It’s less of a bias of the programmer and moreso a bias of data, particularly when a factor like gender or ethnicity correlates with something without direct causation, such as crime rates correlating with ethnicity largely because of immigrants being poorer on average, and economic standing being a major correlating factor. If your dataset doesn’t include that, any AI will just see “oh, people in group x are way more likely to commit crimes”. This can be prevented but it’s generally more of a risk of overlooking something than intentional data manipulation (not that that isn’t possible).
Yes that’s fair. I guess my comment wasn’t a direct response to yours other than it made me think this desire that all the difficult issues (like bias) just disappear if you remove all the humans from the process* is flawed and any anticapitalist society should really start from that understanding. One that understands that conflict will emerge and pro-social “convivial” systems and structures need to emerge to handle them.
*You are right to point out that the “AI” we are talking about is statistical models built from humans that includes bias where as the hype is that we have Data from Star Trek and therefore these systems hide the human inputs but don’t remove them.
The Aral Sea is essentially gone and it was killed by poor Soviet planning. Capitalism was not the driving factor rather ignorance was and ignorance is held equally by all sides.
Capitalism isn’t the only thing driving environmental collapse. It’s industrialization
Industrialization to make money is encouraged by capitalism. Why do you think big oil was lying about global warming? It’s not a few bad apples it is a systemic drive to make more money even if it hurts people or the planet.
Industrialization has been done by every nation that is capable of doing it regardless of their economic system or philosophy.
Thinking this is a capitalist issue ignores the Marxist states that have horrible records on the environment eg China and the USSR. It’s industrialization that is the issue.
There’s a difference between industrialization for people and trade versus industrialization for money and power. One helps everyone, The other only helps capitalists.
I wouldn’t necessarily look at China and USSR and say they are a good alternative. I prefer a more democratic socialism. My problem with capitalism is specifically the lack of choice of the people. We spend 8 out of 12 hours on average working for a company that we don’t get a vote in.
There’s a difference between industrialization for people and trade versus industrialization for money and power.
Not as far as the environment is concerned and frankly many will tell you running water and electricity are huge advantages regardless of how you get them.
What? Yes, the environment can tell because there would be less pollution. The motivations are different. Do you think worker controlled industries would use the same tactics to over produce and polute the areas the workers live in? No one would benefit from that.
I’m not saying we would reach zero pollution but there would be a lot less pollution.
I have no problem with running water and electricity, most reasonable socialist would agree.
Central planners in the Soviet Union didn’t even have computers and they lacked the level of scientific understanding we have today of the environment, of our resources, and of the limits to growth. We’ve all heard about Mao killing the sparrows in China.
This isn’t a reason to never try central planning again.
They absolutely had computers, I have no idea why you would think the second largest economy that produced tremendous technological advances in its time did not have computers.You know Tetris was created by a Soviet programmer, right?
Planned economies are doomed at this point gecause we aren’t able to predict distasters and the planned economy cannot respond in an efficient manner when things go wrong. Humans aren’t smart enough and we do not have artificial intelligence capable of doing so.
How old are you? Did you go through COVID? Capitalism doesn’t do disasters well at all. Every cost is minimized. So emergency supplies go unmaintained. If it doesn’t help the stock price annually it doesn’t get done.
50, yes and most nations did poorly the reason for America’s failures have to do with American healthcare as most market economies handled it much better than the planned ones did. China did much worse but that rarely made China’s news.
Im well aware of what a planned economy is as I have taken economics courses. Historically speaking planned economies have performed extremely poorly because humans are bad at predicting the future. Until circumstances change to the point where we can reliably predict the future planned economies will always perform poorly compared to market based ones.
Non market economies are never going to work, because you’ll be essentially creating one giant monopoly and leaving people without the possibility of doing things differently
What happens when you don’t like the product the state offers?
What if you discover a way of doing things more efficiently?
What about independent artists and creators?
And that’s not getting into how unpredictable people are, products that have been predicted to fail end up becoming very successful, and the opposite also happens
They had computers towards the end, of course, but they were extremely primitive. The kinds of disaster predictions you can do on a machine built to run Tetris are nothing compared to what can be done with today’s technology.
Also, it’s not like markets can actually deal with disasters. Without at least some central planning disaster response and relief is impossible.
Planning for relief disaster and a planned economy are incredibly different things. Planned economies do not handle disasters well at all as they didn’t prepare for that disaster in advance (typically because how can you plan for the one in a hundred million chance that x would happen).
We largely have stuck with market based economies because they currently are much more responsive to changes.
While computers have gotten more powerful there is zero evidence to support that we have gotten to the point where they could run a planned economy in any fashion.
