11 ms·
AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society
- khafra 10mo agoThis piece is wildly optimistic about the outcomes likely from AI on par with the smartest humans, let alone smarter than that. The author seems to think that widespread disbelief in the legitimacy of the system could make a difference, in such a world.
- dyauspitr 10mo agoWhat philosophical foundations are left? Even at the very top the president is corrupt and morally depraved.
- parineum 10mo agoLeaders are rarely shining moral beacons.
- antonvs 10mo agoAre you suggesting that no meaningful distinction can be made in terms of morality between Trump and, say, Biden, Obama, Blair, the Bushes etc.? Some people will point to their supposed crimes or immoral actions while in office, having to do with execution of their duties as president. Large countries tend to do many questionable things. But the current US administration is pretty unique in terms of its corruption, avoidance of accountability, authoritarian and fascist tendencies, etc. It's not a useful contribution to the discussion to essentially claim that "they're all the same" without making some sort of case for it.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- zmgsabst 10mo agoI would argue that yes, there’s no meaningful distinction between Biden and Trump. (And perhaps that Trump is more moral than Biden.) I’d find your argument would be more persuasive if you outlined what you believe Trump had done worse than the others — rather than argument-by-name-calling.
- dyauspitr 10mo agoRacist, dishonest, nepotistic, war mongering, anti meritocratic, fraudulent, vindictive, unscrupulous, corrupt, divisive, pedophile etc.
- antonvs 10mo agoThere’s no point in discussing anything with someone that holds your position, against the enormous amount of evidence to the contrary. The best we can do is take action to prevent you from exerting any influence over society.
- silisili 10mo ago> But the current US administration is pretty unique in terms of its corruption, avoidance of accountability, authoritarian and fascist tendencies, etc. I've mostly been reading that since the Bush years. Definitely said against Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump. In fairness, I don't remember it about Clinton. That you don't agree with a politician doesn't make him or her particularly worse than others.
- dyauspitr 10mo agoHe’s pretty objectively corrupt in regards to universal values of fairness, honesty, empathy etc. by an order of magnitude compared to a lot of recent presidents.
- parineum 10mo agoI'm suggesting that the morality of our leaders is not a barometer for the morality of the populace.
- dyauspitr 10mo agoIn a democracy there’s a correlation.
- shrubby 10mo agoThe moral comes from the grassroots as power corrupts. As long as we wait for a godlike leader for rescue the end result is same as with Stalin, Hitler, Trump, Thiel, Epstein, Musk, ... The godlikeness can come though in many forms, political (Trump), propaganda (Musk/Zuck7Thiel) or via extortion material and money like Epstein. A good litmus test for a decision maker is the universal ethical principle mentioned in the article put into concrete and compare everything via the lens of "what if all eight billion of current humans and also the future generations would do this". Right now nobody's daring to to this but as long as we start asking "who's afraid of the narcissist zillionaire" the world starts to make sense and the solution appears.
- wildpeaks 10mo agoPower reveals rather than corrupt: it's easy to act moral when there are consequences (real or imagined) when you don't, but you see someone's true self when they know they could get away with it. For example, this is why the way someone treats service workers is a good indicator of someone's character.
- shrubby 10mo agoYup. I'm looking this via the lens of moral development where: Pre-conventional level is the narcissist me-me-me level, that seems to dominate the geopolitics and tech. Conventional is most of us as the sheep. This level follows the loudest crowd that right now is the pre-conventional. Post-conventional is the few that can do standalone thinking and morals. Most conventionals can though understand the difference between and also the outcome we're headed to with the pre-conventional human gods, but we need to build the normalcy for the post-conventional ones together and make it structural. My hunch is that first step could be to start the discussion on what is excessive on personal level. Consumption, wealth, political power. Something like Mamdani or Polanski have showed, only more blunt. The majority of people are waking up that the current trajectory means the end of the world and extinction after the short period of accelerationist-dystopian hellscape.
- rightbyte 10mo agoYe like a guy at Walmart and a cop. The leeway to mess with you is off by orders of magnitude.
