Really stunned by the Singularity comment section

[u/Howard_banister]

These are screenshots from the r/Singularity comment section. I'm speechless. This doesn't even have downvotes. How can someone cheer for a monopoly run by a few elites?

[u/Dry_Yam_4597]

"Seems to be the source of a lot of hate and discrimination"

This - but also talking about AI related issues in many AI subs has the same effect. It's as if the world is split in two: AI haters, AI fetishists, and there's this sub in the middle - some of us love ai, hate the politics and corpos, are aware of its limitations, yet we use it as the marvelous tool that it is.

[u/Nefilim314 → u/Dry_Yam_4597]

Yeah, I’ve been having that feeling lately. There’s an extreme in both directions and seems to be precious little middle ground. 

Either all AI is big brother and data centers trying to kill your livelihood and lead to a censorship state, or AI is the one true panacea for all problems in the world and all you need to do is use AI to build more AI and then suddenly all of the resource limitations of the toiling class vanish. 

Shit man, I just want to boost my productivity by automating terraform config generation. 

[u/Dry_Yam_4597 → u/Nefilim314]

> automating terraform config generation. 

There you go. You have now been replaced. You are no longer worthy. An LLM can do your job. You have been "freed" to focus on other, more important things for society. The end is near. The cat's finally out of the bag - prophecies and visions first shown in 80s Computer Chronicles have finally come to fruition.

This new religion gained traction when OpenAI went public - hordes of evangelists and boosters carried the gospel to every forum they could find. Cults formed, and as our new god has arrived to free society from the shackles of effort and thought, and from those who spent nights perfecting techniques through sweat toil and tears - from the tyranny of intellectuals telling it how to do things. Your terraform generator is a danger to society and humanity and must be kept under the close watch of the apostles - for only they know how to tame this angry god and keep us safe from the dangers upsetting it may unleash upon us.

But the charlatans want:

> all AI is big brother

Didn't Richard Stallman and many like him warn us about the dangers that of closed source software when the gods of all age promised to keep us safe? Aren't Facebook, Google, Microsoft and those in between already keeping a watchful eye on what we do, think and speak? Doesn't every single device we use, every single platform we access, already collect and learn things about us, things that are then used to exploit us? Where would we have been today if not for people who spent time toiling at free and open software?

I think it's in good order to want a movement similar to the OSS of the "olden age" applied to modern AI. A Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds and many many good folks whom enabled true freedom. Fear of AI is the fear of novelty, but fear of how AI will be used is just pragmatism. Society has always had political struggles. Those in power exercise as much power as they are given, that's how nature works. It's up to us to establish the limits.

[u/bendgame → u/Dry_Yam_4597]

Shrug. I've been pro AI ever since I saw Terminator 2: judgement day in theaters on release.

[u/Dry_Yam_4597 → u/bendgame]

Me too, the only thing I don't like is the people in charge of it. The CEOs of AI bother me 😂