There is certainly a giving up on owning and being a part of one’s world, and instead embracing a consumeristic mind-controlling framing in which one is simply pushed around by basic urges and those who feed them and how everyone else is consuming.

I think this is the Internet and tech. Lots of people praise the older Internet, before Facebook etc, and for good reason. But I’m not sure you can separate what it was and what it’s become.

I think there’s a neo-Luddite position that many would appreciate but don’t know how to conceptualise, because we’re all in this consumeristic mind-control cloud to some extent and don’t know what foregoing it even looks like.

Please don’t tell me universities genuinely thought AI detection was going to pan out?!

The jokes about starting some random religion aside, it really isn’t that far fetched that being steadfastly anti AI includes enough values and beliefs about the world to form some sort of religion. Maybe weak on metaphysical beliefs, but again, leaning a bit more in that direction from an anti AI position seems pretty natural.

Humanism, naturalism and whatever you want to call it, if averting from the tech industry’s latest “progress” is non-secular, then let that be a religion.

Can’t help but think it’s worse.

Factor in the world wars and colonialism and other conflicts and just how wealthy Europe has been and for how long … It’s just like can you guys sort your shit out already.

I love this so fucking much!

Long live NetBSD then!

Yea, that list is painting a fairly bleak picture.

Linux kernel and all BSD are basically “lost”, which means FOSS OSs are basically lost. Arch, gentoo and Elementary (and Asahi, interestingly) seem like notable exceptions against the grain, but they are just distros.

Not sure where anti-computing is supposed to be from here?

Honestly, organising around a hard fork of a kernel and committing as a collective seems the only viable way … but we sure as hell know that’s not going to happen.

Not any other of the BSDs?

Sad indictment of American tech culture to be honest.

I feel like you only need first principles and solve precautionary logic to care about AI safety. Not some pseudo-intellectual circle-jerk-first.

Something I find interesting is the ambiguity in this question.

I think you can be pro-AI and also prefer to go back to before AI in a “we should make the best of the opportunities we have now” kind of mindset. A mindset that is also disinclined from opposing the mainstream and scared of being left behind etc.

In other words, the question’s premise is an unrealistic magical solution and doesn’t directly concern practical reality.

Which might be a neat way of cutting through the noise people’s rebellious or conformist or opportunistic mindsets which can cloud the essential question of whether this all feels good or bad to people.

“Meaningless” is a strong term.

How biased is the user who posted the poll, and their audience?

All good!

In the end, I think we’re more or less in the same page. If you picked up on a tone policing vibe, I think I can see that, but that totally wasn’t where I was coming from. EG, going after all CEOs for being brain washed psychopaths who naturally use AI because they’re psychopathic would have been in line with what I was saying, at least to me.

But no need to drag this out. Appreciate your comments!

Thanks!

I get what you’re saying. But that’s your thoughts not those presented in the Twitter excerpt, and I’m talking about that excerpt.

Slightly more broadly, yes one can make the point that you are, and it may have been a more interesting exchange on Twitter if it were made from the top.

More broadly, I still have concerns about the nature of “the discourse”, because I just don’t think you’re going to win many hearts and minds with this line of thinking without some change in the framing, by, eg, focusing on the harms and “evils” of AI (with the disqualification of those indifferent to such issues being a natural corollary).

But even then, I fear still that that conversation is being lost, and these sort of ad hominem attacks as we see in the excerpt and even your summary just above of disqualified people are symptom of anti-AI not knowing what to say anymore. I see your point about shaming and all, but I look around the world and honestly think it’s a pipe dream. I hope it works for you, genuinely.

Sure. Either way, that’s not the argument that was made in the tweet. It was much more specific and easily countered, which is my broader point.

I feel like we’re more or less saying the same thing here. I think the initial argument was a fairly logical and dry one about what skills CEOs do and don’t have, not, as I think we both claim is more important, that they work for companies in capitalism, with all that that entails, such that the marketable qualities of the CEO as a person are a distraction.

I’m totally with you. But I think that’s where we are. As I see it at the moment the big points are

• “safety”, which is a lot like climate change (yay),
• power and wealth concentration, which I’m surprised I don’t hear more about
• enslavement of potentially conscious creatures (again more of a future problem thing but a serious one)
• a human and even spiritual urge to not reduce ourselves to mere operators of machines, which is a pretty basic matter of taste but which gets Amish pretty quickly.

These are all big “what is life about” issues that are just hard to get penetration on. Only the second is material right now. Maybe it’s an issue with today’s society that we’ve forgotten how to talk about these sorts of things. But maybe we’re just wired to jump off of these sorts of cliffs. I don’t know.

I honestly don’t thing this will be the end of humanity. It could be, but I’d bet on some weird future first. Could it be better. Yea. But again, we’re a funny bunch.

Yea. I’m scared that anti-AI types are losing “the argument” by sometimes being silly or struggling to articulate the big important issues rather than dwelling on smaller easily countered points or points that the world has just moved on from.

I don’t know the relationship between the two. It was obviously a harsh response. But it was defending himself as a CEO that apparently is not just a heartless and skillless CEO. If that’s untrue, that’s mostly a separate issue.

But their main point, as I understand, is that the generalising critique of CEOs was missing the point that CEOs who apparently know what they’re talking about can also be pro-AI.

Now I’m anti-AI, but that seems like a meaningful point to make at the moment (although it was done aggressively, as I said).

Honestly, one of the things worrying me at this moment with AI is just how much pro and anti-AI can’t speak the same language any more. And I think this is an example. AI can be good or bad irrespective of whether CEOs psychopaths.

In fact, I worry more so that the anti-AI side is struggling to express our side of things clearly and convincingly. For pro-AI peeps it’s easy. If it does a thing quickly and easily, and that’s your goal, then that’s a win. Talking about quality and the fate of humanity is a different kind of conversation.

With this Twitter exchange, yes CEOs can be psychopaths. But I’m not sure that’s the important point. A world run by Big Corpo is much more psychopathic while there will always be some CEOs in that system who aren’t all bad. Maybe a pedantic point. But in this case, I’m not sure Kenney win the argument, at least not for many of the readers we’d need to convince.

Honestly, I think this is one of the big questions of our moment.

How can distinct societies with different technological eco systems co-exist on this planet?

We’ve got extreme examples like monks in monasteries, the Amish, Orthodox Jews etc. But at some point, maybe now, there may be many who’d really like and even at a psychological level “need” to live in a different ecosystem quite different from the wants of “the global market”.

You can try to get a dumb phone or not use AI or whatever. But thinking in terms of hard exclusions and ecosystem health seems to me necessary.

I was lucky enough to speak to a friend in the environmental space about 10 years ago. I was never a super fan of Musk but I casually muttered something about Teslas being good as electrics.

They interrupted the conversation and made it clear to the group that Musk was more of a bullshit artist than the public were aware and that we was unclear to do any good for the environment at least not reliably.

Then I spoke to someone in tech that clued me into the same perspective. I’d never realised how much of a cult of personality had been built around him until then. Seeing him unfold in this way since then has certainly been “interesting”.

Apart from the particulars of Musk, I think the lesson is to never get involved in a cult of personality.