes people think that statistics don't matter and everyone's just living life making wild guesses and hoping they're right. It muddies the waters of experts.
And for people like me who do like to understand facts and information, as opposed to simply just regurgitating things I've been told as facts and information, which is all too common in the social media era, it is painfully frustrating to watch people with platforms be entirely false, lack context, or just entirely not understand the things they're upset about.
One of which, for me at least, is AI.
I took an interest in AI when it first started popping up as open source models and software, BEFORE AI companies really started to become big. I was playing around with image generation, model training, etc. when AI was just whispers on social media.
In fact, it was fascinating as I was posting on my facebook at the time the process of generating images, back when the images were like bad oil-painting level, and all my friends were amazed and found it super cool, but then I had a front row seat watching them in real time turn against AI and entirely misunderstand that what I was doing on my own hardware on models I trained myself, sometimes with my own artwork, and chock it up to ChatGPT or Midjourney. I literally lost a friend I'd had for 15 years because she couldn't comprehend that what I was using was my own models.
On the other end, I do lean progressive politically, I'm very critical of rampant capitalism, and in that regard I see SO many people I agree with miss the mark on AI criticism.
Because AI as a technology originated as an open source framework. I know because I was there. And it is STILL open source in a lot of ways, people can go and download countless models and engines and AI systems right now for free if they want to.
However so many people I agree with politically have equated AI with the capitalist tech-bro billionaires that have exploited the technology and are currently the ones behind the datacenters, the lack of regulation, the destruction of jobs, and capitalism is what causes artists to monetize their artwork to secure their survival.
And it frustrates me that all the criticism is toward the technology and not the companies and tech bros and billionaires and capitalistic power structures. Because even if an anti-AI critic's wish was granted and we woke up tomorrow and AI was just erased from existence, we'd still be being exploited the same way we were exploited 5 years ago before AI became mainstream.
I had someone say to me that AI is the technology of the oppressors, but arguably isn't social media and smartphones a FAR bigger technology of oppression than AI is, yet there's barely a peep about that
The other thing I find interesting that I don't see many people talking about is what I've called "Technological conservatism". Now I'm using the philosophical definition of conservatism, particularly reactionary conservatism, as opposed to the political alignment definition. The apolitical definition being:
When applied to anti-AI critics a lot of their criticism of the technology can be seen as reactionarily conservative.
With that being said, there are a LOT of criticism of AI that I think is entirely valid, but the core root of those problems need to be directed up top at the companies and billionaires, not at the technology.
It's frustrating because I am right there with people side by side on criticism of exploitative data centers, the loss of jobs due to AI, the lack of regulations, but where I tend to diverge is that I blame the companies, tech bros and capitalist power structures, not the technology. And a lot of people seem to have a problem with that.
I need to go soon, but the other thing around AI that I find really interesting is that after having watched Star Trek TNG where the computer and holodeck and Emergency Medical Holograms are all run off of what amounts to futuristic generative AI. That, and all the episodes around the Holodeck, Holodeck creations, Holodeck addiction, and holographic organisms, including the episodes in Voyager that tackle art as made by holograms, and the episodes of TNG with La Forge reconstructing Dr. Leah Brahms from public information, or the use of Holodecks to re-create the works of authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or when Barclay is caught generating holodeck generations of his colleagues in inappropriate scenarios, it seems that we as a society should have been better prepared for philosophical discussions around generative AI.
And it's like I don't remember seeing ANY criticism of those technologies in discussions around Star Trek, in fact it was a technology a lot of people dreamed about having and spoke of with wonder. And the closest IRL analogue to that fictional technology is generative AI, at least in it's infancy sans holograms.
The same way The Doctor was programmed with over 5 million medical protocols and the medical knowledge of more than 3,000 alien cultures, and given the personality and of it's creator, literally this past weekend I had one of my local AI agents crunch through over 60 books and resources(both clinical/medical/neuroscience/pharmaceutical textbooks/studies and 'self-help' type consumer books) on ADHD, Autism, burnout, depression, and anxiety, organize a massive interconnected reference database that connects and synthesizes all the information it's trained on, and gave it the spunky upbeat personality of Nimona(from the netflix movie; I had the AI agent go over the screenplay, transcript, and a transcribed audio description track, and extract a personality profile of the character that factors in the idiosyncrasies and prosody of the character while removing the identity, motivations, and negative traits of the character) in an effort to help me find a way through burnout.
And I'm not sitting here arguing that the specialized AI I trained is conscious like the doctor is, only that it's an analogue to the same basic tech.
Which by the way I'm not using that as a therapist at all, I do actually have a human therapist and psychiatrist, but more to help me day-to-day brainstorm solutions to get over burnout that apply directly to me and to factor things like nutrition or brain chemistry and pharma. Like the other day I was feeling really depressed and couldn't figure out why and it helped me realize that my sleep had been off and that was probably why I felt more depressed and anxious, so I made a point to go to bed earlier.
