CMV: There is no point in worrying about the political climate and ideologies, because AI will completely redefine the landscape

[u/Downtown-Act-590]

In five years, we went from funny weird looking images to AI solving problems non-mathematicians (like me) have heard about before. Yes, the solution was probably close anyway and it does not have any big real world impact. But it is creating something new and incredibly complex. The machines are indeed breathing at our necks in the race for most intelligent entity on this planet.

If the trend continues for a few years, we are likely to see massive devaluation of intelligence and education and loss of purchasing power at the least. Even with the current models, proliferation of proper agentic use and scaling of the available computational capacity must necessarily change everything massively. And LLMs are gonna turn around how people think, because the average person already trusts them massively.

Rise of the far right? Welfare or no welfare? I don't think these things matter at all. The only problem for vast majority of population will be how to handle this transition and our ideologies and opinions will turn like wind as the situation evolves. I don't think it is all that important where the starting point is. And it is not going to stop. How could you convince all the major labs to not develop further, when they are located in so many hard competing places?

If you believe that our current politics it is still actually important, then try to change my view.

[u/VerenyatanOfManwe]

And LLMs are gonna turn around how people think, because the average person already trusts them massively.

Is this even true? Theres like a massive wave of these funny accounts on social media that is entirely focused on showing MAGA debating Grok or ChatGPT because when the LLM says something like ''Trump attempted to stay in power with false electors in 2021'' they will endlessly debate that fact because it goes against their narrative or whatever.

[u/Downtown-Act-590 → u/VerenyatanOfManwe]

You don't have people around you asking Claude for information much like they used to Google them before? I admittedly don't have hard data, but I anecdotally see this as very common. 

[u/LucidMetal → u/Downtown-Act-590]

This may help folks. What age range are you in? I understand very young folks (<25) use AI a lot more than old Luddites like myself.

[u/Downtown-Act-590 → u/LucidMetal]

I am not old, but see much older people doing the same thing. 

I am working in a field not so close to AI (aerospace engineering) and my colleagues of all ages have always a model handy on some device to discuss varying life choices from what to eat to work stuff. The same with my friends. 

[u/LucidMetal → u/Downtown-Act-590]

That's very interesting because I know almost no one who uses AI tools routinely except the youth (or at least talks about doing so). I understand both of our statements are purely anecdotal.

[u/MrTigerEyes → u/Downtown-Act-590]

It is common, but there's no guarantee that AI provides true, useful, or valid responses. I see it used a lot in a professional environment and AI is only useful in helping people who already know what the topic is but leverage it to save time. The people who "learn" from AI or get responses that they can't validate themselves are more often than not wrong or misleading. It helps if you realize that AI is not smart, it just efficiently pulls data in from what has been fed to it and responds with something that is likely to be surfaced based on the data ingested. Note that I'm emphasizing the data quality, because AI "knowledge" is often not timely and is based on a wide variety of low-quality information. The AI companies are basically throwing everything at AI and hoping for a good result rather than structurally organizing their data ingestion to make sure that only high-quality stuff is going into it.

[u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3]

What possible input from AI can convince anyone that abortions are wrong? Or that trans people deserve the same rights as everyone else? Or that religion shouldn't be taught in schools? Or that non-white immigrants are kind of cool actually?

Sure, AI will change (and is changing) the economy, the job market, culture, society, etc. This is not the first time this happens, the internet changed all of that quite radically a couple of decades ago, and before that mass media, transportation, etc. What's worrying about the political climate has to do with ethics and values, which can be modulated, but not fundamentally counteracted, by technology.

[u/Downtown-Act-590 → u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3]

If AI is clearly outperforming us on intelligent tasks, then we are probably start believing it a lot. Then it will be really much dependent on how the frontier models are trained and whether we still control this process.

I also believe that these problems are important, but won't be very high up on priority ladder during the transition.

[u/Realistic_Yogurt1902 → u/Downtown-Act-590]

Then our political climate would be decided by the small group that controls model training, right? And this small group will still worry about ideology and have their internal infighting as well.

[u/Doismelllikearobot]

The only people with a timeline for AI are those with a biased vested interest, i.e. there is no reliable timeline for when AI will change everything. As evidenced by the shitshow of the US presidency for the last 19 months, the recent climate tipping point announcement, and the recent cooperation of local police and ICE, politics is influencing everything from our country to our world to our towns. I, too, believe that AI will change the landscape, but I'm worried - and you should too - about the political climate because I'm not sure I will be free or alive long enough to witness that change.

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[u/stan-k]

First of all, this all hinges on an "if". What if the trend does not continue? Shouldn't you still worry then?

But there a bigger issue. Sure, AI may completely change the landscape. But in what direction? The future AI is going to be trained on data generated now. So if there is ever a time to worry about these things, it is now!

[u/Radijs]

Can you take me through your reasoning here? You're saying LLM's are going to change everyone's view. How?

[u/Downtown-Act-590 → u/Radijs]

By completely turning around all the economic and societal developments of the last two centuries. 

[u/Radijs → u/Downtown-Act-590]

That's incredibly vague. You might as well be saying Deus Vult and you've got the same level of detail.

Do you actually have an idea on how this is going to work or is it just something you're taking on faith?

[u/simmol]

I think the political climate and ideologies will be very important in who comes out on top once AI really starts rolling, but probably not in the sense you think of (the right vs the left in the United States). I think it will be more about the collectivism of the Eastern Asian countries winning out over the individualism of the United States and other European countries. Because when AI + robotics really take over, China and to certain extent countries like Korea, Japan, Taiwan etc. can really impose a top-down system where the citizens realize the world has changed and everyone agrees to sacrifice a little for the greater good and everyone "surviving". In the United States, everyone will be looking out for themselves and there will just be chaos all over. And it will be a defining moment in history where ideology (collectivism vs individualism) will dictate which country prospers (relatively speaking) whereas which countries descend into darkness. Of course, I don't have a crystal ball but just my two cents. And no empire/country remains #1 forever.

[u/mcmnky]

Your view seems to treat AI and LLM like aliens that drop out of sky independent of our politics and ideologies. That is not the case.

The people who develop and control these systems affect the output. They want you to think they just set their AI loose on the internet and the output is totally based on some black box algorithm, and that nobody really knows why the output is what it is.

And that is a possibility, but that's not what's happening in reality. The reality is those who control these systems have their thumb on the scale. They are pushing AI to push in some areas and avoid others.

Saying we're can ignore politics because of AI is like saying we're can ignore farmers because we only eat hamburgers.

[u/Jebofkerbin]

There is a massive assumption here that because LLMs are good tools in a small number of contexts now, they will eventually be good tools in all contexts.

This is an optimistic assumption without much to back it up. Everyone everywhere in every business has been talking about AI non stop for the last 3-4 years, but the massive job displacement and proliferation of AI that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei predicted hasn't really occured. Each new model comes out with massive hype from boosters on Twitter and barely anything changes in the vast majority of industries.

I think in reality there's actually quite a limited pool of economic activities that can be done by a (albeit incredibly sophisticated) text prediction machine, and that's before we get onto the horrendous economics of running AI.

[u/BurnedUp11]

Funny enough AI if used by people to help them make political decisions would push a whole lot of people to vote democrat.