Supporting Little Tech is the Practical Way to Deal with Big Tech

[ygolo]

I think it's very easy for people to get disillusioned with technology these days. Optimism about technology was an important part of the 80s/90s zeitgeist, and I miss it, but it's a different century.

I once was extremely optimistic about the internet and how it might affect society and look how that turned out. I realize that AI is just a tool, but I think we probably won't put it to good use, same as with everything else. At the end of the day, it comes down to the economic systems in place.

New technology always has so much potential but it's never really realized because of other factors.

That is the zeitgeist. Being disillusioned is one thing, but the implication is to hurt the workers in that sector. With full knowledge that the net of disparaging the whole idea of technology is to harm more workers than if you took a more nuanced position, how would you change your stance?

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

That is the zeitgeist. Being disillusioned is one thing, but the implication is to hurt the workers in that sector. With full knowledge that the net of disparaging the whole idea of technology is to harm more workers than if you took a more nuanced position, how would you change your stance?

I'd focus on the underlying system, that is, capitalism. There is extreme resistance to doing that, however. I will add that there is much less resistance now than there was ten years ago. There is probably a reason you don't hear people bring it up in the media, though. Usually it seems that commentators will frequently go out of their way to avoid invoking this topic. Perhaps they fear losing their jobs?

 

[ygolo]

I'd focus on the underlying system, that is, capitalism. There is extreme resistance to doing that, however. I will add that there is much less resistance now than there was ten years ago. There is probably a reason you don't hear people bring it up in the media, though. Usually it seems that commentators will frequently go out of their way to avoid invoking this topic. Perhaps they fear losing their jobs?

You can be just as cynical about attempts to change the economic system (for pretty much identical reasons). We have been trying to do this since Karl Marx, and many of those experiments have ended even worse than our current situation(like Stalin or Mao, for example).

Why should we give broad-brush optimism to the attempts to recreate our economic system, which have so far all ended in totalitarianism?

 

[SensEye]

I think it's a fool's errand to put the "genie back in the bottle" in terms of AI.

Indeed. I'd say it's also impossible. There is zero chance China will not exploit AI as much as possible. India too. Russia would but I think Putin has destroyed Russia's tech industries/educational system such that they can't compete anymore (e.g. their recent failed moon landing used Soviet era tech, they simply can't engineer anything sophisticated these days).

Even if the west tries to build a walled garden to protect jobs, the work that can be cheaply and effectively done by AI will just migrate off shore. So the jobs will disappear anyways. Not to mention the military applications of AI. Any country that limits it's level of expertise regarding AI (which I think can only be done by allowing widespread application in both the commercial and government spheres) will be playing a dangerous game. And again, you know dictatorial regimes like China will be going full speed ahead on that front.

 

[ygolo]

I perhaps continue to be clumsy in making my point.

I believe it is the broad brush that is the problem.

The problem is the belief in some broad-sweeping force that we have to create broad-sweeping countermeasures to make things right. This belief is fundamentally an abdication of our agency, while our broad statements end up hurting the very workers we purport to protect.

We can collectively act. But there is no need to disallow people with other ways of looking at the world to do the same.

 

[ygolo]

You can act collectively but think independently. This is the ethos of open source.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

You can be just as cynical about attempts to change the economic system (for pretty much identical reasons). We have been trying to do this since Karl Marx, and many of those experiments have ended even worse than our current situation(like Stalin or Mao, for example).

Why should we give broad-brush optimism to the attempts to recreate our economic system, which have so far all ended in totalitarianism?

Well, there's no reason to repeat what hasn't worked before. I just think that we can do better. Why does everything have to be determined by principles of competition, growth, and profit? Why is this what it means to many for society to advance? Is this really an inevitable final state of human societies? I don't have enough knowledge of the humanities for more detail on what alternatives might be (beyond what I suggest below), but I would say the answer to the latest question is no. There is nothing about our biology that maps to capitalism; brutal warfare perhaps, but not capitalism.

I would say the worst aspect of capitalism is really the competitive aspect. This is the aspect that will result in you, I, or anyone else getting laid off so that they can be replaced by an AI so that another margin can be shaved off. If I understand capitalism correctly, it is not enough to simply do well, one has to be doing the best, which is why we might see measures like this. Note that the consumer has a very different idea of what "the best" means; they might not be delighted to deal with AI tech support that is always answering the wrong questions.

