@steve mookie kong video summary: a voice actor in front of a microphone reads a script. The script advertises business AI for business. It seems like about 80% of the words in the script are either "AI" or "business."

@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... @nprofile1q...

I suspect ye old biological imperative is a big part of why random people just decide to have kids on what seems like a whim, but it absolutely results in plenty of unhappy parents who often also then create unhappy kids...

Our society absolutely is freakishly obsessive about the subject, and the way especially women's bodily autonomy is casually denied by random strangers when they so much as suggest they might not want kids is gross.

As it turns out, social pressure is absolutely 100% not needed on top of the good old biological instincts to encourage couples to have kids, and in fact that extra social pressure is indirectly the cause of a lot of misery.

@nprofile1q... at our school economics seems to be a big destination.

It is FASCINATING to observe that the closer the relationship between LLM output and direct monetary gain/loss, the fewer jobs are being replaced.

Get rid of your entry-level coders? Sure, the relationship between code quality/mistakes and money gained/lost is pretty vague. Even estimating the financial impact of a big outage can be difficult.

Get rid of your day traders or financial analysts? For some reason not happening at scale (yes there's a bunch of people doing AI-based investing, including before the advent of LLMs, but at least there isn't the public perception of jobs in that sector drying up).

@nprofile1q...

IMO we *could* have much better tools to help facilitate social solutions though...

I was just brainstorming about this:

https://kolektiva.social/@tiotasram/116363166024461961

I'm sure some of my ideas of even all of them are terrible, but I'm equally sure good options for improving the tools do exist.

@nprofile1q... as an anarchist, I think this jives with my instinct to blame hierarchies for these problems and oppose capitalism as one hierarchical system among others. I'm not actually that well-read on theory but it shouldn't be hard to find anarchist theorists who have thought through the issue in this way; David Graeber and Kropotkin come to mind as likely scholars to look at.

As for the solution, I think many can agree it requires a change to "human nature" but of those many are pessimistic about that being impossible. I don't share that pessimism. I think that human "nature" is in fact quite malleable over long or sometimes even short time-scales. To me, there are a few key ingredients in human nature required to avoid *a lot* of these problems (surely there would be other problems; I'm not envisioning this as a recipe for utopia):

1. Baseline unwillingness to obey orders from another. Obedience seen as disgusting and/or vaguely disquieting. This makes the task of the random antisocial jerk who wants to be a warlord nearly impossible.
2. Awareness of the risks of hierarchy, and an understanding of how to undermine it. This allows a non-global anarchist society to defeat a hierarchical threat by converting the individuals in the threatening group to their beliefs, ideally in part made easy by materially providing for the needs that the hierarchical society is withholding in order to cement control, and by demonstrating how much more enjoyable a life of free association is.
3. An instinctive impulse to provide for strangers and help one another. This one is already very much present in the current day, just brutally suppressed by states. The fact that it continues to bloom through the cracks of our modern order gives me a lot of hope.
4. That's it, mostly. I think one could argue that another necessary ingredient is some tendency towards spontaneous higher-order organization in order to actually get the work done necessary to feed everyone without hierarchies involved, but I see this as a minor detail.

Of course, *how* to change human nature to get this mix, at sufficient scale, and whether that could happen before hierarchies drive us to extinction is the much harder question.

In any case, as an anarchist I'm not dogmatic about this recipe. Others might have their own ideas about what could succeed, and as long as we don't extinct ourselves (very real possibility on multiple fronts) over millennia I think evolutionary processes at the societal level should produce *something* with longer-term stability than a few measly tens of thousands of years. We do still have existing present-day societies in small corners of the world that have been stable that long, in fact, and they may well simply outlive the present chaos and continue on past it. What I will argue against as an anarchist is pure pessimism. If you don't like my formula, by all means point out specific flaws or advocate for your own, or even day "I don't like that but I'm not sure what you do." Just don't say "That's unrealistic and couldn't possibly succeed, so we must continue with the status quo as the only option," because that means either we have incompatible definitions of "succeed" or you're arguing against any attempts towards changing a failing system because those attempts might fail, which is silly. (Of course, arguing that the failure modes of attempted change could be worse than the failure modes of continuing as is, but that's not a very solid-looking argument right now.)

@nprofile1q... I saw a project doing this for NYC council meetings, and brought up the inevitability of mistranscriptions (and bias in whose testimony would be more accurately transcribed). They pushed back saying it was fine and users could submit corrections. I decided to check whether my hypothesis was correct and mistranscriptions were common. I followed an upthread link to a transcription and started reading through to see how long it would take me to spot an error. Literally the next speaker had serious errors in the transcription.

The kicker: NYC already provides human-taken transcriptions. But these are released "too slowly" and it's "too hard" to even implement a feature to automatically check the machine transcriptions against the human ones when they're available.

The second kicker: in the video with the error, the human scribe interrupted to ask the speaker to speak louder/more clearly so that they could get an accurate transcript.

Anyways I got blocked because the project (which aside from using AI for transcription was pretty cool) was super useful for civic engagement and my objections were intolerable.

@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... also Doctorow didn't just use an LLM for spell-checking, he pivoted to defending LLM use in general and disparaging those against it because he rightly predicted we'd be unhappy about his use of LLMs for spell-checking.

Also: we're unhappy because the technology being pushed on us is harmful in numerous ways. The AI boosters are unhappy because someone won't use the thing they're trying to sell (and/or because they keep getting called out on the harms). These are very different reasons to be unhappy with different levels of validity.

@nprofile1q... maybe they still think like Trump that this will be over in a few days? More likely there are somehow competing pressures at play, although I can't begin to guess what they would be.

@nprofile1q... fascinating that this is written by an AI booster (look at the front page of the "think tank" he leads). I guess he thinks these dangers are often worth risking...

I'd argue that there are much better metaphors available for this kind of tool: a police department, for example, shapes the way we think about certain kids of problems (and imagined potential problems) through both overt propaganda and even without that just through the "call 911 to solve your problem" and "the threat of incarceration will prevent crime" ideas which... don't actually play out in practice. There are lots of similar social institutions that offer promises or propose frameworks of thought which aren't dependable but which deeply shape our behavior (democracy: "Want to change things? Vote," or even just cars and attendant urban design in US suburbs: "want to go anywhere? Get in the car."). Like LLMs, these things are tools/institutions that change the way we think as a consequence of using them, and those changes often lead us to think or behave in ways that rely on them to our detriment. LLMs do feel like a more generalist form of this phenomenon, since you can "rely on" them for almost any kind of thinking, not just certain very specific uses.

@nprofile1q... great points. An article that transformed my thinking on this from Crimethinc was this about it being safer at the front:

https://crimethinc.com/2025/01/28/its-safer-in-the-front-taking-the-offensive-against-tyranny

Obviously this doesn't always apply (it didn't work for Pretti) but speaking out when the real consequence is a beating and short unfair prison stay after which you understand the need to get the hell out is much preferable to remaining silent for "safety" and then a few years later you get picked up anyways but this time it's a one-way trip to a concentration camp.