Re: I want to roundhouse kick GenAI into the sun

[rynling]

I bitch and moan about GenAI, but I think it’s important to emphasize that it’s not all one thing, and that many applications of these programs can be super useful. Like in language learning, for instance, or in helping researchers in STEM fields organize and present data. Just because some people are evil and stupid and lazy doesn’t mean the technology is “bad” by default.

One of my many problems with the hypocrisy of woke academics is that they put all their time and energy into “calling out” and “critiquing” abstract problems while all but ignoring more specific material problems that they can actually solve. Like sure, we need to resist Islamophobia. Of course we do!! But also, how about paying our Arabic teachers a livable wage? Like maybe more than $4k a class, a salary that hasn’t been raised in more than twenty years?

With this in mind, I started attending (via Zoom) labor organization meetings. Something like 80% of my university’s faculty is severely underpaid, not to mention employed on extremely precarious annual contracts. The current political climate isn’t helping. I’m not convinced that I can actually be useful to anyone, but it’s been interesting to follow the process.

In the most recent meeting, what a union leader from another school said is that the university will attempt to frustrate organizational efforts by dividing the faculty in different programs along ideological lines. One example she gave involved ChatGPT; namely, how most Humanities people hate it and want it to be banned while STEM people tend to be more curious and permissive.

For me at least, that really hammered down the point that the “enemy” isn’t necessarily the technology itself. Rather, it’s how institutions use the technology to exacerbate pre-existing inequalities related to labor.

Comments

[lassarina]

That last sentence is pretty much the whole AI thing in a nutshell, yeah. A surprisingly nonzero number of the people who are at the top of the food chain for some of the AI things have said repeatedly that one thing they expect to come out of AI is a UBI policy because of what AI can do w/r/t labor, but....then there's putting your money where your mouth is and that whole idea is very Someone Else Will Handle It! to them. like nah dude own your consequences please.

[rynling]

You are so right, and you stated this so well. Thank you.

I spent about a week driving around in Europe this past May. I can usually get by when it comes to speaking, but reading can be a challenge. I therefore spent a lot of time experimenting with Google Lens, which lets you take a picture of something (a menu, for instance) with your smartphone and then instantly overlays the text with a (surprisingly very good!!) English translation. It's really amazing, like Star Trek in real life.

And it's wild to me that we can take such a literally fantastic set of technologies and be like: How do we use this to exacerbate pre-existing income inequalities and destroy the middle class?

Like the utopian potential is definitely there! But just, as you said, part of the responsibility (and the joy, I would think) of developing these technologies is putting your money where your mouth is as you help to guide their use and implementation in the right direction.

[lassarina]

Machine learning can do SUCH incredible and powerful things, and people are out here being like hurr hurr writers make too many monies how do we steal that from them, instead of, say, asking how we can use these models to sequence medical treatment for MS or spina bifida or something. Like for literal centuries people have been thinking about what we will be able to do as technology replaces our labor, and where we will find identity and purpose, and we could be doing that instead.