• PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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    5 days ago

    Of those, only the internet was turned loose on an unsuspecting public, and they had decades of the faucet slowly being opened, to prepare.

    Can you imagine if after WW2, Werner Von Braun came to the USA and then just like… Gave every man woman and child a rocket, with no training? Good and evil wouldn’t even come into, it’d be chaos and destruction.

    Imagine if every household got a nuclear reactor to power it, but none of the people in the household got any training in how to care for it.

    It’s not a matter of good and evil, it’s a matter of harm.

    • Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.socialOP
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      5 days ago

      The Internet kind of was turned lose on an unsuspecting public. Social media has and still is causing a lot of harm.

      Did you really compare every household having a nuclear reactor with people having access to AI?

      How’s is that even remotely a fair comparison.

      To me the Internet being released on people and AI being released on people is more of a fair comparison.

      Both can do lots of harm and good, both will probably cost a lot of people their jobs etc.

      • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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        4 days ago

        You know that the public got trickle-fed the internet for decades before it was ubiquitous in everyone house, and then another decade before it was ubiquitous in everyone’s pocket. People had literal decades to learn how to protect themselves and for the job market to adjust. During that time, there was lots of research and information on how to protect yourself, and although regulation mostly failed to do anything, the learning material was adapted for all ages and was promoted.

        Meanwhile LLMs are at least as impactful as the internet, and were released to the public almost without notice. Research on it’s affects is being done now that it’s already too late, and the public doesn’t have any tools to protect itself. What meager material in appropriate use exist hasn’t been well researched not adapted to all ages, when it isn’t being presented as “the insane thoughts of doomer Luddites, not to be taken seriously” by the AI supporters.

        The point is that people are being handed this catastrophically dangerous tool, without any training or even research into what the training should be. And we expect everything to be fine just because the tool is easy to use and convenient?

        These companies are being allowed to bulldoze not just the economy, and the mental resilience of entire generations, for the sake of a bit of shareholder profit.