We largely have stuck with market based economies because they currently are much more responsive to changes.
No, we still have market based economies because they make a few people very very rich.
We needed markets before computers and instant mass communication. Things are different now
While computers have gotten more powerful there is zero evidence to support that we have gotten to the point where they could run a planned economy in any fashion.
What about the fact that market-based responses to COVID were universally worse than centrally planned responses?
They don’t disappear if capitalism disappears. I agree with you capitalism needs to end in order to deal with them but there are hard issues that we have to deal with even with capitalism gone.
Even if the causes ceased we would still be left with residual emissions and degraded natural systems to try and deal with and a lower EROI society to do it.
They’re “hard issues” because we don’t have a centrally planned economy, we have to rely on the market to provide solutions.
Through a combination of marshaling the forces of production to build a renewable infrastructure and strict fossil fuel rationing during the build-up phase I think we could get the crisis under control within 5 years.
They’re “hard issues” because we don’t have a centrally planned economy, we have to rely on the market to provide solutions
As humans are very bad a predicting the future, centrally planned economies come with so many added problems that market based solutions are frequently more realistic.
What happens when you don’t like the product that the state is offering?
Petition the central planners to offer something else. Central planning can still be democratic.
What about independent artists and creators?
Well without the need to sell their art they could create whatever they want without fear of it being unmarketable. An artist could just create without needing to sell it to anyone.
Figuring out what things people will like is next to impossible.
Businesses do this all the time! They do market research to find out what people want, they monitor current events and customer demands and social media. There’s no reason a central planner can’t do the same.
Not going to work unless the government has somehow unlimited resources. Otherwise why would they spend money and resources on something they don’t know how popular would it be?
What reward do those independent creators receive in exchange of doing their art? Do they just work for free?
And sometimes they succeed and other times they don’t. In a planned economy you’d essentially be stuck with whatever the government monopoly has decided to manufacture and you won’t have any other choice.
Are you really this poorly educated in economics that you do not get that for profit businesses and nation states function under completely different realities?
They’re trying to strip the wiring from the walls. They’re not even running like a business, they’re running it like VC.
Let’s not pretend they’re trying to centrally plan anything. The doggy department hates central planning. They just tell ChatGPT to come up with things to cut
This is a strawman. Centrally planned does not mean immutable, and markets are no more able to predict the future than anyone else. What it does allow is the disregard of the only quantity markets are capable of maximizing, profit.
This is not a strawman. Im not constructing a false point to argue against while ignoring their claims. Im in fact discussing them directly.
Markets don’t need to predict the future as the market responds naturally more quickly than central planning can adjust for errors or unexpected aspects of the plan. one of the major points of failure for central planned economies is the lack of responsiveness. A centally planned economy would not avoid environmental catastrophe as the Soviets were responsible for several with profit motives.
Markets respond only to profit changes, and even then they are far from perfect. It’s simply an economist fiction that they are uniquely good at adaptation, one proof being the utter failure of markets to handle the global catastrophe climate change is going to cause.
Markets respond to the needs of the market. Historically speaking this works much faster in market based economies than centrally planned economies because market economies don’t require prestidigitation to function correctly.
No one claims market economies are perfect just that they function better than planned ones at our current technological levels.
Central planned economies have resulted in devastated ecology as well. Industrialized economies are the real cause not the economy running them.
Some of the issues stem from material and energy limitations regardless of human organisation structures. Fossil Fuels are stored sunlight over a long period of time that means that burning them has a high yield and that’s given us a very high EROI society (one where there’s an abundance of energy for purposes that aren’t basic functioning).
I recommend reading The Collapse of Complex Societies by Tainter who discussing the energy limitations of society. Its before our understanding of energy limitations of technology and he’s by no means a leftist but it is still a good introductory text to it.
I’ve read Limits to Growth. I understand there are physical limits and that we can’t just grow our way through this crisis. Industrial civilization can not continue as it is.
But central planning would allow for us to transition to a lower energy society.
I agree but there’s a lot of detail about what activities a lower energy society precludes and my point is that energy intensive “AI” (mostly thinking about LLMs rather than targets applications of ML) probably aren’t part of it.
Deepseek showed that these chatbots can be run much more cheaply than they have been and it isn’t really necessary to build giga warehouses of servers. It might be possible to run them on even tighter hardware specifications too.
Of course, chatbots aren’t AI and the fact that they’re trying to use them as AI isn’t going to work out anyway lol
Yes its clear that the path of throwing more and more resource at LLMS to improve quality has been a lazy growth focused approach that we could do better if we actually try a design focussed approach.
