i've heard a few times that "waymos will make streets safer" so i went and looked up sf's traffic fatality statistics and they're pretty much identical
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@EndlessMason @tef "The origin point for nearly all of those 'you work harder than a medieval peasant' memes and articles is Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1993). The argument has been debunked quite a few times…" — https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/
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we're destroying the open web
we're burning down the closest thing i've ever seen in my life to the library of alexandria
and people are explaining to me how warm it keeps their hands, and maybe, in the future, the ashes will contain the secrets of the universe
@tef I think we are more likely to be destroyed by a Vogon construction crew.
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@vfig @EndlessMason the point i was making in the post is that timekeeping, albeit good, has also been used as a means of control, and i am using the meme of a medieval peasant to satirise the belief that technology will save us
@tef @vfig @EndlessMason Certainly work can be thought of as a pleasure or a burden to some degree. Intensive production whether manual or automated accelerates #alienation and #conflict Overproduction is not sustainable and idleness does not produce creativity. All, is not for the best if people don’t do their best for each other. If just for a very few technology serves and protects those who abuse and destroy capital. Work, is for the worst! The good is for the many, the worst is for the few.
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the worst bit? i still like machine learning, i still think stochastic approaches can have benefits
but if i wrote software that pushed vulnerable teenagers to suicide, or enabled people to sexually harass strangers with pornographic forgeries
i would take a step back from the keyboard and ask my good buddy hans, "are we the baddies"
or at least, i hope i'd ask those hard questions
@tef I listened to an excellent podcast yesterday on 'Neuroprivacy' - a brilliant example of cooperation between ethical/legal and technical expertise working very hard to make new neurotechnologies a net positive by considering and guarding against social harms whilst the technology is still developing.
From the @eff podcast:
https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/1c515ea8-cb6d-4f72-8d17-bc9b7a566869/episodes/3955c653-7346-44d2-82e2-0238931bcfd9/audio/6ce9ce71-a66a-46ba-9472-890fadb7ff08/default_tc.mp3 -
@EndlessMason @tef "The origin point for nearly all of those 'you work harder than a medieval peasant' memes and articles is Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1993). The argument has been debunked quite a few times…" — https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/
@vfig @EndlessMason @tef It does feed into a weird revanchism that is popular on both the right and the left, though.
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i don't want to be all "you are not immune to propaganda" but a lot of these arguments prey on optimism and hope that technology can lift people up
but when you start to examine the rhetoric, like "what if <imaginary circumstance where the tools are useful>"
or "bad thing? that's a lack of training and dicipline"
it just feels like gun logic in a new outfit
@tef This comparison is really clarifying for me, because I'm coming up against a lot of "what if"s where blind people like me are used to justify AI because we benefit from it so much. Not all of which is imaginary but it's really exaggerated and context-specific.
And the reaction to any problem I mention is "oh you/other blind people just need to learn about it, get used to it, skill issue." No! It is not just a skill issue.
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similarly, i've heard a few times that "we might cure cancer", and sure enough some brute force computation can fold proteins fast
but in practice it is more likely these tools will be used to fabricate experimental results, push dietary supplements and other snakeoil cures
and more coarsely, ai isn't pouring funding into the CDC, ai isn't reversing the destruction of the FDA, and is more than likely going to be used to justify those things
@tef
The medical industry doesn't even *want* to cure cancer. Plenty of researchers do of course, but we have to contend with the fact that the people who *fund* research have literally said out loud that they don't want to cure cancer because it would interfere with their profits. -
the simple answer is that none of the good futures we imagine happen by accident. and none of the people with power can be trusted to make better things happen
and now i'm asking myself if medieval peasants looked at the clock in the bell tower and told each other
"in the future, we'll have a weekend off, as they'll be able to see how long and hard we've worked"
@tef maybe, and I want to stress it's just an idea of mine, of which I'm not sure, they are killing the open web to give us AI also in order to control us more. Let me explain: you can't easily run an "AI" on you own pc unless you can spend a lot in hardware (and electricity of course). So you need to rely on their data centers , and so no more private stuff in your pc... everything flows in their hands. The open web is maybe more freedom than they are willing to allow us ? Should this idea be true then this requires us to fight back, unless we want to give up our freedom. Which I don't personally.
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similarly, i've heard a few times that "we might cure cancer", and sure enough some brute force computation can fold proteins fast
but in practice it is more likely these tools will be used to fabricate experimental results, push dietary supplements and other snakeoil cures
and more coarsely, ai isn't pouring funding into the CDC, ai isn't reversing the destruction of the FDA, and is more than likely going to be used to justify those things
We are already super close to curing cancer and LLMs had nothing to do with it. LLMs had nothing to do with protein folding either; that was a related but different tech. All of the elision going on merging LLMs and other distinct and revolutionary ML applications is purposeful and mendacious.