- barrell 10mo agoAn idea that has been living rent free in my head is that "AI is ultimately nothing but a pure destruction of value". It's promise is unlimited value to everyone on demand; but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable. Value and scarcity go hand in hand. I realize the hyperbolic framing of the idea, but none-the-less I haven't been able to get it out of my head. This article feels like it's another piece of the same puzzle.
- RobinL 10mo agoPrice and scarcity go hand in hand, not value and scarcity. Diamonds are pretty worthless but expensive because they're scarce (putting aside industrial applications), water is extremely valuable but cheap. No doubt there are some goods where the value is related to price, but these are probably mostly status related goods. e.g. to many buyers, the whole point in a Rolex is that it's expensive.
- tennysont 10mo agoI prefer the `price = value = relative wealth != wealth = resources` paradigm. Thus, wars destroy wealth and tech advances create wealth, but that's just me
- Human-Cabbage 10mo agoThis conflates use-value and exchange-value. Water to someone dying of thirst has extremely high use-value, while a diamond would in that same moment have nearly no use-value, except for the fact that, as a commodity, the diamond has an exchange-value, and so can be sold to help acquire a source of water.
- js8 10mo agoIn a sane world we would just give the poor guy some water and let him keep his precious diamond. And in the sane world, the guy would donate the precious diamond to a museum so that everyone could enjoy its beauty. What are you describing happens if you follow the mathematical rules of your models too much and ignore the real world.
- feverzsj 10mo agoIt seems the public is getting tired of these AI slops. No one wants "AI powered" products. How long will the bubble last?
- jmathai 10mo agoI feel a lot less pride in my creative work knowing it can be done much too easily with modern AI. It makes me less eager to create which is quite unfortunate. I haven’t felt to bad about my creative works being fed into training models. Taken by itself, my creations are minuscule. But it’s very apparent when I look at AI as a whole, having taken from everyone in aggregate. I feel that.
- anal_reactor 10mo agoI'm the opposite. I am more prideful and I appreciate art more exactly because I know that it could've been done by AI but someone somewhere chose not to.
- zmgsabst 10mo agoDo you feel the same way about automatic looms displacing crafters, eg, the Luddites?
- philistine 10mo agoSomeone needs to maintain and setup those efficient brand new looms. All I hear from AI is the promise that managers and owners will no longer need creative and managerial workers.
- zmgsabst 10mo agoAs many people as were employed as artisans? — are the new jobs on average as good as artisanship? Or so we displace 9/10 workers to worse or no jobs while 1/10 gets a valuable one? My understanding of AI is that it’s likely to represent the same 90:10 split — where some people operate those new AI systems, but most people are displaced to intellectual assembly lines. (Or unneeded, entirely.)
- philistine 10mo ago> As many people as were employed as artisans? Counterintuitively, yes! Automation unlocked the birth of a worker class that could now afford the products made by automation, producing a virtuous spiral of growth. AI is breaking everybody's social compact. The workers' labour is used as training with nothing given back and the owners' consumers are unemployed giving you no market for your goods.
- renewiltord 10mo agoThis stuff is all a bit much. Fan fiction sites are all “creative content lifted without your consent”. You think J K Rowling consented to Harry x Hermione slash fiction? Or Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality? Absolutely non-consensual. All of this stuff is clearly a highly cherry-picked gymnastic exercise to justify a pre-existing position. Classic Elephant and Rider stuff. It’s the same as support for the snail darter. Same as the story about how groups shouldn’t go out during COVID but BLM protests are fine. And if by some incredible chance it had been the FSF or Brewster Kahle who had produced GPT then you guys would be talking about how information should be unchained because creative work belongs to all Man. Couching this blatantly motivated reasoning by quoting past philosophers is just such middle-brow woe-is-me whining. Take one look at yourselves in an honest sense. Do you have any principles or will you slave them all to your outcomes? And now I must repeat the litany lest one assume that my opposition to this kind of balderdash be construed as some kind of political tribalism: * I don’t think we should destroy endangered species * I think COVID wasn’t a hoax and does spread in large groups * I think people have a right to protest if they are discriminated against and that includes the black people at BLM * I love the Internet Archive and have donated to them
- masswerk 10mo agoI think, you're mistaking I.P. and creative effort. Certainly, there must be a reason for people reading, even searching for this stuff, beyond the mention of a well-protected trademark.