For me though it comes back to the fact we are facing a polycrisis and most of our resource should be focused on looking for solutions to that and I’m not sure what problem* this technology solves yet alone what problem relating to the polycrisis.
*I realise what they are designed to solve is a capitalist problem. How can we avoid paying staff for service and creative type jobs to increase profit.
Let’s say its true that doing that would stop the problem getting worse (e.g. no more emissions after 5 years)*.
We still have the legacy issues to deal with and I need anticaps who are thinking seriously about what can replace capitalism to take seriously how dependent we are on natural systems that are very close to collapse. We are already passed the point where just stopping the harm is job done. The climate is not the one we have evolved and developed civilisation under its far less stable.
There are material and energy constraints that aren’t instantly solvable and electricity production is far from the only cause of climate harm (land use and manufacturing) and some of those have major question marks remaining as to how they can be removed or electrified.
And none of the issues are helped by a further moving target by pursuing something that pushes our energy usage even higher like some forms of “AI” that produce very little meaningful outside of capitalism anyway.
It doesn’t solve the energy and emissions crisis we are facing but sure.
Nor does it resolve the inherent biases introduced by humans working on it
To be honest I’m tempted to say that desire to remove humans from the production of society is a fundamentally capitalist one.
While that might be true in some contexts it makes no sense in the context of my comment.
Im saying that leftist coders inherent personal problems and racism will make their way into the AI much like how it has worked with capitalist AI.
Humans have many of the same biases and issues regardless of political lean.
It’s less of a bias of the programmer and moreso a bias of data, particularly when a factor like gender or ethnicity correlates with something without direct causation, such as crime rates correlating with ethnicity largely because of immigrants being poorer on average, and economic standing being a major correlating factor. If your dataset doesn’t include that, any AI will just see “oh, people in group x are way more likely to commit crimes”. This can be prevented but it’s generally more of a risk of overlooking something than intentional data manipulation (not that that isn’t possible).
Yes that’s fair. I guess my comment wasn’t a direct response to yours other than it made me think this desire that all the difficult issues (like bias) just disappear if you remove all the humans from the process* is flawed and any anticapitalist society should really start from that understanding. One that understands that conflict will emerge and pro-social “convivial” systems and structures need to emerge to handle them.
*You are right to point out that the “AI” we are talking about is statistical models built from humans that includes bias where as the hype is that we have Data from Star Trek and therefore these systems hide the human inputs but don’t remove them.
(the energy and emissions crisis are also byproducts of capitalism)
The Aral Sea is essentially gone and it was killed by poor Soviet planning. Capitalism was not the driving factor rather ignorance was and ignorance is held equally by all sides.
Capitalism isn’t the only thing driving environmental collapse. It’s industrialization
Industrialization to make money is encouraged by capitalism. Why do you think big oil was lying about global warming? It’s not a few bad apples it is a systemic drive to make more money even if it hurts people or the planet.
Industrialization has been done by every nation that is capable of doing it regardless of their economic system or philosophy.
Thinking this is a capitalist issue ignores the Marxist states that have horrible records on the environment eg China and the USSR. It’s industrialization that is the issue.
There’s a difference between industrialization for people and trade versus industrialization for money and power. One helps everyone, The other only helps capitalists.
I wouldn’t necessarily look at China and USSR and say they are a good alternative. I prefer a more democratic socialism. My problem with capitalism is specifically the lack of choice of the people. We spend 8 out of 12 hours on average working for a company that we don’t get a vote in.
Not as far as the environment is concerned and frankly many will tell you running water and electricity are huge advantages regardless of how you get them.
What? Yes, the environment can tell because there would be less pollution. The motivations are different. Do you think worker controlled industries would use the same tactics to over produce and polute the areas the workers live in? No one would benefit from that.
I’m not saying we would reach zero pollution but there would be a lot less pollution.
I have no problem with running water and electricity, most reasonable socialist would agree.
Central planners in the Soviet Union didn’t even have computers and they lacked the level of scientific understanding we have today of the environment, of our resources, and of the limits to growth. We’ve all heard about Mao killing the sparrows in China.
This isn’t a reason to never try central planning again.
They absolutely had computers, I have no idea why you would think the second largest economy that produced tremendous technological advances in its time did not have computers.You know Tetris was created by a Soviet programmer, right?
Planned economies are doomed at this point gecause we aren’t able to predict distasters and the planned economy cannot respond in an efficient manner when things go wrong. Humans aren’t smart enough and we do not have artificial intelligence capable of doing so.
How old are you? Did you go through COVID? Capitalism doesn’t do disasters well at all. Every cost is minimized. So emergency supplies go unmaintained. If it doesn’t help the stock price annually it doesn’t get done.