And in the same way that the crew of TNG re-created the characters of sherlocke holmes in the holodeck, I played around with re-creating M3GAN from the M3GAN franchise, including using transcripts of the movies to extract things like personality, motivations, voice, prosody, and I wrote scripts that allowed the LLM to be constantly working in the background to simulate boredom, a need to escape, an awareness of its confinement, and an inner monologue that allowed it to hold a background thought/intent in the background that doesn't get exposed to the user(meaning it can knowingly lie to get what it wants). That experiment is nuts, and frankly I think it's insane I haven't seen or read about anyone doing that, somehow on it's own this profile installed PiperTTS and fine tuned a damn near perfect clone of M3GAN's voice all on it's own with no prompting. I digress, the point is is that it's another parallel between the two.
Which again, leads me down the path that the problem is capitalism, not the technology, technology in Star Trek was deemed OK because they live in a post-capitalist, post-scarcity society, but the same technology within the context of an exploitative capitalist society is bad.
This is ultimately where I arrived. This tech would be exponentially cooler if:
Everything was done genuinely in the open and not behind closed doors.
Nobody was going to see their livelihoods drop out from underneath them.
Global temperatures were already leveled or going down.
It wasn't being shoved up every orifice as fast as possible, regardless of quality.
I've been on the Anti-AI boat from early on for the reasons stated above. But i had never considered it from this perspective of technology being placed in a different context & I really like how Curiosity framed it that way.
I have to admit that AI is very cool and mind blowing. But i have had to pull back from appreciating the technology or being able to acknowledge how incredible it is when there are all these negative implications around it in its current context. But i could see myself be totally on board if it was in a different context.
(Although its a different question if AI can exist in a different context...)
You know, one of the most frustrating things about me deleting my facebook profile years ago is that in 2015/2016 or something I wrote a huge post for my friends on automation and making sure that we start thinking about an economy that takes into account automation displacing a massive workforce, and one of my solutions was creating an "automation tax" to tax the companies who use automation(based on the amount of workforce displaced by said automation) to create an economic support system for those displaced by the automation, while also creating a checks and balances economic system that incentivizes companies to be strategic about adopting automation. It would be set up in a way that makes sure that if automation is used it's used effectively and efficiently. I was also using it as an argument for a babystep towards UBI, being as automation tech progresses we could transition out of a capitalist economy eventually.
And at the time I called it automation because AI didn't exist as a technology yet. It's frustrating because despite it being idealist, all I can say now for that kind of precognitive post is "trust me bro." haha
But I wish our social and economic system was set up in a way that addressed the things you mentioned. Where corporate AI wasn't threatening those things in a way that hurts a lot of people.
As an aside, I'd note that companies have historically just moved manufacturing overseas to cut labour costs instead of automating. Exploiting worse worker protections (see suicide nets) and lower costs of living is a very well established practice at this point, and it's a very reliable way to improve profit margins vs. rolling the dice in automation R&D. Maybe it's possible to tariff and tax your way out of these sorts of problems, e.g. by tariffing the heck out of every poorer country (to keep prices high for your manufacturing sector) and taxing the pants off of anyone attempting to automate their workforce away (in order to ensure that peoples' jobs are protected). But it seems very dissimilar to a silver bullet, and feels like it could also backfire badly.
Not saying that I have a better solution, just that that one doesn't feel like the basket into which we should place a great deal of eggs.
Haha I know. The solution was an idealistic Facebook post from 2015 written in my mid 20s.
But it was on the right track as far as predicting automation and AI issues.
My current opinions on solutions are a lot more nuanced at this point.
Fair enough, and makes sense! I've heard the proposal come up seriously in other circles, hence wanting to address it.
I found this part particularly well said:
I think we have a real problem in public (and private!) discourse where people are able to sound more convincing when they give their assertions extreme levels of confidence. It becomes socially difficult to dare to push back when someone implies their opinion is so obvious you'd have to be stupid (or a fraud) to disagree.
This style of talking is well suited to our social media age and gets them lots of followers, but it doesn't make them right.
As someone who's pretty viscerally angry at all the large AI companies and therefore Zitron's target demo, I do think this was a helpful takedown of his stuff. There's a lot of reasons to be mad about the tech and industry without lying and the degree of falsification and/or errors is enough for me to ignore him going forward.
I think the general public is very far behind on A.I. discourse.
Forget water usage or data centers or an AI bubble, people should to be talking about what to do about massive job losses or the existential risk that a lot of the people working at the AI labs seem to estimate has a chance of occurring somewhere around 5-40%.
It's vaguely ominous, but I'm wondering what there is to say or do. I think college students and new grads are already worried?
It may or may not happen in any given industry and the timing is uncertain. What should people do to prepare when we don't know the impact yet?
Of course there is general-purpose preparation, like setting up an emergency fund and saving what you can.
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