I think if we could reduce or remove the highly competitive aspect of capitalism, we might be ok. Firms should operate in such a way as to benefit consumers and workers, which I think is something you agree with me on.

(I also don't believe hyper-competitiveness necessarily results in greater quality or efficiency. I particularly have rants about this with regards to health care. )

 

[The Cat]

Greed has never been good. But these days a lot of people are committed to the lie that it is.

 

[ygolo]

Well, there's no reason to repeat what hasn't worked before. I just think that we can do better. Why does everything have to be determined by principles of competition, growth, and profit? Why is this what it means to many for society to advance? Is this really an inevitable final state of human societies? I don't have enough knowledge of the humanities for more detail on what alternatives might be (beyond what I suggest below), but I would say the answer to the latest question is no. There is nothing about our biology that maps to capitalism; brutal warfare perhaps, but not capitalism.

I would say the worst aspect of capitalism is really the competitive aspect. This is the aspect that will result in you, I, or anyone else getting laid off so that they can be replaced by an AI so that another margin can be shaved off. If I understand capitalism correctly, it is not enough to simply do well, one has to be doing the best, which is why we might see measures like this. Note that the consumer has a very different idea of what "the best" means; they might not be delighted to deal with AI tech support that is always answering the wrong questions.

I think if we could reduce or remove the highly competitive aspect of capitalism, we might be ok. Firms should operate in such a way as to benefit consumers and workers, which I think is something you agree with me on.

(I also don't believe hyper-competitiveness necessarily results in greater quality or efficiency, although I think in some ways it might. I particularly have rants about this with regards to health care. )

The bolded is the general sentiment, whether it improving things through technology or through improvements to our economic systems.

We can argue about the track records broadly speaking. But keep in mind, even the discussion we are having here is due to the internet. The internet helped bring down the Berlin wall. Unions have been responsible for the 40 hour work week and protections against child labor.

But technological development led to the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It led to social media (which BTW, simply amplified the ills the media already produced).

You could argue that taken to extremes, reworking economic systems, led us to Mao Zedong, who killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined.

I don't like the "-isms" because everyone will try to hide their whole viewpoint and argument inside of definitions. Our current economic system isn't broadly speaking any supporter of capitalism's conception of it (they will call our current system socialism for the rich or something like that).

So, lets just avoid "isms". Our current economic system is f'd up. I think almost every one agrees on that.

I think, at least among people in this thread, rampant inequality is a problem we all agree on. The lack of ability for people in the bottom 90% to share in the prosperity of our economic system is something I believe we agree on as well.

I am ambivalent on competition. Ultimately, as I have mentioned before, I think most people just want to be able to make the world a little better than when we came into it while still supporting ourselves and our families.

There are aspects of our current economic system that make this hard for a lot of people (myself included-especially given the brain issues I now have).

But as I have been trying to stress over and over in this thread, open source is our way out. Let's be fully honest about which jobs are going to be lost first due to AI -- it will be those of Software Engineers. Nobody understands the work requirements of Software Engineers better than other Software Engineers (who are building the AIs).

But open source development (and ownership by the broader community under Apache 2.0 or MIT licenses) is where we take out the destructive aspects competition. Competition among projects will tend to favor one project over another, but once that consensus starts to form (and over time, in the absence of regulatory capture, open-source has always beaten closed or proprietary alternatives). The developers can move to working on the projects that are winning and keep improving on the commons used by more people.

The commercial viability of these projects is still being worked out. But careers have been built on being able to navigate it and build companies around open source. There are probably many examples. However, in particular, Travis Oliphant, has spearheaded the NumPy, SciPy, Numba and Anaconda projects. These projects along with many others that Open Teams, a company of his, builds forms the backbone of open source strands of AI.

A new economic model is being formed, one that dampens the winner-take-all competition of Big Tech. It's Little Tech. It's Open Source.

Being an Open Source developer may be the only type of job a software engineer can have in the near future -- at least one with any dignity (instead of being thought of and treated like a basement dweller by the political science/business majors who run the big corporations).

But in a twist of fate, the very impulses that aims to take down Big Tech would kill Little Tech in its cradle and leave Big Tech virtually unscathed.

 

[The Cat]

The 109th Rule of Acquisition states that Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.

 

[ygolo]

The 109th Rule of Acquisition states that Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.

The Ferngi are an interesting group from Star Trek. Who might they be satirizing?

 

[The Cat]

The Ferngi are an interesting group from Star Trek. Who might they be satirizing?

