US senator Bernie Sanders amplified his recent criticism of artificial intelligence on Sunday, explicitly linking the financial ambition of “the richest people in the world” to economic insecurity for millions of Americans – and calling for a potential moratorium on new datacenters.
Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democratic party, said on CNN’s State of the Union that he was “fearful of a lot” when it came to AI. And the senator called it “the most consequential technology in the history of humanity” that will “transform” the US and the world in ways that had not been fully discussed.
“If there are no jobs and humans won’t be needed for most things, how do people get an income to feed their families, to get healthcare or to pay the rent?” Sanders said. “There’s not been one serious word of discussion in the Congress about that reality.”
“If there are no jobs and humans won’t be needed for most things, how do people get an income to feed their families, to get healthcare or to pay the rent?” Sanders said. “There’s not been one serious word of discussion in the Congress about that reality.”
Because if people could think more than 2 months ahead we wouldn’t be in this spot to begin with…
Resource scarcity makes you lose long term planning though, which is why we keep getting squeezed so hard. If people had time to step back and realize where we’re headed, we’d change direction really fucking quick.
We haven’t done it on climate change, why the hell would people change for ai?
Yeah but we did it on the ozone
Username checks out. I’m so tired, Givesomefucks, so very tired.
On the bright side this the most optimistic I’ve been in 30 years, except like 6 months after Obama won the first time.
It’s a catch-22 where the people legitimately won back the DNC, but the masses are still ignorant of it because the billionaires who own are media don’t want anyone to hear about it.
The DNC is giving insane levels of money back to state parties after neoliberals robbed them for a decade with the victory fund grift. We’re already seeing the results of that, and midterms are going to be huge.
Then we’ll get a fair primary for the presidential, with a very very good chance of a progressive getting in with huge majorities in the House and Senate.
Like, shits bad now. But it’s still not as bad as the Great Depression, and that shit got us FDR.
There’s a very good chance we’re about to hit a massive upswing.
We just got to remember that the peaceful option of FDR and policy wasn’t the only option on the table:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
Just like Martin wouldn’t have won without Malcolm, peaceful societial change almost always requires at least the threat of hypothetical violence along with it.
We were damn close to a civil war right when FDR got elected.
When shit gets bad enough, the best short term plan for the majority is often “gang up on the people that have everything”. Because that’s the only people who have anything
Hey now, that’s unfair; people think more than 2 months ahead!
They think 3 months ahead, correlating with the next Quarterly report.
People forget that a very short time ago, there was no internet and knowlege and fast communication was rare and slow.
Nothing in the last 500 years has changed our society so much, in such a short time.
AI has been around for decades now. The main recent breakthrough has been in its ability to immitate a human conversation. Untill a similar breakthough happens in its ability to reason and understand, it will continue to stagnate.
Right now AI development needs the current bubble to pop before significant progress can be made.
I sincerely believe that our advancement in technology has outpaced our evolution and we are simply not equipped to wield it yet.
Its certainly apparrent in how much our brains are struggeling to process the level of information we have access to.
You can see that in many areas of society, people have given up on facts based reasoning and are simply following “vibes” in their decision making that is a lot “cheaper” on the brain.
The thing is that technology is not linear.
That could happen tomorrow.
It might never happen.
It likely isn’t going to happen with LLMs but the next big breakthrough could happen at any time. Or never.
I very respectfully but firmly disagree.
Human progression isn’t just advancing, it’s accelerating. If you were born in 1700 and died in 1775, basically everything at the time of your death was identical to the time of your birth.
If you were born in 1900 and died in 1975, you were born to horse-drawn carriages and died after seeing a man walk on the moon.
Now, even though our “AI” isn’t real AI and just language models, it can still crunch numbers historically faster. So the acceleration is objectively going to accelerate.
I sincerely don’t understand how anything you wrote with disagrees with my comment about technological advancement not being linear.
Fair point, sorry - I didn’t word it well. My bad.
You seem to think something bad might happen, I think that stone is already moving and can’t be stopped.
It might or it might not.
I agree that it will likely will given the insane progression in ai models of every kind and the absurd amount of money being invested into it, but it’s not a certainty.
LLMs are likely a dead end but anyone that thinks the buck stops there is an idiot.
I’d have to disagree that LLM are a dead end. They aren’t actual AI, but they can crunch data at a rate that will make them a bridge to actual AI. I guess I see this is a very dangerous and inevitable stepping-stone.
LLM will be able to crunch raw numbers to make actual AI possible IMHO.
You keep saying number crunching - gpus “crunch numbers” cpus “crunch numbers” ai models ARE numbers.
You also need it to pop so the billionaires who want to gatekeep and control the future of AI (in order to make sure their names are attached to that future) can be knocked off the fucking pedestal they keep trying to place themselves on. They suck and they’re making everything else suck too.
Imagine how much weirder and shittier the U.S. would currently be if only Steve Jobs and a handful of out of touch billionaires had been given this much fucking control of all future technology in the 80s.
As if attaching yourself to something successful before anyone else did a long fucking time ago, then gives you some kind of lifetime special status allowing you to decide what’s best for all of humanity. Like it’s only reasonable you be allowed to ignore whatever regulations you want while using your power to enforce other regulations that protect your monopoly. You’re not being a self centered prick, you’re “saving humanity from stagnation,” while somehow being completely oblivious you and your mediocre state protected monopolies are the fucking stagnation that is plaguing society and fucking decimating hundreds of years of progress as fast as you possibly can.
Bernie is still using old, sensible definition of the word AI, back when it meant something, back when we could hold philosophical conversations about the future, and technical conversations about applications of “machine learning”.
It’s all gone now, AI doesn’t exist, can’t do shit, but will ruin our lives anywayNuclear weapons be damned.
Or tools, the boat, agriculture and animal husbandry, the wheel, metallurgy, writing…
Yeah just a few things more consequential.
Bernie riding a populist wave? Shocker.
I rather be killed by nuclear hell fire than die from thirst and starvation from all of the data centers overheating the earth because Fuckerburg needed more AI slop on Instagram
Wow, you ever stop to think about how fucking stupid your anti-AI agenda can make you?
There are enough nuclear weapons to kill every human a few times over but hey, I guess that means it’s not the most consequential technology yet known.
Instead, you have to make up some bullshit doomsday scenario to justify such a stupid fucking statement.
We get it, you’re a climate denier.
I think the internet has it beat. Without the internet, “AI” wouldn’t be nearly as ubiquitous. Or as useful, I’d wager, especially in all the wrong ways.
I think Bernie is using the term “consequential” very carefully here. He doesnt mean its the most transformative, impactful technology ever. He means it’s the one that’s going to have the most negative consequences for people - and I think it has the internet beat there.
But, its certainly arguable. ‘Ai’ and ‘the internet’ are really both a large collection of technologies bundled into one umbrella terb, and there are positive, benign, and negative components within both.
I don’t ever remember people making ‘fuck the internet’ clubs back when it was gaining steam in 97/98 though…
There were definitely people who were opposed to the internet, and who thought there was nothing useful on it. And there was a lot of useless crap. When the number one visited website is HamsterDance, it’s hard to make a convincing argument that the internet is the future of society
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More than fire? Agriculture? The wheel? Municipal water treatment? Sewers? Germ theory? Refrigeration? Vaccines? Chemistry? Fossil fuels? Electricity?
The ability to generate pictures or true-sounding text is nothing compared to the ability to getting hot water to come out the wall at the twist of a knob, or yanking frozen dinners out the freezer and into the microwave…