- renewiltord 10mo agoI see. What things that I said are no longer coherent when one makes a distinction between IP and creative effort?
- masswerk 10mo agoWell, let's say, an alternative history novel, is it just ripping off a history textbook or is there more going on?
- jasonsb 10mo agoNo it doesn't, because social media already did that. There's nothing left to be broken.
- tayo42 10mo agoI like the one upping of cynicism here
- sneak 10mo agoThis argument depends on the idea that someone’s creative work output being used for AI training somehow deprives them of benefit from that creative work output - the basic idea behind “copyright infringement is stealing”. This is not to agree that AI training is copyright infringement, just that it depends on the same concept of intellectual property. I don’t subscribe to this basic idea. Copyrights are a legal fiction designed to prop up an industry. Somehow from that we went to the idea that creative work output is property. It isn’t. It’s a service. This is why “works made for hire” is a thing. This is the same reason that reasonable people don’t believe that fanfic authors should be jailed.
- est 10mo agoFeels like AI is speed-running us straight into last man (antithesis of Übermensch), where the algorithms make the values and we’re just the training data.
- simianwords 10mo agoWhat do you mean by last man?
- W6zVktFA 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man
- lloydjones 10mo agoPerhaps sovereign compute is the answer? We have open weights models, as a sort of ‘public commons’ that democratises that layer, but compute is still the bottleneck for big companies..
- pugio 10mo agoIn the past few decades, I learned to be skeptical of any piece of "true" media because it could be easily be photoshopped by an expert. Yet people still gave credence to a damning photo or soundbite shared around. AI has finally made it so easy to fake things that (I hope) people will re-learn skepticism of all they see/hear. Likewise, I've felt like the meritocracy story that the author sets up as the "moral foundation" has heavily attenuated in this century. It's still used as the justification in America (I'm rich because I deserve it, you're not rich because you didn't work as hard/smart as me) but it feels like that story is wearing thin. Or that the relative proportion of the luck / ovarian lottery aspect has become so much larger than the skill+hard work aspect. The trend of the rich getting richer, of them using their power to manipulate the system to further advantage them and theirs at the expense of everyone else, existed before AI burst into the public in '20-21. Maybe, like the fake media, it will finally be the kick people need to let go of the meritocracy trap* and realize we need a change. * I like the notion of meritocracy, it just seems like America has moved from aiming for that, to using the story of it as an excuse to or opiate for the masses.
- ares623 10mo agoI opened 10 PRs in 20 minutes today and it felt great. If I extrapolate that to everything else with a straight line then everything looks good /s
- theshrike79 10mo agoI fixed a bunch of nitpicky PR comments just by saying "PR 69 has some comments, fix the issues" to Claude. It opened the PR automatically, took the comments and applied the fixes (renaming a few things, simple refactoring and added a few unit tests). Effort from me: maybe 5 minutes going through the PR comments and deciding they were super simple monkey work and 10 seconds typing instructions for Claude. Then maybe 5 minutes of checking the work, commit and push. All of this could've been done with a Github integrated Claude tbh without me in the loop more than accepting the changes one by one.
- ares623 10mo ago> maybe 5 minutes going through the PR comments and deciding they were super simple monkey work There’s an old joke about a mechanic banging a hammer on a car and charging $1000 for it. Man us engineers severely undervalue each other’s worth huh. One thing all this AI hype has taught me is I’ve started to be very conscious of what my value is. It’s a hard habit to break.
- theshrike79 10mo agoI've noticed how much of my daily work is just busywork that can be automated today. I kinda enjoy it, I can focus more on planning, thinking, networking and solving actual problems rather than typing 1000 lines of unit tests by hand and then doing a stupid copy-paste mistake somewhere when I try to speed things up and spend 2 hours debugging it. (True story)
- flanked-evergl 10mo agoModern society has no moral foundation.
