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[–] 10 points 9 hours ago

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  • [–] 16 points 12 hours ago (3 children)
  • [–] 11 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

    There are currently other problems with AI but they are much easier to solve when those profiting from them don't own the government. See: China's regulation on AI chatbots

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  • [–] 5 points 11 hours ago*

    Since this comment is about the edge cases I'll add my own here as an example. It's not about "AI" in how most people think of it.

    One example of "AI" that is more efficient and more accurate than traditional algorithms is in OCR (Optical character recognition). Traditional algorithms rely on templates and are very dependent on configuration. OCR is basically when you take a picture of some text on a sign or a page. The conversion of those pixels of text in the real world into text that you can copy and paste on your phone. Basic shit we've had long before "AI". Modern machine learning has improved this drastically. The same field that brought us "AI".

    The "AI" in this case is really an evolution of machine learning in applications of computer vision . When we decided to call that "AI" was when the capitalist decided it was good marketing.

    I worked on machine learning in college a decade ago. It is an area of computer science that has a lot of potential to make computer systems more efficient and more accurate when interacting with the real world and applied to computer vision models.

    All of this shit has been thrown out of the window for chat bots that can be marketed and sold as a consumer commodity and experience.

    I say all this, because "AI" is not really anything bad in its foundational principles in computer science. The insanity of where we are today is entirely because of the ownership of the means of production.

    I tried to find the comparison of OCR algorithms I read in the past. The "application specific AI" models use less computational power and are more accurate than previous template models. This was a year ago I think. But, because of how awful the search is now (throw AI into something that doesn't improve from it) I can't find it.

    DeepSeek-OCR and some other algorithms were compared.

    Anyway, the point of this is that there are cool improvements in computer science that use machine learning. As someone in CS I fucking hate the bloat on this industry that has made a generation of society hate computers and tech. Capitalism is a fucking plague.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 11 hours ago

    Yup, every technology can be abused and has negative effects. It is the job of social structures to make sure it is used in a way that's actually beneficial to the society at large.

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  • [–] 6 points 13 hours ago
    [–] 1 point 10 hours ago (2 children)

    Yes, but to be clear: the ideology of capitalism (along with the specific ideologies of the tech barons) is baked into the AI.

    Tools, by their very nature, orient their users toward a particular way of seeing the world that they would not otherwise adopt.

    That’s simply what happens when suddenly some outcomes are easier to achieve than others, and some methods of achieving those outcomes become easier than others too.

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 10 hours ago* (1 child)

    To be clear, the ideology of capitalism is absolutely not baked into AI, because development of this technology is not exclusive to capitalist states. China is a socialist state, and technology developed there is very much rooted in the material conditions of China. Similarly, there are open source projects working on AI tech which are not commercially driven. Your argument holds for AI tech built by corporations in the US.

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  • [–] -4 points 9 hours ago (1 child)

    China is not so different from the US, and even open source projects are using the same methods as the commercial projects.

    But I’m not too interested in evaluating individual projects here, since the original question was to what extent are the harms of AI driven by capitalism, and my answer is: deeply.

    I just wanted to remind people that artifacts have politics, so when we’re considering how an given kind of artifact would be different under a different political regime, we need to take seriously the fact that tools are not “just tools” and that the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 9 hours ago

    China is fundamentally different from the US in every respect imaginable, and you should spend a bit of time actually educating yourself on the subject instead of just stating your uninformed opinions. Here are a couple of books you can get started with to actually understand China:

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  • [–] -1 points 11 hours ago (1 child)