> Yet, I am shocked when AI does not stop Outlook Messenger from bursting confetti across my desktop in response to the Congratulations reply I receive when HR misreads my email about both adding and removing our late son from my health insurance.
Echoes of Facebook showing people “memories” (photos) of their deceased children on their bday. This is one of the saddest stories I’ve read in a bit.
It’s a painful reminder of how technology often lacks the sensitivity
To be fair, it was a human in HR who didn't read the email carefully and replied with "congratulations".
An LLM probably could have warned them before they sent the email, if only it had been integrated into their email client.
The technology can be pushed into any direction, it's just a medium for us. It could be made with sensitivity, customizability, accessibility and so on. But I highly agree that it's lacking in many areas. My solution is to scale back the tech in my life and use it as a tools whenever I need it.
Adam Curtis made a fantastic documentary on the darker side of our relationship with technology. I don't agree with all of his points, but it's still a great watch.
From Wikipedia: Curtis argues that computers have failed to liberate humanity, and instead have "distorted and simplified our view of the world around us".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...
My main takeaway from that series was the anecdotes about the communes living in geodesic domes who operated under a hierarchy-less system but all of them allegedly imploded due to a common mechanism:
In a community that has no explicit rules, implicit rules emerge. Power accumulates quietly to the people who know the rules and can bend them often. In those situations the powerless are even more vulnerable to the powerful because of the lack of an explicit power structure with rules that would usually require checks and balances in order for people to opt into the system.
> In a community that has no explicit rules, implicit rules emerge
This is The Tyranny of Structurelessness: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
this was a great read, thanks
And how often do we hear a demand to 'direct' democracy, egalitarianism, the end of policing, and so on.. from those with a-little-to-much but clearly not-enough, power?
There's rarely anything more in people's political prescriptions other than, "I do not have enough power, and I want more" -- and there's nothing inherently wrong with this demand. Only that when it is disguised by the false promise of power for everyone, it means power for almost no one.
Now now, let's not forget that there are already direct democracies at work in the world ahemtzerland and the general inland consensus is that they work.
Yes - and there are hundreds of thousands of small groups applying principles of direct democracy in practice, from democratic schools to consensus based art centres.
People have been collectively organising movements and spaces for many decades now, and the processes are pretty well worked out. Comparing utopian dropouts in the 60's running farms on vibes to dedicated activists establishing and maintaining consensus based social contracts is disingenuous. There's plenty to be criticised in terms of the practical aspects of these systems - from implementation to scalability, and good luck to the folks doing the hard work of improving them. But dismissing them out of hand is an argument from ignorance.
> small groups applying principles of direct democracy
Small groups. That is the problem. It can work but doesn't scale.
As the number of people go up, the need and benefits of more complex coordination go up. People's interactions, dependencies, needs, understandings and problems multiply in quantity, complexity and diversity.
People O(n). Decisions O(n^2).
Direct coordination becomes too costly in time and effort. And people get asked to make decisions in areas where they have no skin in the game, so put little care into their decisions, or seek selfish benefits opportunistically. Things get difficult and ugly.
The default is a descent into anarchy, which gets counter weighted by emergent initiatives that centralize decision making around people who care, have expertise, are good at taking power, etc. Acknowledged or not, "direct", as the universal principle of decision making, no longer works.
Better to see it coming and as directly and openly as possible, prescribe how indirect governance is to be done. As openly and accountably as possible.
Organizations and societies, like computer memory and and processing cores in server centers, need to bifurcate and modularize into different levels, types and policies, to remain efficient and reliable at scale.
Once again for the last row: Switzerland. 9 millions inhabitants, 5.5 millions with voting rights, 0 anarchy. Is that still not big enough for the no true scotsman?
They have councils and parties, classic institutions of centralization and decision delegation. The people in those organizations, especially the leaders, have tremendous outsized power to decide and frame what issues and candidates are exposed to votes by the democracy as a whole. And of course, in the best position to maintain their own positions or set up their successors chances.
So no - they are not a direct democracy. For the unavoidable reasons I gave.
However yes, they are doing a fantastic and inspiring job of maintaining as much directness as possible. And at keeping the centralized and indirect processes formalized, open and accountable.
