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curl-6 1 day ago
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Norion said:
curl-6 said:

Whether those applications outweigh the downsides is a matter of debate though; I mean to take the internet for example, I actually made a thread about whether that was a net positive or negative for humanity and a lot of people felt it had largely been detrimental, especially in terms of allowing misinformation and the resulting authoritarian ideologies to thrive; one could argue the state of the US at the moment was largely enabled by the internet's ability to radicalise people en masse.

Similarly, innovations such as DDT, lead and asbestos all had useful and positive applications, yet in retrospect we would have been better off without them.

Are there useful applications for AI? Yes, there are. The question is though whether those advances are worth the consequences.

Everyone knows the benefits of the internet existing so I won't go into them but without it I never would've met my boyfriend and a lot of my close friends so the perspective that it's been largely detrimental is wild to me. I think anyone who feels that way is taking the benefits of it for granted and is overly focusing on the negatives. And it is a matter of debate yeah, that's why I've been bringing up various use cases as a way to show how the technology is already having significant benefits since the positives often go unnoticed compared to the negatives.

In general a lot of this is that a ton of the benefits are a future thing. Like the technology is already doing massive things like helping out medical research, scientific research in general and letting self driving cars be developed so huge future benefits are already baked in at this point so for me I'm taking that into account in my perspective of it. While just how exactly impactful AI will become is up in the air it's already clear that it's gonna help save a lot of lives and prevent a lot of suffering in the future and that's easily worth all the current negatives. Since a lot of the current positives are more in the background so aren't directly impacting most people yet a way to think of this is it's like going through some discomfort for a period of time to reap a ton of rewards later on.

If AI is already causing numerous problems from mass layoffs to stealing people's works to the enshittification of the internet, how do we know it won't get worse and worse rather than better over time?

Is a world of digital and political dystopia under the boot of AI systems and the billionaires and politicians who control them really worth self driving cars?

Last edited by curl-6 - 1 day ago