I test drove the first-generation Tesla Roadster. I once lived on Soylent powder shakes for a month. My Twitter account is almost old enough to drive. I wrote a book about the iPhone.
Also, I’m a Luddite. That’s not the contradiction that it might sound like. The original Luddites did not hate technology. Most were skilled machine operators. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, what they objected to were the specific ways that tech was being used to undermine their status, upend their communities and destroy their livelihoods. So they took sledgehammers to the mechanized looms used to exploit them.
If your first reaction to criticism is to discount it as artificial I would suggest taking stock of yourself and how you engage in discussions.
AI/ML is an extremely broad field, while some assholes do have terrible motives most of the work is tool building. We build tools to help do things that are monotonous or difficult for humans to do so people can focus on more creative work… while acknowledging that the field carries some extreme dangers if misused. AI alone isn’t the problem, the concentration of wealth is devastating to society and we need to fix that before AI makes it worse - but AI itself is a tool that can be used for good.
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I think you’re taking a far too narrow view if you can state that it’s not positive. At my company we’ve managed to drastically reduce the amount of dumb menial stuff that people have to do and we haven’t fired people when we’ve improved productivity. In some cases AI is going to be terribly misused but it’s a tool and we should use it to make people’s lives better.
Maybe your view is too narrow if it’s fueled by personal anecdotes. Technology not hurting you is just a data point, not a conclusion. Typically when we say positive, we really mean “net positive” and that’s unknown. And the argument is not that we shouldn’t use tools to make our lives better. It’s OK to recognize that tools can be harmful and seek to reduce that harm.
I agree that this tool could be used to cause great harm, similar to most of our other tools. The problem isn’t with the tool though, this tool could be a great gift to all of us, the problem is with the people who choose how the tool is used. Those people are causing massive social issues whether we have the tool or not.
But, I reject the previous statement that the tool will be a net negative. We have the power to fix our social issues and that will allow the tool to be a force for good.