Vs. the US, where even the president isn't elected directly; lower offices are heavily controlled by whoever draws district maps, often the incumbents; only two parties have much power, and conspire together to maintain that - reducing citizen choices to only two preset menus of policies & governance styles; parties enforce litmus tests on their own candidates at all levels of office, vastly increasing party leadership power at the expense of eliminating 99% of potential alternative views. The result of all this power hoarding are many laws in significant opposition to majority views, and an institutionalization of two way service and influence with the rich. The highest court nomination process and members of the highest court have become aggressively politicized and brazenly unethical. Overall, the US system has become increasingly dysfunctional, corrupt, divisive and dystopian.
Switzerland is amazing.
All the goals you named are about literally removing tyranny and adding structured egalitarianism. Curious that you only mention leftist policy issues when rightoids are the ones whose entire ideology is about the will to power
Yes, I suppose you can summarize their positions as the right is in favor of self-determination, whereas the left appears to prefer to let others determine their fate.
Looking at it that way, though, I find myself concerned with the people who are setting themselves up as the arbiters of my fate. Regardless of party affiliations, they don't seem to think very highly of me or care about my personal happiness.
Seeing that is the case, I'd rather they stay out of the business of pursuing my happiness and instead support my freedom to pursue happiness. I can be responsible for my own happiness.
> Yes, I suppose you can summarize their positions as the right is in favor of self-determination, whereas the left appears to prefer to let others determine their fate.
I find this meme, in the original sense, rather odd. Speaking as an american, over the last 40 years the right wing of our political institutions have been extremely hierarchical and authoritarian. Right wing ideologies are almost entirely based on which group should obey which other group and why.
The term left-wing has gotten a little vague recently, but I think you could say that the common premise of most of their political theory is that there's already/always going to be a powerful government that everyone has to obey so we might as well make that government the best it can possibly be for as many people as possible.
(I have a personal theory that political power, much like energy, can never actually be destroyed, merely moved.)
> (I have a personal theory that political power, much like energy, can never actually be destroyed, merely moved.)
This journal article discusses power in two forms:
- 'Power to' (freedom, from others): a variable-sum game
- 'Power over' (others, ultimately denying freedoms): a zero-sum game
I'm no scientist and this is just from the abstract: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00323187.2020.1...
If you speak for the US, your political system has only 2 powerful entities, one on the far Right, flirting with corporation capture, and the other on the far Right going into fanatical Fascism.
>I suppose you can summarize their positions as the right is in favor of self-determination, whereas the left appears to prefer to let others determine their fate.
I mean, no I really don't summarize it that way at all.
>Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect
Is a better, but much more politically charged saying.
Moreso, self determination is more of a libertarian thing rather than right directly.
Alas, that 'documentary' is long on insinuation and short on facts. As is typical of that auteur.
yeah, but the soundtrack is brilliant. so…
/s
brutal story. for those who were equally confused this post seems to have the same title as but is unrelated to Dario Amodei's recent https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace - is perhaps a nice/bittersweet reality check on how our designs often fall short of our ambitions.
Which in turn references the 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines...
I had wondered where this saying came from, thank you for the reference.
here is the direct link to the poem.
The full poem is also in the article.
(sorry to be That Person, but I'm really hoping Hacker News doesn't eventually become like Reddit where the comments are almost completely divorced from the content of the article).
It sometimes happens, but I'd say it's for the best. Often the greatest value (sometimes the only value) a submitted link has is as a discussion prompt.
I don't know, the Matt Stoller Substack post from yesterday had a whole line of discussion that was already covered in the article.
Also the name of a documentary series by Adam Curtis: https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/all-watched-over-by-machines...
There’s also John Markoff’s history of the relationship of human and intelligent machines, artificial intelligence vs intelligence augmentation, etc. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23460922-machines-of-lov...).
The post here and Amodei’s are both in reference to this poem: https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving...
And I think the poem is satire, although some have read it as being serious.
I think that the benign portrayal of machines seems tongue-in-cheek, particularly considering Brautigan’s own ambivalence toward technological advancement.
Let's then make sure we build those Machines of Loving Grace right, for we might have only one shot at that.
I like that poem, and I hope we eventually get there, with our artificial descendants as our partners.
A chillingly moving article that reminds me of what is important in life... to want to spend time with those I love that still live, and to remember those that don't.
