tef
i've heard a few times that "waymos will make streets safer" so i went and looked up sf's traffic fatality statistics and they're pretty much identical
i mean, there is a slight increase over the last two years but there's sufficient variance to avoid suggesting a trend
as i understand it, waymos tend to take people off busses and other forms of transit, rather than out of their own cars
so i'm doubtful it will lower deaths on the road, just the number of busses
tef
"yes your problem is capitalism" yes
arguing about the technology in a vacuum is a debate club tactic, a way of denying the real consequences and moving the focus to imaginary benefits
i am not capable of putting on the pom poms and cheering for supply-side economic arguments that paper over the real world harms
i don't care if tests pass or if it works on your machine, i care how it acts in production
tef
the worst bit? i still like machine learning, i still think stochastic approaches can have benefits
but if i wrote software that pushed vulnerable teenagers to suicide, or enabled people to sexually harass strangers with pornographic forgeries
i would take a step back from the keyboard and ask my good buddy hans, "are we the baddies"
or at least, i hope i'd ask those hard questions
tef
we're destroying the open web
we're burning down the closest thing i've ever seen in my life to the library of alexandria
and people are explaining to me how warm it keeps their hands, and maybe, in the future, the ashes will contain the secrets of the universe
tef
it feels like a lot of the arguments i hear boil down to "what if none of the bad things were happening right now, and instead, good things happened instead"
and sure, if that were true, things would be good
but, well, all of the bad things are happening already and none of the good things are any closer to appearing
and i'm just not confident "wait and see if everything reverses course" is a sensible way to evaluate the impact of new technologies
tef
sure enough machine translation has reasonably proven itself as a mostly public good, albeit at the expense of the translation industry
so i am aware that good things can come with bad prices, but i haven't really seen much good and i am seeing a lot of bad things
it literally breaks my heart that the public web now sits behind a proof of work system, forcing strangers to mine coins to buy access to webpages
because a bunch of tech companies are desperate for an poison-free training set
tef
i said elsewhere but there is a distinction between things being commodotized and things being democratized
sure enough there's a new low cost bidder in town and things are a little more affordable to some
but we all know those prices aren't sustainable, and i'm pretty sure that when the prices go up, and the adverts appear, the world won't be much better off for it happening
i give it a year before your representatives are cutting library funding "who needs it when we have ai"
tef
i don't want to be all "you are not immune to propaganda" but a lot of these arguments prey on optimism and hope that technology can lift people up
but when you start to examine the rhetoric, like "what if <imaginary circumstance where the tools are useful>"
or "bad thing? that's a lack of training and dicipline"
it just feels like gun logic in a new outfit
tef
similarly, i've heard a few times that "we might cure cancer", and sure enough some brute force computation can fold proteins fast
but in practice it is more likely these tools will be used to fabricate experimental results, push dietary supplements and other snakeoil cures
and more coarsely, ai isn't pouring funding into the CDC, ai isn't reversing the destruction of the FDA, and is more than likely going to be used to justify those things
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