The ~23-minute video below isn't that long, but it packs a lot of information. The interviewer is insufferable, but Meredith Whittaker (president of Signal) is a force of nature, and Frances Haugen is very good, as well. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykfABSBeAVo" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ykfABSBeAVo" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Washington Post Live" caption="The Futurist Summit: Lessons of the Last Decade"> At <b>08:00</b>, Whittaker talks about the recent strikes in Hollywood, <bq>[...r]egulating AI, just non-traditionally. They did the classic move---withholding their labor---and they got terms that are actually staunching the bleeding of the use by the studios and big tech to place AI within their labor process that will degrade their labor, that will degrade artistic output, and will have a precedent-setting move of stopping the real harms, right now. I would look to the Writer's Guild of America, I would look to SAG, I would look to your driver's unions that are contesting the sort-of automated precarity of systems like Uber and Lyft, <b>I would look to sort-of movements from below that are actually tackling the harms now, and not simply sitting around taking selfies with Elon Musk and calling it a regulatory agenda.</b></bq> Frances Haugen is also very, very good. At <b>09:50</b>, she says, <bq>There is a skills escalator. You know, you come out of college, you come out of high school, and you have relatively low-complexity jobs. I had lunch with a friend a couple of days ago, and she'd been playing around with generative AI. And she's like, 'I'm never gonna hire a junior copywriter again! It's like amazing!' and I looked at her and I said 'Amazing for <i>you</i>.' Right? <b>In a world where you're a junior [list of jobs] ... the jobs that allow you to become a more sophisticated contributor---they're about to disappear.</b></bq> The dipshit interviewer responds with <iq>clearly, yes, there is going to be huge impact on labor.</iq> No. Jesus, lady. Could you be any more indoctrinated? Can't you hear what Haugen is saying? Even if she were wrong, you should still, as the interviewer, engage her argument, rather than blowing right through to your predefined agenda. No wonder Whittaker keeps rolling her eyes. Do your job. Actually, you know what? At least she shut up and let Haugen speak her piece. What Haugen is pointing out is that the already pitiful "training program" that the U.S. has is going to become even worse---it will be utterly broken. Businesses only ever put up with having less-skilled employees around because they were investing in them to become more-skilled employees. If AI replaces less-skilled employees, there will no longer be more-skilled employees either---because where will they come from? The U.S. already lacks a training programs for so-called blue-collar jobs. Now it's going to wipe out its ad-hoc training programs for white-collar jobs. At least places like Switzerland still have apprenticeship programs. We'll see how long that lasts, though, as every so-called advanced country chases the U.S. down the drain. Whittaker is devastatingly insightful. She draws the distinction between an actually useful technology and the <iq>bombast</iq> surrounding it, delineating that the problem is with the hyper-capitalist companies that own and drive the technology---<iq>it's the definition of metastatis</iq>---rather than with the technology itself. At <b>22:40</b>. she says, <bq>Just to clarify: 'hype' doesn't mean it doesn't do some things. Hype means that an entire ecology of narrative bombast has been predicated on ... <b>yeah, it can help you write an e-mail. If that's a problem you want to solve with 20 billion GPUs, you can do it. But is that a world-changing problem to solve?</b> And what is the actual material basis for what I would call these bombastic claims? [...] Let's get back down to reality and the actual the thing it [GPT] does before we make all of these predications based on that.</bq> The point of the bombast is to increase stock price in the short-term. There is literally no other goal anymore. Maybe there never was. <img src="{att_link}alwayshasbeenforai.jpeg" href="{att_link}alwayshasbeenforai.jpeg" align="none" caption="AI is going to ruin everything. No. Capitalism ruins everything." scale="75%"> The tools are useful, but the companies that own them are willing to lie about them in order to make them seem more useful to everyone. They sell an <i>Eierlegende Wollmilchsau</i> and the same fools lap it all up, just like they do every time. It's the opposite with vaccines. We've not had a single technology that has helped save more lives in the history of mankind. And yet, vaccines have never had a worse reputation than they do now. People don't trust them. They don't think they work. It's a clusterfuck. And that has a lot to do with the way the hyper-capitalist system has benefitted from vaccines. Instead of imagining that we could get inexpensive, reliable vaccines for everyone, we accept that they will always become more expensive as the companies that control them tighten the noose. We accept that we never will wrest control of vaccines from these companies, so we write them off instead! The most effective medicine ever---and we choose to ignore them rather than to imagine controlling them ourselves. It really is true that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The discussion on <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38108873" source="Hacker News">Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario</a> also has several good comments about AI and capitalism.