- ozim 10mo agoI think that a lot of people are fine with intellectual property theft because most of people don’t have much valuable intellectual property. No one steals from them. So far AI companies were settling by throwing VC cash at it so the vocal ones that do have IP will be paid off.
- Synaesthesia 10mo agoAI could be a boon for mankind. it can be a useful tool. We could employ it in a manner which provides more dignity for workers. That is, let them work less hours, have more leisure time etc. That necessitates something which will keep the powers of capital in check, and people don't seem to think that this is possible. Corporations are just so large and powerful, that people feel hopeless. Byt we could still get together and enact legislation which will override them. Othing is impossible, it just takes some imagination and organisation. Like Chomsky once said, if the peasants of Haiti could organise and overthrow their government and create a functioning democracy, then surely we can too, with far more advantages.
- philistine 10mo agoHaiti's democracy was never, in its storied 200 years of existence, functioning. France saw fit it never did until the damage was irreparable.
- Synaesthesia 10mo agoI'm referring to the ascendance of Bertrand Aristide. Now he was quickly removed but it was a remarkable triumph of grassroots democracy.
- conartist6 10mo agoI see such positivity in your comment, but also every technology has promised to make everything easier and more convenient and so to give us more leisure time. What the evidence has shown is that the people who end up living the life of leisure are the ones who amass wealth and power, and everyone else is going to be stuck in the rat race because, well, we're living things. The rules we live by are: you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't even stop playing the game.
- simianwords 10mo agoPeople who amass wealth are the ones working more hours on average.
- 10mo ago
- puppycodes 10mo agoAI is getting way too much credit in this article. There are much much bigger forces that impact society in the way the author describes.
- hoherd 10mo agoGo on.
- youoy 10mo ago> Right now, even people who reject meritocracy understand its logic. You develop rare skills, you work hard, you create value, and you capture some of that value. The premise is that AI does not allow to do this any more, which is completely false. It may not allow to do it in the same way, so its true that some jobs may disappear, but others will be created. The article is too alarmist by someone who has drank all of the corporate hype. AI is not AGI. AI is an automation tool, like any other that we have invented before. The cool thing is that now we can use natural language as a programming language which was not possible before. If you treat AI as something that can thin k, you will fail again and again. If you treat it as an automation tool, that cannot think you will get all of the benefits. Here i am talking about work. Of course AI has introduced a new scale of AI slop, and that has other psycological impacts on society.
- impossiblefork 10mo agoYes, but I don't think it's about the present, necessarily. AI is still shit. There are prompt networks, what some people call agents, but presently models are still primarily trained as a singular models, not made to operate as agents in different contexts with RL on each agent being used to improve the whole indirectly. Tokens will eventually become cheaper to the point where it will be possible to actually train proper agents. So we probably will end up with very powerful systems in time, systems that might actually be at least some kind of AGI-lite. I don't think is far off. At most a decade.
- zkmon 10mo agoOwnership of things by humans is never a settled question. There is no ideal or correct model for ownership, as ownership itself is unnatural. People went through many models over centuries - famliy/community owneship, monarchies, socialism, capitalism etc. Capitalism is the worst of all, allowing extreme exaggeration of talent differences between people. AI is like back to monarchies. AI is exposing the myths of talent and erasing differences between humans making them all a uniform array of subjects. However this erasure comes at the cost of return to monarchy style of economic model, where wealth would be moved from common population to the owners of AI or the neo-monarchies.
- zingababba 10mo agoThis is an interesting take that I don't think I have come across before. Thanks. Would you happen to have any further reading material on this topic either by yourself or others?
- TinyBig 10mo agoJames C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is a useful lens here. Scott argues that modern states flattened human complexity into legible categories so they could govern: surnames, maps, censuses, standardized occupations. You lose a lot of nuance, but in theory the trade-off is that the state can then build institutions that serve the public. AI feels like a more extreme version of that flattening, but without the civic purpose that justified it. You end up with legibility without legitimacy. That’s the part I think we don’t have a good framework for yet.
