AI Is Dehumanization Technology

The counter-counter-argument is that the messy part of human interaction is necessary for social cohesion. I’ve already witnessed this erosion prior to LLMs in the rise of SMS over phone calls (personal) and automated menu systems for customer service (institutional).

It is sad to me that the skill required to navigate everyday life are being delegated to technology. Pretty soon it won’t matter what you think or feel about your neighbors because you will only ever know their tech-mediated facade.

> I can think of few things as intellectually miserable as the #help channels of the many open source projects on Discord, for example. Should I wager a guess, if these projects all integrated LLMs into their chatbots for just a few bucks and let them take on the brunt of the interactions, all participants on either side would be left with much more capacity to maintain and express empathy and care, or to nurture social connections. This extends beyond these noncommercial contexts of course, to stuff like customer service for example.

This would be a good counter if this were all that this technology is being used for.

I am not sure about your experience, but these types of channles seem to mostly have the issues of people being to bussy to repply, but when they do, there is often an interesting interaction & this is how users often become contributors to the project over time.

Sure, if you want to make sure you don't get any more contributors, you can try to replace that with a chatbot that will always reply immediately, but might just be wrong like 40% of the time, is not actually working on the project and will certainly not help in building sociel interactions between the project and its users.

In their bio:

“I’m not a tech worker…” they like to tinker with code and local Linux servers.

They have not seen how robotic the job has become and felt how much pressure there is to act like a copy-paste/git pull assembly line.

Counter-counter : there is nothing as intellectually miserable and antisocial as large corporations and institutions replacing Helpdesks with draconian automated systems.

Also, try to come up with a less esoteric example than Discord Help channels. In fact, this is the issue with most defenses of LLMs. The benefits are so niche, or minor, that the example itself shows why they are not worth the money being poured in

> [..] if these projects all integrated LLMs into their chatbots for just a few bucks [..]

No matter your position on the AI helpfulness, asking volunteers to not only spend time helping support a free software project but to also pony up money is just doubling down on the burden free software maintainers face as was highlighted in the recent libxml2 discussion.

You forgot one key thing: I don't want to talk to an AI.

This assumes the conclusion that AI would solve the lack of resources interaction issue. Unfortunately the data has been in on this for quite a long time (longer the LLM chatbots have been in existence) if you've worked in IT at a large carrier provider or for large call centers you know about this.

The simple fact of the matter is, there is a sharp gap between what an AI can do, and what a human does in any role involving communications, especially customer service.

Worse, there are psychological responses that naturally occur when you do any number of a few specific things that escalate conflict if you leave this to an AI. A qualified CSR person is taught how to de-escalate, diffuse, and calm the person who has been wound up to the point of irrationality. They are the front-line punching bags.

AI can't differentiate between what's acceptable, and what's not because the tokens it uses to identify these contexts have two contradictory states in the same underlying tokens. This goes to core classical computer science problems of halting, and other aspects.

The companies that were ahead of the curb for this invested a lot into this almost a decade and a half ago, and they found that in most cases these types of systems exponentiated the issues once they did finally get to a person, and they took it out on that person irrationally because they were the representative of the company that put them through what amounts to torture.

Some examples of behavior that causes these types of responses are when you are being manipulated in a way that you know is manipulation, it causes stress through perceptual blindspots causing an inconsistent internal mental state resulting in confusion. When that happens it causes a psychological reversal often of irrational anger. An infinite or byzantine loop designed to run people in circular hamster wheels is one such structure.

If you've ever been in a social interaction where you offer an olive branch and they seem to accept it, but at the last minute through it back in your face, you've experienced this. The smart individual doesn't ever do this because they know they will make an enemy for life who will always remember.

This is also how through communication, you can impose coercive cost on people, and companies have done this for years where anti-trust and FTC weren't being enforced. These triggers are inherent to a lesser or greater degree in all of us, every person alive.

The imposition of personal cost through this and other psychological blindspots is how torturous and vexatious processes are created.

Empathy and care are a two way street. It requires both entities to be acting in good faith through reflective appraisal. When this is distorted, it drives people crazy, and there is a critical saturation point where assumptions change because the environment has changed. If people show the indicators that they are acting in bad faith, others will treat them automatically as acting in bad faith. Eventually, the environment dictates that those people must prove they are acting in good faith (somehow) but proving this is quite hard. The environment switches from innocent benefit of the doubt to, guilty until proven innocent.

These erosions of the social contract while subtle, dictate social behavior. Can you imagine a world where something bad happens to you, and everyone just turns their backs, or prevents you from helping yourself?

Its the slipperly slope of society failing back to violence, few today commenting on things like this have actually read the material published by the greats on the social contract and don't know how society arose from the chaos of violence.

> I'm not saying those things aren't valuable, or that humans can't express social and spiritual value in those ways, but that human value doesn't only exist there.

This sounds sort of like a "God of the gaps" argument.

Yes, we could say that humanity is left to express itself in the margins between the things machines have automated away. As automation increases its capabilities, we just wander around looking for some untouched back-alley or dark corner the robots haven't swept through yet and do our dancing and poetry slams there until the machines arrive forcing us to again scurry away.

