• 0 Posts
  • 158 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
Cake day: February 26th, 2026
  • Cris_Citrus@piefed.ziptoTechnology@lemmy.world•‘More harmful than helpful’: young people sour on AIEnglish
    191·
    6 hours ago

    I feel like this is a headline that does a good job of capturing the heart of the issue.

    I’ve tried to evaluate how useful ai is so I can at least get a sense for how much harm it will do, as its WAY more potentially harmful if its useful enough to actually seen any organic adoption. And my experience has been that it can be incredibly helpful, particular for finding things online that are out there somewhere but that search engines are just useful for finding or consolidating into one place (it feels like a major element of that is just how ass search engines are. Part of me feels like google is comfortable allowing their traditional search experience to languish because it makes ai more necessary)

    But the heart of the problem is that those upsides for users feel largely incidental to the way companies are forcing adoption down everyone’s throats, and the massive harms it caries are all feel like fairly structural elements of why anyone cares about the technology as a product to sell, or elements of how the technology works.

    The intellectual property theft and labor exploitation, environmental harms, skyrocketing utility and noise pollution for people near data centers, harm to societies ability to think critically, stochastic parrot tendency to spread disinformation or misunderstanding, and supercharged surveillance capitalism are all things that are fairly intrinsic. Some of them can be avoided with a local model (which I would guess may make the model way worse functionally, but at some point I need to try options in that space so I understand where things are at)

    At the end of the day, the reason we’re burning ludicrous amounts of money (and electricity) to prop up this technologies adoption before its even remotely monetizable is NECCISARILY because it has the potential to rob people of their employment by stealing labor other people have done to create a commercial product. Thats the only aspect of it that makes it a worthwhile investment for companies. So companies will move heaven and earth to be the ones who hold the most competitive version, and force people to become dependent on this tech so that it is normalized to the point we can’t criticize it and extricate it from our society once its been successfully woven in.

    So its fun to laugh when its really dumb and its lack of actual understanding under-the-hood is on full display, the reality is that sentiment drastically underrepresents the amount of harm that it might do to society. Its not that its never helpful, its that the reason its available to us is for the explicit purpose of enabling corporations to do harm to our world for profit

    And given the way it impacts user’s thinking, its also harmful on the individual scale. Frankly I can tell its bad for my head, and so I do my best to limit use. But the fact that sometimes its the most effective way to find certain things makes it so easy to come back to, and so easy to just keep asking questions and getting easy polished answers. It feels slightly addicting in nature.

    Thats the heart of it. Its more harmful than helpful.

  • Cris_Citrus@piefed.ziptopolitics @lemmy.world•Southern California mayor resigns, will plead guilty to acting as agent for Chinese government | CNNEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    I don’t say this to try and be a dick, I think its important to be able to have discussions around these topics, but a party’s platform document really is not important to me. Their voting record is. Their actions are. And the more I learn about politics the more their voting record and actions the last 10-20 years frustrate me.

    I will 1000% give credit it to Lina Khan. She was a godsend and gave me hope that maybe the american political apparatus could actually be operated in good faith by someone who understands what it means to be a civil servant.

    When we did last had a senate majority under Obama he failed to pass a more impactful healthcare reform bill. And we got a version that he said was essentially just Mitt Romney’s healthcare bill. I have personally benefited from obamacare. And, we had the opportunity to pass something much more meaningful. And we just didnt.

    Democratic foreign policy is horrifying. One of my closest friends is part of an ethnic and religious minority group that was subjected to ethnic cleansing after Obama backed a militant group controlling Egypt because it was momentarily convenient to our interests. If I remember right the statistics she told me were that the population dropped from something like 15% to 5% in a matter of a few years. Because of it she went into intelligence research (as an academic, not working for the government) and now lives with the imagery of people (often her people) being executed burned into her head because she specialized in propaganda and recruitment materials made by radical Islamic terror groups, and lots of radical Islamic terrorist groups love using video of executions and beheadings as recruitment material. She left the field because she can’t do it anymore.

    We outright refused to engage with the fact that Israel is intentionally killing an entire civilian population as an issue lots of people care about last election. We still aren’t even all on the same page about it.

    It feels like they have done nothing but present themselves as progressive without actually doing any of the progressive shit that would fix people’s problems. Every time we’ve gotten a genuinely progressive candidate the party’s response has been to degrade them and try to undercut their efforts.

    And frankly, I think we could have had a much stronger hold of the legislature if we actually put forward candidates that folks believed cared about their issues on any kind of regular basis, instead of just people taking lots of corporate campaign funding and posturing about how much we care about minorities without putting forward policies that would help said minorities in any meaningful way

    There are probably meaningful accomplishments that the democratic party has accomplished that I’m blind or ignorant to, and you’re welcome to inform me of them. I’d like to have a more well rounded perspective. And at the same time, I don’t think its unreasonable of me to be angry with them. They have taken a frankly ungodly amount of corporate money. The DNC’s document outlining what went wrong last election was an actual joke, that blamed their loss on voters.

    Sorry for the ridiculously long reply. A lot of my thoughts on this subject are still ill-formed and inconcrete enough to be difficult to communicate concisely.

  • Cris_Citrus@piefed.ziptopolitics @lemmy.world•Southern California mayor resigns, will plead guilty to acting as agent for Chinese government | CNNEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    In all fairness “kinda slow to get with the times” is at least a slight underrepresentation of how culpable democrats are for the current political moment 😅

    They are not the same. And they are also clearly almost exclusively accountable to their donors, and for a very hot minute now have done nothing to meaningfully adress the countries class-based dysfunction (that disproportionately impacts minorities) while championing minorities in almost exclusively superficial ways that have laid the groundwork for the current cataclysmic anti-inclusionary social movement thats feeding our rapid decent into neo-fascism.

    Slow to get with the times is more than just being charitable. They kinda suck. They are not a monolith, no group is, but there is good reason why people call them controlled opposition. I’d like for people to be wrong about that and for them to fix their shit. Because fixing the Democratic party still feels easier than uprooting the deeply entrenched two party system, and there are candidates that make me hopeful… But I’m not holding my breath :/