As an aside- I'm also an academic and resent this sudden nonsense push to 'embrace AI' from people that have no clue what it even is. Some of my research is close enough to be getting renewed interest and funding from this... but I find it offensive the my same research ideas weren't interesting on their own merits a few years ago but only suddenly are now because they involve 'AI.' It suggests a frivolous trend following unbecoming of scientists.
I don't know what this author researches, but she deeply understands why technology needs to be aligned with human interests, and how to make sure it is. That seems to me something academic departments interested in AI research need now more than ever.
I've also always found this poem darkly captivating, because it imagines that positive humanizing technology will be possible but itself seems like a vision that would be infantilizing, and the author leaves it unclear on if they notice this or not, and if it is serious or dark satire.
It is such a meaningful piece, deeply disturbing, yet a strong reminder to be with those we love - and yes to really 'be'.
I would posit that it is the people using the technology that also need to be empathetic and ensure the use is not disturbing.
As a founder and engineer primarily focused on AI right now, it's strange to see all of this going on. Neither I nor anyone in my immediate bubble go along with the fanaticism, it's an exciting new tool with lots of potential, but a tool among many nonetheless.
I want to prevent everyone else from getting distracted by the shininess of it all, because the world really needs all these scientists and organizations to keep progressing the substantial work they are best at.
The recent Nobel in physics was the perfect example, and I think HN echoed the general feeling that we mightily respect the field, probably above what we are doing, and that it is an outrage for it to get overshadowed like that.
It's also weird to see how not being focused on AI is disrupting so many people, but being focused on AI doesn't help you that much either. It is definitely not the trump-card people think it is with investors, and even less with the market. Sometimes it is better not to emphasize it because it cheapens the whole thing! Among other things, people (understandably) do not understand the spectrum of possibilities for using LLMs, in their minds it all boils down to asking ChatGPT, which is obviously not very substantive. At the end of the day, it's all just technical details, people want results and value.
>> not being focused on AI is disrupting so many people
What are you talking about?
I think they are referring to the author of the article losing their job because they weren't focused on AI:
> the Dean of my college told me...that I should look for long-term academic employment elsewhere. My research and practice was not centered enough on “AI” and “emerging technology” to fit within the institution...
Utterly painful and deeply humiliating gynocology - which I would guess every women begrudgingly deals with is not a product of AI, but of MS. Medical Stupidity. Certainally a place the marketing department deems 'unprofitable'.
I hope her inbox is filled with sympathy, and promises to destroy the dehumanizing parts of women's health.
We think nk in terms of modern medicine, when it took 150 years for surgeons to wash their hands. Now it's a common place assumption, while not washing hands is ancient history. Let's have women's health care advance much much faster.
"As an aside- I'm also an academic and resent this sudden nonsense push to 'embrace AI' from people that have no clue what it even is."
Follow the money.
If you're used to "follow the money" and have done it a lot, you may find this money trail doesn't lead to the usual places. But look at the size of the AI bubble. There's a lot money available to fund PR and push "influencers" to run around telling people that they need to get on board or get left behind... because if people don't get on board that AI bubble is going to pop. And I think people underestimate the amount of control a donation to an educational institution gets the donor, unless they are very cynical.
I do not claim or believe that "AI" is useless. I do firmly believe that on top of the foundation of useful stuff that it can do, some of it if anything underutilized and understudied (I agree with an article in HN a few days back that embeddings are really underutilized and studied versus all this generative stuff which is a lot less interesting than meets the eye), there is a staggeringly enormous bubble. And with that bubble, a lot of well-resourced people motivated to keep it inflated, as there always is.
You'd think by 2024, the techno-fetishist "If it's NEW technology it's GOOD technology!" would be dying down in the general consciousness. Tech is not automatically good and helpful just by virtue of being good.
> of a cybernetic forest > filled with pines and electronics > where deer stroll peacefully past computers > as if they were flowers
This image of an electronic garden - leptospirosis from cat sitting - has flooded nature with server calls. Now, a tree does not grow of its own accord, but in the structure of a system. Furthering its seed, the redwood pollinates through incineration. The technological is constantly in flux.
“Boo, Forever", also by Richard Brautigan
Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.
Machines and dreamstuff are connected. Wherever you find a machine you find a dream of what it's for and how it works.
Dream lovers are invariably machine lovers. A dream lover lives entirely in dreams. To the degree that he absolutely cannot avoid interacting with reality, he does it through machines.
So that's something I think about.