- zingababba 10mo agoThanks I'll pick it up and finally read it. I've had it on my to-read forever but have never got around to it.
- neilwilson 10mo agoI’m going to disagree with the premise. The value in AI won’t come from providing AI but from using it. The “knowledge cut off date” is 12 to 18 months ago for models, which essentially means that copyright has, in some ways, shrunk to that period since designing around is now very easy. Given most people live on what they produced recently and not 20 years ago there’s an argument this makes access to knowledge and techniques fairer. Constant new creation is required to obtain a markup and that drives forward productivity In other words it’s the copyright/patent argument all over again. And it’s perhaps a debate we need to have again as a service society.
- Aperocky 10mo agoIf the moral foundation is that majority of people must perform economically valuable work in order to exchange for their survival, then perhaps it should be broken. I'm cautiously optimistic because perhaps AGI will find a way to implement it - if it is sentient at that level, then it would be rather difficult to be owned by some person or corporation. Obviously LLMs are very far from there and remains just a tool for now.
- zingababba 10mo agoWhy would anyone ever cede their decision making over to a machine? I think people are way overestimating the impact AGI will have on a certain type of person. Nothing will ever be implemented easily and without force even if some Meta AGI (TM) says its a good idea.
- simianwords 10mo agoThis is a strange article. AI is the best thing to happen to meritocracy. Previously, knowledge was gatekept. Pretty much everyone has access to ChatGPT in India. You used to need the privilege of knowing the right people or knowing the right sources. But you don’t need that anymore. What honestly could be better for meritocracy than AI?
- theshrike79 10mo agoAn AI that isn't a subscription service hosted in the USofA
- simianwords 10mo agoi don't get it, what does USofA or subscription have to do with anything
- theshrike79 10mo agoAI is the ultimate "someone else's computer". If you're doing work in The Cloud and the servers are in America, you can still move all that to physically reside in whatever jurisdiction you live in. The tech is there. But if you build stuff on top of Anthropic, OpenAI or Google AIs, their data resides and will always reside in the US. They have very specific laws that allow them to grab data from anywhere and nobody can say shit about it. There's no realistic way for anyone to run "ChatGPT" at home. You can get pretty close with the 200B++ param models but they're still just a pale shadow of what an acre of industrially cooled compute will do in comparison. But if your risk modelling doesn't flash a big red light about building a business on top of someone else's hardware and software that is physically in a currently very unstable and legally unreliable country, that's fine. I've been using my VC subsidised LLM credits to build local-first systems I can still use when either the money runs out or the political craziness crashes down.
- simianwords 10mo agoBut what does this have to do with meritocracy???
- sebow 10mo agoAI & Social Media are only exacerbating the decline of morality in society, spreading it and making it more visible. Morality has been "breaking", objectively speaking, for at least a century, most noticeable with the advent of postmodernism.
- samdoesnothing 10mo agoOr maybe it's just a bubble and once it pops it will be seen as a useful tool for some things, and the world will keep going on.
- spwa4 10mo agoThis argument forgets one very important fact: "We’re in a narrow window where institutional choices still matter, where there’s enough distributed economic and political power to reshape who controls AI infrastructure and how its benefits flow." China has AI infrastructure and has made it very clear how its benefits flow. Not to people, "despite" China being communist. In other words we can't do this unless we were to stop China first, or China honestly cooperates, which they've never done. And if you don't do that, then your institutions can only sabotage our side. You want to exercise control, fine, but first need to have that control.
- thefz 10mo ago> AI renders their disagreement moot by violating the premise they shared. When your talents become training data harvested without consent, when your creative work becomes parameters in a model, you’re being used as a pure instrument. I wonder if the "vibe coders" can fix their own code. Or find a very subtle logic error in it. Hell, I wonder if someone with access to AI can fix a bicycle if they haven't even touched a spanner.
