GreenBeard

{Jesus knocks}

Jesus: Let me in, I’m here to save you.

Innocent bystander: Save me from what Jesus?

Jesus: {voice lowers ominously} From what I’m going to do to you if you don’t let me in…

What I’m hearing you say is AI is really only useful for doing the busy-work you already know well, but needs to be done anyway. No one should be using it to do things that you can’t do yourself… which is a use, but not what they’ve been advertising.

On a different level, what I’m hearing you say is the secret sauce in AI is us, it always has been, there are billions of people effectively operating a giant Mechanical Turk against their will and as far as the executives are concerned, all the real people making this stuff possible are invisible… which is a problem.

Which is why not using them, not becoming dependent on them, avoiding them to the greatest degree possible is crucial.

You cannot build a model that is safe and viable under the current incentive structure. So don’t. These companies are going to burn under the weight of their own debt if adoption is minimal. Let them burn. The less you need them, the less likely you are to have a problem when Sodom and Gomorrah burn.

Techno-feudalism and the dark age of technology. A dark age produced, not necessarily by there being nothing new to find, but by all the profit being held by a handful of aristocratic gentry whose interest is best served by maintaining the status quo. Then it was land that was the basis of all wealth. Now it’s platforms. Either way, same outcome.

Right? If it weren’t for the TPM I’d be just as happy running a machine I bought in 2018. It’s not the performance making the difference.

Give an agent a goal and…

Which involves prompting it. It may take a thousand unexpected twists in the process but it’s still starting from the single prompt. It has no will and desire of its own, it cannot chose to act without human intent knocking down the first domino. So don’t ask it to do anything and it’s just a trillion dollars of silicon and code sitting there boiling water.

I guess that’s a problem for the Korean game industry then. If you want to sell to the international market, you’re going to need to do some research. Not doing so is wilful blindness. No one in gaming doesn’t know that globally players absolutely hate detectable AI anything. Just including AI in your process makes people uncomfortable. Expecting a major part of your game to be entirely generated content and that just being overlooked takes some pretty delusional confidence.

Like I said, Nebula does it and it’s pretty good. Hard to get on as a creator unless you have a proven follower base elsewhere though. They’re still mainly using YouTube as a farm league.

Might be interesting to see Nebula set up a fund for PeerTube creators and start using that as a farm league, but I don’t know that they have the subscription revenue for that yet.

Sure, but then you’re still bringing a for-profit company into the mix. PeerTube is your loss-leader and Patreon is your main platform.

You can’t really monetize PeerTube though, so you’re never going to get full time creators there. Media distribution has always been a choke point. Always will be. Short of a non-profit foundation and a unionized creators guild joining forces to operate a decentralized subscription video platform, you’re never going to have a real alternative. I mean… there’s Nebula which is basically that, but who goes to Nebula, it’s full of lefties and educators and theatre people.

As an individual, you’re not. As a market participant, you’re (probably) a rounding error. All of us together have negligible market value compared to a handful of overinflated megacorps. Nvidia isn’t a company that is driven by the gaming market anymore. We may have raised them up from the dust, but they’ve long since abandoned us for greener fields. Companies don’t have loyalty, consumers do. You can’t hurt them. Buy from them, don’t buy from them, it doesn’t matter, you’re not the customer they work for anymore.

I don’t even think it’s about gamers. Gamers are irrelevant these days. Those chips are for Crypto farms and AI companies. That you’re allowed to own one to play games is a privilege.

“Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Asked and answered.

I don’t know how to make any clearer, if you want a future country it is all our job to make sure kids are safe. The parents may be primarily responsible for protecting them, but if your company is a threat to children, and you’re not taking steps to mitigate that, you need to be dealt with to the fullest extent of the law.

I’m also concerned about the powers that be trying to force AI to do things it can’t actually accomplish in spite of the fact that human labour is objectively the only real option. It doesn’t matter that it can’t actually do the job, it matters that they spent money on it and will keep hammering at it until reality catches up with them and hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people get hurt when the world burns because they won’t stop chasing sunk costs. The hubris at the top of a lot of companies is thick enough to cause real suffering for a lot of people.

To be fair, the US has never won a war without either Britain, France, or both working with them. Americans are very good at causing a lot of destruction, but they have no idea how to stabilize or rebuild. Even when they can effectively beat the enemy weapons, all they know how to do is leave a chaotic mess in their wake, and whatever warlord is left with enough firepower to dominate the rest takes control eventually. They may take an objective, but they can’t hold it long term, because that’s not their job, that’s for private contractors, who are always grifters who take the money and leave things worse than they found it.

Roman legions spent more time building highways than fighting for a lot of the Empire. States build infrastructure. Markets build around it. The US is ideologically incapable of recognizing this fact that has been true since time immemorial.

That’s not a gun. That’s an autonomous killing device. The only gun that ever killed people of its own free will was the STEN gun. If you make something that kills without human intent, that’s not a gun anymore.

If I make a gun that actively chooses to kill people, I didn’t build a gun and that whole argument falls apart. I’d hold everyone from the CEO to the janitor accountable.

Yeah, even a well built agent is pretty resource intensive. Your hybrid idea makes more sense. People underestimate just how resource intensive AI is. Anyone who has built their own AI rig can tell you it is NOT a lightweight process that can conveniently sit in a browser plugin without being its own annoying obstacle.

What do we do? We’re doing it. We’re asking questions, we’re building communities IRL and in digital paces outside the bounds of the major corps. We use poison pills to make corpos that embrace these systems pay dearly. We give grace to those who sincerely pull back and we move on.

Cocaine exists and it can be a major boost to productivity. But we don’t have to use it. We don’t have to live with its downsides slowly killing us and robbing us of our humanity.