Miguel Gómez

I hope so! I’ve seen some reckless use, so I hope more people imbibe the message that this should all be done carefully and thoughtfully.

So is the argument then that LLMs allow you to kind of play around with social science ideas without having to, eg, poll real people? Or do the LLMs produce data that replaces polls or interviews or market studies or whatever?

So I read this and it seems like your pros are outweighed by the cons. Like the stuff that works here is pretty minimal and the pitfalls to, say, a polling firm or marketing firm not using caution that you recommend seem significant, no?

The psychotic level of hype alone should be a big blinking warning sign, before we even discuss the epistemological implications, the fraud and theft, the slop, the unethical uses, the environmental problems, etc.

But oh yeah, I forgot, pointing out the environmental costs of progress is bad.

This is bizarro world nonsense. If you are an academic and don’t have the critical thinking skills to at least say “huh, maybe we should let the technology mature before we jump in with both feet”, I don’t know what to tell you.

Tbh? Yeah? Where?

I mean he is not wrong, I just identified a whole fucking publishing company of AI slop posing as peer reviewed journals in my library’s database, after a student organically found and tried to use one of the garbage articles. But sure, we would not want to stigmatize such a thing.

She says it will be bad for the people
Who lose their jobs, yes. Seems pretty uncontroversial?

Clearly, apparently a lot of us have time for dumb arguments on the internet. Cold comfort i expect for agricultural workers already sweating the ethnic cleansing campaign and now maybe losing their work to drones. I’m sure it will translate into a great time for then. Surely!

Who is we? What are you even talking about now?

Drones…

Where? I looked. She did say drone would not be good for workers…

I’m not sure why I find it so irritating, but I hate when someone defends their own shitty argument as “rational”, especially when all they are doing is hippy punching

You know you are out on two straw-man branches now, right?

She clearly said that automation has not automatically led to more leisure time. There’s tons of economics literature on that…

You might be an unserious person who thinks nothing changes and our current system is inevitable.

None of what you are arguing “logically follows” from that essay. Critiquing the capitalist version of progress does not lead to mass starvation, eugenics, or living in tipis. This whole line of thinking is unserious nonsense for social media.

You are going to have to show me who is arguing for this.

There’s a ton of economics literature about how technology, or more to the point, greater productivity, has not translated to more leisure. Or more specifically, it has in some places, not in the United States.

She’s saying we invented weaving 4000 years ago. Your “presumably” is silly.

It is deeply unserious to respond to real, accurate critiques of the way in which technological progress is framed in our society by saying “so what, you want billions of people to starve to death”? That’s weasely nonsense.

You know that whole waffles/pancake meme? That’s what you are doing.

Where does she say those bad things are worth the lives of billions?

He is not taking her argument seriously.

I agree that is a worthwhile discussion.

Maybe she believes that, but it’s not in that essay.

I’m not sure it’s that simple. One might have to yell pretty loud to get someone to pay attention to something they’d prefer to ignore. Good ideas don’t just win because they are right.

Are not, sorry.

The value (and I think the goal) of most of these over-the-top positions is they stake out new ground for debate. I don’t agree with PETA, but it is good they forced us to talk more seriously about how we treat animals. Same with the land back and the weather underground and the rest of it.

I think she’d agree wit your specific binary, but in general I’d hope she’d agree that those bad things are necessary preconditions for any technological progress.

I think it’s possible to mitigate the bad effects like environmental damage, and essentially eliminate the labor exploitation.