> In some ways, this just feels like a reversion to the mean for humanity.
No it doesn't, this is ridiculous. All of you guys with your "this is just like the printing press" arguments are so intellectually lazy, think a little more about the problems of scale and speed and the way information spreads in the modern world.
Murdering a random civilian and murdering a public official are also very different levels of damage, but we still outlaw and prosecute both of them. This is the same thing.
Not to mention, what constitutes a political leader? Just the upper echelon? What about local civil servants? Mayors, cops, judges? Are they gonna have a database of every public or political figure in the country? No they won't. This is absurd.
Making AI-voice videos of Trump and Biden playing Minecraft is one thing, they clearly sound overly robotic and that makes it funny, but being able to perfectly replicate voices is a realistic way is a technology that has very little real-life utility and so, so many real-life downsides.
Literally what is the point of this tech? To eliminate voice actors? I don't buy for a second their supposed use-cases of accessibility or assisting people with disabilities. We're gonna enable people to fake voices realistically off of 15 seconds of for example a voicemail just so media companies can save a few bucks? This is actually madness.
The fact that so many of them believe in that effective altruism nonsense shows why none of these people should ever be in control of such vast amounts of power and resources. They think they should have all the money and power because they're tech CEOs and have a maniacally unhinged confidence in their understanding of complex global societal issues / are straight-up lying because they're greedy, and the rest of us peons should just bow to their will.
It's insane that this protection exists for "prominent figures" but nobody else. The same damage that can be done to prominent figures can be done to regular people, they acknowledge the damage can be done, and yet they're still rolling this out? The more OpenAI does the more it's clear they don't give a single damn about the consequences of their technology.
> The other job seeker loses, your boss loses, you win
Yes, that is how our economic system works. What, are you under the illusion we still have some kind of social contract or moral responsibility toward society? If my CEO doesn't, why the hell should I?
For the record I don't think it's good, but I didn't invent the game, we're all just trying to play it as best we can.
> nonsensical conspiracy theories that match their ideological priors
People's lived experiences in many parts of the country don't match what they're being told. If macro trends go one way but microtrends all over the country go the other way, then the macrotrend analysis is functionally meaningless for millions of people. That's not a conspiracy theory, and hand-waving so many people's lived experiences away because it doesn't match YOUR ideological prior is not taking the discussion seriously and fundamentally and possibly wilfully misunderstanding the issue. Insisting that people everywhere saying life is harder than it was pre-pandemic or 10 years ago or whatever are wrong "because the charts say so" is silly.
Meaningless when housing costs have soared. They've made wage gains because it's literally not worth it to work for $8/hr anymore and companies were unable to find workers.
And yet Craig Newmark is a billionaire and the owners of Reddit aren't. $900 million in revenue means nothing if you jettison it into the stratosphere.
The people who cultivate Reddit communities are not the owners of Reddit, or the paid engineers of Reddit. Reddit isn't good because of Steve, or any of its leaders, the good and bad parts alike are 100% because of its users and unpaid moderators. Reddit is a tool, and the users have used the tool to create a massive site that contains a gigantic variety of subcultures, including ones that hate each other.
Any "innovations" Reddit has made in the past decade have been making the UI worse and borderline unusable in poor attempts to monetize the site. It offers video hosting that it does poorly, an "improved UI" that it does poorly, chat that it does poorly, some nebulous web3 things that it also did poorly, and now is going to pretend that using Reddit as a training set won't result in a very unskilled, and exceedingly confident of its own correctness, chatbot. Spez has no vision for Reddit, and clearly neither does Paul. The way to make Reddit great is to empower the communities and moderators, and instead Reddit has done the opposite, because - let's be real here - Steve Huffman doesn't want to create a cool website or a useful tool, he wants to IPO and become a billionaire and ride off into the sunset.
I think the trust comment is the crux of it. When AI can suddenly generate photorealistic images and answer any question, people wonder what it will be able to do next. Generate movies? TV shows? Video games even? And then a lawyer gets disbarred because ChatGPT made up cases and people's excitement starts to waver. And then people start using existing AI to make deepfake porn and people's excitement starts to waver. And then AI starts generating photorealistic black Nazis, and people's excitement starts to waver again. If the negative incidents keep happening but people's lives don't get better at the same time thanks to the utility of AI, people start asking "Are the downsides worth it?" and "Can we even trust the people making this stuff?".
Oh I see where the disconnect is: It was always my understanding that Luddism isn't really an ideology, it's just a name for the specific Luddite workers movement that happened in the 19th century, that colloquially came to be a term for people against progress for any reason - despite the Luddites only being against the machinery that was specifically threatening their jobs, who also sought government reform for things like workers' rights and wages. I think what you're talking about is Neo-Luddism, I at least can't find anything that gives an explanation for any kind of specific general anti-technology Luddism philosophy or ideology that the people in the 19th century followed. If I'm wrong about this then I was mistaken, but I am definitely in agreement about the Neo-Luddites or any group that is completely against technological progress.
I certainly would much rather not have to work and just let automation take care of everything, while I pursue my own projects, but I also certainly don't want to be sent to the proverbial mines because humans become more expendable than robots.
>Yes it is, we shouldn't deny 10000 people shirts or cars or fresh bread to save 100 jobs
That's not what I said. I said that if we want automation, we must also have a system to keep the people it's replacing able to earn a living. That could be many things. Excess profit from automation could be paid to the people that it's replacing, and that's just the first thing that popped into my head.
> but that's almost besides the point.
The point was Luddites are not a caricature of an ideology, and their concerns and the issues they faced still exist today. We can have progress and still not mass-unemploy entire groups of people, but that comes at a cost to people in power, which is why we don't do it, and why labor movements historically have been met with violence by the state. HN is very quick to dismiss automation concerns because we're the ones building the automation, but there's no reason it won't come for us eventually, too. We're not the ones that own the factories, after all, we're just assembling them.
As for the rest, yeah it doesn't seem like the author has a good grasp on anything lol, it even says that Ned Ludd was their leader, and a real person. Way to lose credibility in a single panel. I just always have to point out that Luddites were a LABOR movement, primarily, and not an anti-progress or anti-technology movement. There is zero reason for workers to suffer as progress happens, other than greed.
>Preventing such replacement is definitionally anti-progress
You can have automation while also ensuring that people do not lose their livelihoods. It's not anti-progress to say that automation must not come at the expense of the lives of the people it is replacing. This wilful misrepresentation of Luddites was bad then, and it's bad now.
"Luddites [...] protested against manufacturers who used machines in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods". 1
It's not an ideology and it's not anti-progress. Workers losing their jobs to automation was a problem then and is a problem now and we still haven't figured out a good way to deal with this problem. People are right to be concerned about the effects of automation, people are right to be upset when they lose their jobs, and masses of people losing their jobs is terrible and leads to other socio-economic issues. Dismissing those complaints and ignoring those issues because hey, who cares about people that aren't me, living where I don't, when number must go up, right? is the bad ideology here.
No it doesn't, this is ridiculous. All of you guys with your "this is just like the printing press" arguments are so intellectually lazy, think a little more about the problems of scale and speed and the way information spreads in the modern world.