But at that point, who is the master, us or the machines?

It kind of makes sense if following a particular pattern is your purpose and life, and maybe your identity.

Due to how AI works its only a matter of time till its better at pretty much everything humans do beside “living”.

People tend to talk about any AI related topic comparing it to any industrial shift that happened in the past.

But its much Much MUCH bigger this time. Mostly because AI can make itself better, it will be better and it is better with every passing month.

Its a matter of years until it can completely replace humans in any form of intellectual work.

And those are not mine words but smartest ppl in the world, like AI grandfather.

We humans think we are special. That there wont be something better than us. But we are in the middle of the process of creating something better.

It will be better. Smarter. Not tired. Wont be sick. Wont ever complain.

And it IS ALREADY and WILL replace a lot of jobs and it will not create new ones purely due to efficiency gains and lack of brainpower in majority of ppl who will be laid off.

Not everyone is a noble prize winner. And soon we will need only such ppl to advance AI.

not entirely.

The risk raised in the article is that AI is being promoted beyond its scope (pattern recognition/creation) to legal/moral choice determination.

The techo-optimists will claim that legal/moral choices may be nothing more than the sum of various pattern-recognition mechanisms...

My take on the article is that this is missing a deep point: AI cannot have a human-centered morality/legality because it can never be human. It can only ever amplify the existing biases in its training environments.

By decoupling the gears of moral choice from human interaction, whether by choice or by inertia, humanity is being removed from the mechanisms that amplify moral and legal action (or, in some perverse cases, amplify the biases intentionally)

> And so, to give AI the power of complete dehumanization is to reduce humans to just pattern followers.

It would but I don't think that's what they're saying. The agent of dehumanization isn't the technology, but the selection of what the technology is applied to. Or like the quip "we made an AI that creates, freeing up more time for you to work."

Wherever human value, however you define that, exists or is created by people, what does it look like to apply this technology such that human value increases? Does that look like how we're applying it? The article seems to me to be much more focused on how this is actually being used right now rather than how it could be.

Interesting point of view, didn't know about Jevon's paradox before. To me, the outcome still depends on whether AI can get superhuman [1] (and beyond) at some point. If it can, then, well, we will likely indeed see that suitable-for-human areas of the intellectual labor are shrinking. If it cannot, then it becomes an even more philosophical question similar to the agnosticism beliefs. Is the universe completely knowable? Because if it's not, then we might as well have an infinite more hard problems, and AI just rises a bar for what we can achieve by paring a human with AI compared to just human alone.

[1] I know it's a bit hard to define, but I'd vaguely say that it's significantly better in the majority of intelligence areas than the vast majority of the population. Also it should be scalable. If we can make it slightly better than human by burning the entire Earth's energy, then it doesn't make much sense.

Prioritize goals over the process and what AIs can do doesn't matter.

Want to make a movie? The goal should be getting the movie out, seen by people and reviewed.

Whether it's people captured by film, animations in Blender or AI slop, what matters is the outcome. Is it good? Do people like it?

I do the infrastructure at a department of my Uni as sort of a side-gig. I would have never had the time to learn Ansible, borg, FreeIPA, wireguard, and everything else I have configured now and would have probably resorted to a bunch of messy shell scripts that don't work half the time like the people before me.

But everything I was able to set up I was able to set up in days, because of AI.

Sure, it's really satisfying because I also have a deep understanding of the fundamentals, and I can debug problems when AI fails, and then I ask it "how does this work" as a faster Google/wiki.

I've tried windsurf but given up because the AI does something that doesn't work and I can give it the prompts to find a solution (+ think for myself) much faster than it can figure out itself (and probably at the cost of a lot less tokens).

But the fact that I enjoy the process doesn't matter. And the moment I can click a button and make a webapp, I have so many ideas in my drawer for how I could improve the network at Uni.

I think the problem people have is that they work corporate jobs where they have no freedom to choose their own outcomes so they are basically just doing homework all their life. And AI can do homework better than them.

What would be a better explanation today?

Anyone who thinks that AI is bad for "empathy and care" should be forced to work for a year in a tech support call center, first line.

There are some jobs that humans really shouldn't be doing. And now, we're at the point where we can start offloading that to machines.

I believe that our socializing is the absolute most fundamentally human aspect of us as a species.

If you cut off a bird's wings, it can't bird in any real meaningful sense. If you cut off humans from others, I don't think we can really be human either.

To be fair, people only need guns to protect themselves because guns literally are murder tech.

The fundamental advantage of our society as designed is that it weaponizes narcissism, and makes narcissists do useful stuff for society.

Don't care about competition? Find a place where rent prices are reasonable and you'll find it's actually surprisingly easy to earn a living.

Oh, but you want the fancy stuff, don't you?

Technology that ultimately breaks power balance in a society is asking for fascism to come. Without strong and working checks and balances the doom scenario is inevitable. Yet, we are witnessing the destruction of our previous, weaker checks and balances. This will only accelerate us to the dead end.