I agree. I think this is what happens when a persons transitions from a progressive mindset to a conservative one, but has made being "progressive" a central tenant of their identity.
Progressiveness is forward looking and a proponent of rapid change. So it is natural that LLM's are popular amongst that crowd. Also, progressivism should be accepting of and encouraging the evolution of concepts and social constructs.
In reality, many people define "progressiveness" as "when things I like happen, not when things I don't like happen." When they lose control of the direction of society, they end up just as reactionary and dismissive as the people they claim to oppose.
>AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists.
>Craft, expression and skilled labor is what produces value, and that gives us control over ourselves
To me, that sums up the author's biases. You may value skilled labor, but generally people don't. Nor should they. Demand is what produces value. The later half of the piece falls into a diatribe of "Capitalism Bad".
Just seeing that sentence fragment about "structures of power and violence" told me so much about the author.
Its the sort of language that brings with it a whole host of stereotypes, some of which were immediately confirmed with a little more digging (and others would require way too much effort to confirm, but likely could be).
And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Because it was capitalism that gave them the tools to be who they are and the opportunities to do what they do.
> And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Because it was capitalism that gave them the tools to be who they are and the opportunities to do what they do.
It's not hard to see why that mentality exists though. That same capitalism also gave rise to the behemoth, abusive monopolies we have today. It gave rise to the over financialization of the sector and declining product quality because you get richer doing stock buybacks and rent-seeking instead of making a better product.
Early hacker culture was also very much not pro-capitalism. The core principle of "Information should be free" itself is a statement against artificial scarcity and anti-proprietary systems, directly opposed to the capitalist ethos of locking up knowledge for profit. The FOSS we use and love rose directly from this culture, which is fundamentally communal, not capitalist.
I'm not ignorant to this fact that it helped us for quite a long time but it also created climate change. Overpopulation.
We are still stuck on planet earth, have not figured out the reason for live or the origin of the universe.
I would prefer a world were we think about using all the resources earth provides sustainable and how to use them the most efficient way for the max amount of human beings. The rest of it we would use to advance society.
I would like to have Post-Scarcity Scientific Humanism
You would need to demonstrate that some other system would have given us all the things you want while avoiding every problem you cite, while not introducing other comparable or worse problems.
Progressiveness is forward looking and a proponent of rapid change. So it is natural that LLM's are popular amongst that crowd. Also, progressivism should be accepting of and encouraging the evolution of concepts and social constructs.
In reality, many people define "progressiveness" as "when things I like happen, not when things I don't like happen." When they lose control of the direction of society, they end up just as reactionary and dismissive as the people they claim to oppose.
>AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists.
>Craft, expression and skilled labor is what produces value, and that gives us control over ourselves
To me, that sums up the author's biases. You may value skilled labor, but generally people don't. Nor should they. Demand is what produces value. The later half of the piece falls into a diatribe of "Capitalism Bad".