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similarly, i've heard a few times that "we might cure cancer", and sure enough some brute force computation can fold proteins fast
but in practice it is more likely these tools will be used to fabricate experimental results, push dietary supplements and other snakeoil cures
and more coarsely, ai isn't pouring funding into the CDC, ai isn't reversing the destruction of the FDA, and is more than likely going to be used to justify those things
@tef it's kind of secondary to your main point in this thread, but I think it's generally a mistake to conflate the "ML" definition of AI with the "everything's an LLM now" one
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Hi @gisgeek @tef,
#platforms. And they owe a lot to #sunsetting #Google #Reader. -
@EndlessMason @tef "The origin point for nearly all of those 'you work harder than a medieval peasant' memes and articles is Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1993). The argument has been debunked quite a few times…" — https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/
@vfig blog seems sus, makes this claim pretty early "pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have ever lived," when like farming hasn't been around for the majority of time humans have been around. Also later they make some huge assumptions that most people get weekends & 8 hour days & that's meeting what they call both sustainability and respectability needs.. and like I don't think a lot of people were like "oh yeah I can't wait to be a Roman peasant, the quality of life will be great, conquer me please" so using that as a placeholder for even other people of the era is not great.
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i've heard a few times that "waymos will make streets safer" so i went and looked up sf's traffic fatality statistics and they're pretty much identical
i mean, there is a slight increase over the last two years but there's sufficient variance to avoid suggesting a trend
as i understand it, waymos tend to take people off busses and other forms of transit, rather than out of their own cars
so i'm doubtful it will lower deaths on the road, just the number of busses
@tef the booster arguments all boil down to "ah see for the real benefits to manifest, we need to eliminate all other forms of transit and subsidize three of the least trustworthy tech companies on the planet, *then* we'll have a transit utopia. in select cities. where it doesn't snow. no pets. etc"
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@tef the booster arguments all boil down to "ah see for the real benefits to manifest, we need to eliminate all other forms of transit and subsidize three of the least trustworthy tech companies on the planet, *then* we'll have a transit utopia. in select cities. where it doesn't snow. no pets. etc"
@tef "please believe our extremely cooked stats"
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it feels like a lot of the arguments i hear boil down to "what if none of the bad things were happening right now, and instead, good things happened instead"
and sure, if that were true, things would be good
but, well, all of the bad things are happening already and none of the good things are any closer to appearing
and i'm just not confident "wait and see if everything reverses course" is a sensible way to evaluate the impact of new technologies
@tef This is particularly important because the people controlling the technology have shown no interest in achieving those good things. Good things rarely happen by change. So putting the emphasis on things that may magically appear is really just wishful thinking or a rethorical device to tell you are blocking some possible progress ignoring the bad already happening.
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@tef The Waymo vehicles mimic human drivers too well: loitering and blocking crosswalks for right on red and tailgating cyclists on the road. Folks will say “gotcha; they’re safe,” but this misses a bigger intangible: these vehicles are a fucking nuisance and clog the road. Being safer than a human while being more plentiful and annoying is not a significant improvement.
@matt @tef Maybe Waymos mimic human drivers because they fall back to remote human drivers when the algorithm fails: https://www.newsweek.com/waymo-reveals-remote-workers-in-philippines-help-guide-its-driverless-cars-11478439
Does the driver have a valid license in your jurisdiction? Should they? If they blow past a stopped school bus at full speed, who gets cited? https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/ntsb-investigates-additional-incident-between-waymo-austin-isd/
Start peeling back the PR from any of this tech and it's all casual lawbreaking, denial of consent, and putting the public at risk with no recourse.
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we're destroying the open web
we're burning down the closest thing i've ever seen in my life to the library of alexandria
and people are explaining to me how warm it keeps their hands, and maybe, in the future, the ashes will contain the secrets of the universe
@tef in pricipal, i agree with you, but in the spirit of “the purpose of a system is what is does”, the so-called "open web" is the very thing that has created so many of these harms.
surveillance capitalism, pervasive ad-tech, concentration of wealth & power in the hands of billionaire tech bros, abusive social media algorithms, etc.
i misgivings that preserving the "open web" we have is an unmitigated good.
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@tef This comparison is really clarifying for me, because I'm coming up against a lot of "what if"s where blind people like me are used to justify AI because we benefit from it so much. Not all of which is imaginary but it's really exaggerated and context-specific.
And the reaction to any problem I mention is "oh you/other blind people just need to learn about it, get used to it, skill issue." No! It is not just a skill issue.
@bright_helpings @tef basically 99.975% of the "it's good for people with disabilities" arguments we've seen have come from white abled people doing, effectively, white-saviorism with a technocratic lens, tbqh
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@vfig blog seems sus, makes this claim pretty early "pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have ever lived," when like farming hasn't been around for the majority of time humans have been around. Also later they make some huge assumptions that most people get weekends & 8 hour days & that's meeting what they call both sustainability and respectability needs.. and like I don't think a lot of people were like "oh yeah I can't wait to be a Roman peasant, the quality of life will be great, conquer me please" so using that as a placeholder for even other people of the era is not great.
Yeah I ran those articles past a friend who lived in a traditional village in Cameroon for a bit and he said that Bret is really overclaiming the universality there.
Devereaux knows his shit about the details of Roman economics and military organization, I have been reading his blog for years, but yeah I'm with you on that criticism.
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similarly, i've heard a few times that "we might cure cancer", and sure enough some brute force computation can fold proteins fast
but in practice it is more likely these tools will be used to fabricate experimental results, push dietary supplements and other snakeoil cures
and more coarsely, ai isn't pouring funding into the CDC, ai isn't reversing the destruction of the FDA, and is more than likely going to be used to justify those things
@tef, I can never remember what “CDC” is, other than being something foreign.
So I just think of it as the Cult of the Dead Cow, and now you do too.
