Sam Altman is back as CEO of OpenAI after inking a deal to return to the company following immense pressure from employees and investors on the board that ousted him less than a week ago.
While everyone was jerking themselves raw about this stuff a year ago, Tycho at Penny Arcade (yeah, remember them?) nailed it and it’s been sitting in my head ever since:
Ultimately, the technology is not my concern. It is that there’s another Industrial Revolution happening, right now, you can play with it like a toy, and it will be very surprising to me if it results in a greater bargaining position for the worker. That’s just not how it goes.
Some portion of the conversation always has the sting of betrayal in it. But you like computer stuff! Yeah, I like computer stuff. Except we aren’t talking about computer stuff. We’re talking about people stuff. People are messy. I work with a lot of creative people, and I have also had the pleasure - firmly installed in quotes - of working with the kind of people who call those people “creatives.” We were at a meeting once where the person who will be advocating and using these technologies in your organization told us they hated creatives to our face. These technologies will displace workers and slash pay. That’s… I mean, that’s it.
From the start of this AI boom, I’ve been saying, again and again, that regardless of the technology itself, the truly despicable thing about this are the people. Take all your idealistic futurist nonsense and “passion” for pushing the limits of technology and blow it out your ass, because this technology has one primary use case that was obvious from the word go, and every single one of these fuckers knew what that was when they started making it. For years they have worked to make a tool for corporations to steal the work from the working class, weaponize it against them, and enrich themselves in the process. They can all get fucked.
The only way to slow down this corporatization of the technology isn’t to completely shun it and demonize it. That just plays right into their hands with an “us vs them” narrative.
No, you have to push for open-sourcing the tech as hard as you can. The few open-source tools that have come out of this AI boom has the large corporations running scared that they aren’t going to be able to make money out of those sectors.
While everyone was jerking themselves raw about this stuff a year ago, Tycho at Penny Arcade (yeah, remember them?) nailed it and it’s been sitting in my head ever since:
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/12/26/sockrates
From the start of this AI boom, I’ve been saying, again and again, that regardless of the technology itself, the truly despicable thing about this are the people. Take all your idealistic futurist nonsense and “passion” for pushing the limits of technology and blow it out your ass, because this technology has one primary use case that was obvious from the word go, and every single one of these fuckers knew what that was when they started making it. For years they have worked to make a tool for corporations to steal the work from the working class, weaponize it against them, and enrich themselves in the process. They can all get fucked.
The only way to slow down this corporatization of the technology isn’t to completely shun it and demonize it. That just plays right into their hands with an “us vs them” narrative.
No, you have to push for open-sourcing the tech as hard as you can. The few open-source tools that have come out of this AI boom has the large corporations running scared that they aren’t going to be able to make money out of those sectors.