- tankenmate 10mo agoSo much of this article has two implicit tenets; 1) information can be "owned", and 2) copying information reduces its inherent value (which as I'll explain follows from the first). So as a preface, I would argue than in the marketplace for information (ideas, content, works, etc if you will) that value has two components, 1) utility value, and 2) scarcity value (which I would argue has two components, availability value (information horizon[0]) and saliency value (preference as a result of the information horizon[1]). Obviously the rise of copyright over the last few centuries attempts to limit commerce of ideas based somewhat loosely on the concept of (real, physical) property law (itself a glorified codified extension of the animal behaviour of territoriality, aka survival by means of securing resources); ownership is a moral value autogenous to an idea's sui generis expression on, by, or through a recorded medium. In other words the mere act of recording an idea in a "creative" fashion brings with it a "moral" ownership of that idea. Of course the "creative" and "moral" parts from which the law prescribes and proscribes these limits is debatable. The legally mandated "monopoly" of an idea (even though the marginal cost of replication approaches zero) provides this scarcity. So in the end because of this the scarcity, and the resulting "rent seeking" (corporations seeking to charging (typically over time) more than the cost to create and distribute information), are in effect value (read wealth) redistribution. So, what is more "moral"? Using a constructivist approach, which is more socially acceptable (and hence far more likely to be codified into law)? broad access to information distilled to the point that sui generis is "removed" so that concepts (which in general can't be copyrighted) are freely available for transformative use, or extending the "moral right" of copyright, now that information distillation is so cheap, to include the ability to "copyright" an idea rather than the expression of it. Or are we seeing a "breakdown" of the codification of the law where the granularity of the spectrum is so fine it becomes so costly to enforce such the "value" of the law in reducing the transaction costs of daily social interaction in the information sphere that we revert to pre-copyright behaviours, i.e. information hoarding. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261773523_Information_Horizons https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261773523_Informati... The concept is quite simple there is a limit to the amount and quality of information that a) a human can get access to (and following what they prefer / value), and b) relatedly the amount that can be synthesised for actual use. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0740818804000520 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07408...
- pu_pe 10mo ago> “I own the compute infrastructure” or “I owned the company that bought the AI systems early”, on the other hand, is just being in the right place at the right time. It’s not about your talents, effort, or contribution. It’s pure capital ownership divorced from any human quality. The article is not about AI, it's about this stage of capitalism. Unlike the author, I would argue that it is very much in line with the consequences of Robert Nozick's thinking. On the other hand, the way China is doing its AI development and rollout seems more aligned with a Rawlsian notion of distributing the benefits. I can perfectly understand why everyone in the West is so jaded and worried about how AI benefits will be distributed. That doesn't change the fact that, like any technology, it can also be used to make everyone wealthier, like industrialization also did.
- tinypieman 10mo agoMy take on this: Ultimately the industrial revolution has been beneficial to the majority, but when it occurred it triggered violent changes that pushed many communities toward hardship. From artisans owning or co-owning their means of production, with a significant creative license over their work and the possibility to take their own initiatives… to the efficiency of atomized labor, which strips away the creativity of most, and devalues the work. The created hardship providing more people ready to join the ranks of devalued workers… The industrial revolution was, first, a great mean of consolidating wealth, it immensely benefited a few, and only later “trickled down”. I see the AI revolution the same, it will violently break a significant portion of knowledge works, remove creative licenses, and devalue those works. Similarly to the industrial revolution, we can now atomize knowledge works as much as we want. Through this we can make the workers as easy to replace as we want them to be. This shifts power dynamics and allows the consolidation of wealth. There are strong market incentives for this and no regulations at the moment. I don’t see how we can avoid this. I don’t see those pushing this revolution as great humanists sadly. Yet ultimately, I think this will damage the middle class too much, creating instabilities. From there, there is a a chance we can reclaim the benefits of this revolution for all. But it will be a fight, and I believe the transition will be ugly.
- pu_pe 10mo ago
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 10mo agoCannot read. Cloudflare: "Just a moment..." What does the author suggest is the "moral foundation of modern society"