I think they're satirizing Gordon Gecko and his ilk. Corporate America, Greed is good and all that madness.

 

[ygolo]

I think they're satirizing Gordon Gecko and his ilk. Corporate America, Greed is good and all that madness.

Nominally, that is the goal.

But the physical features chosen for exaggeration in that species lands it somewhere else, as well

It's a great microcosm about the problems talked about in this thread.

 

[The Cat]

Nominally, that is the goal.

But the physical features chosen for exaggeration in that species lands it somewhere else, as well

It's a great microcosm about the problems talked about in this thread.

Bats?

 

[ygolo]

Bats?

Star Trek: Are The Ferengi An Anti-Semitic Stereotype?

There are lots of parallels that have made this race highly questionable, but are Star Trek's Ferengi race truly anti-Semitic?

gamerant.com

 

[The Cat]

Star Trek: Are The Ferengi An Anti-Semitic Stereotype?

There are lots of parallels that have made this race highly questionable, but are Star Trek's Ferengi race truly anti-Semitic?

gamerant.com

They were based on bats. Thats why their first appearance they're thwarted by sonic waves. That's why their ears are big and they have batlike noses.

 

[ygolo]

They were based on bats. Thats why their first appearance they're thwarted by sonic waves. That's why their ears are big and they have batlike noses.

Sure. I am willing to believe that the similarities to Nazi tropes were accidental. But the similarities were missed before it became a part of the lore.

 

[ygolo]

Tech Engineers And Execs Are Not On The Same Page When It Comes To Burnout, Productivity And AI Adoption

Engineers are increasingly facing hurdles, like high rates of burnout, a talent shortage of qualified candidates and a growing divide between them and leadership.

www.forbes.com

 

[ygolo]

 

[ygolo]

There is so much that is troubling happening, that I feel like I really need to stress this again.

This time, let's look explicitly at worker wages and corporate profits when it comes to open vs closed sourced AI. It dove-tails well with the Real vs Business Value thread.

The logic of it seems obvious, but if workers have cheap and ubiquitous access to AI where they can control it, all the gains in productivity goes into making their process more efficient. If, however, corporations control it and who has access, the gains in productivity(which are inherently going to be underwhelming--I can get into this later) goes to the business processes being more efficient.

The value that a worker adds in a worker-controlled-AI scenario will be captured by workers as higher wages. The value that the business adds in the business-controlled-AI scenario gets captured as corporate profits.

In either case, more gets done with fewer people. This effect, like most technological effects should be deflationary.

However, in order for that pressure to manifest, company formation in what business people like to call the "entrepreneurial seizure" has to be more prevalent. (BTW, given Boeing's example of what happens when people who know nothing about airplanes run the airplane building business, we could have used more entrepreneurial seizures to bring competition to them) It is true that a lot of businesses will fail because entrepreneurs are often disgruntled "technicians" who are sick of executives treating their work like widget-making. But here is where AI can aid them for quite some time.

The AI CEO

If there’s one job that’s ripe for automation, it is the Chief Executive Officer

nickl4.medium.com

If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your C.E.O.

Chief executives are vulnerable to the same forces buffeting their employees. Leadership is important, but so is efficiency — and cost-cutting.

www.nytimes.com

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But there are explicit regulations being passed that cannot be understood as anything but regulatory capture of AI. Cloud serfs are going to be toiling a lot more for a lot less if the cloud barons capture AI as well. I realize that "Techno-feudalism" is an -ism and an imperfect description of the ills of our economic system. But it does capture one dynamic--ologopolist control of technology.

Bill Text - SB-1047 Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act.

SB 1047 Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act.

leginfo.legislature.ca.gov

You have to register your use of computing to do linear algebra! - In California, of all places!! The signature training AI is running Stochastic Gradient Descent. This is just a lot of matrix multiplication (and additions).

Having to register with the government to do math? That is draconian. There are many forms of totalitarianism. The computing size limit seems arbitrary, and frankly not that hard to hit at university research groups (or even in long running hackathons and contests where people want to try things to learn) in things that have nothing to do with "AI". Also, the limit actually comes nowhere close to the aim of the limit.

Other troubling wording is about the comes form the wording for "covered model derivative".

If you want to win the fight for worker wages in the age of AI, pick the right battles. Fight to remove compute limits from regulations.

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Ubiquity and open source will lead to higher wages and competition among corporations.

Blocked access and closed source will lead to lower wages and inflation through corporate profits.