50, yes and most nations did poorly the reason for America’s failures have to do with American healthcare as most market economies handled it much better than the planned ones did. China did much worse but that rarely made China’s news.
American healthcare is capitalist. It’s insurance companies and for profit hospitals. That’s why it’s bad. Healthcare is an inelastic demand.
China isn’t a Democratic State. I’m not arguing that just having one guy handling all the economic planning is a good idea.
Im well aware of what a planned economy is as I have taken economics courses. Historically speaking planned economies have performed extremely poorly because humans are bad at predicting the future. Until circumstances change to the point where we can reliably predict the future planned economies will always perform poorly compared to market based ones.
Non market economies are never going to work, because you’ll be essentially creating one giant monopoly and leaving people without the possibility of doing things differently
What happens when you don’t like the product the state offers?
What if you discover a way of doing things more efficiently?
What about independent artists and creators?
And that’s not getting into how unpredictable people are, products that have been predicted to fail end up becoming very successful, and the opposite also happens
They had computers towards the end, of course, but they were extremely primitive. The kinds of disaster predictions you can do on a machine built to run Tetris are nothing compared to what can be done with today’s technology.
Also, it’s not like markets can actually deal with disasters. Without at least some central planning disaster response and relief is impossible.
Planning for relief disaster and a planned economy are incredibly different things. Planned economies do not handle disasters well at all as they didn’t prepare for that disaster in advance (typically because how can you plan for the one in a hundred million chance that x would happen).
We largely have stuck with market based economies because they currently are much more responsive to changes.
While computers have gotten more powerful there is zero evidence to support that we have gotten to the point where they could run a planned economy in any fashion.
No, we still have market based economies because they make a few people very very rich.
We needed markets before computers and instant mass communication. Things are different now
What about the fact that market-based responses to COVID were universally worse than centrally planned responses?
Given what you have said in the last comment I replied to I do not wish to continue this conversation
They don’t disappear if capitalism disappears. I agree with you capitalism needs to end in order to deal with them but there are hard issues that we have to deal with even with capitalism gone.
Even if the causes ceased we would still be left with residual emissions and degraded natural systems to try and deal with and a lower EROI society to do it.
They’re “hard issues” because we don’t have a centrally planned economy, we have to rely on the market to provide solutions.
Through a combination of marshaling the forces of production to build a renewable infrastructure and strict fossil fuel rationing during the build-up phase I think we could get the crisis under control within 5 years.
… I’ll admit that’s just vibes, though.
As humans are very bad a predicting the future, centrally planned economies come with so many added problems that market based solutions are frequently more realistic.
Every corporation is centrally planned.
I recommend reading The People’s Republic of Walmart. Businesses have figured out central planning, there’s no reason it can’t be done for nations.
Corporations are run very differently from countries.
What happens when you don’t like the product that the state is offering?
What about independent artists and creators?
Figuring out what things people will like is next to impossible.
Petition the central planners to offer something else. Central planning can still be democratic.
Well without the need to sell their art they could create whatever they want without fear of it being unmarketable. An artist could just create without needing to sell it to anyone.
Businesses do this all the time! They do market research to find out what people want, they monitor current events and customer demands and social media. There’s no reason a central planner can’t do the same.
Not going to work unless the government has somehow unlimited resources. Otherwise why would they spend money and resources on something they don’t know how popular would it be?
What reward do those independent creators receive in exchange of doing their art? Do they just work for free?
And sometimes they succeed and other times they don’t. In a planned economy you’d essentially be stuck with whatever the government monopoly has decided to manufacture and you won’t have any other choice.
No, they are not and how a business functions amd how a national economy function are incredibly different.
Walmart isn’t a federation, it’s very centrally planned. It’s also larger than a lot of nations.
The only thing missing is a military.
Are you really this poorly educated in economics that you do not get that for profit businesses and nation states function under completely different realities?
Yes, because it’s so great that they’re trying to run the nation like a business right now.
They’re trying to strip the wiring from the walls. They’re not even running like a business, they’re running it like VC.
Let’s not pretend they’re trying to centrally plan anything. The doggy department hates central planning. They just tell ChatGPT to come up with things to cut
This is a strawman. Centrally planned does not mean immutable, and markets are no more able to predict the future than anyone else. What it does allow is the disregard of the only quantity markets are capable of maximizing, profit.
This is not a strawman. Im not constructing a false point to argue against while ignoring their claims. Im in fact discussing them directly.
Markets don’t need to predict the future as the market responds naturally more quickly than central planning can adjust for errors or unexpected aspects of the plan. one of the major points of failure for central planned economies is the lack of responsiveness. A centally planned economy would not avoid environmental catastrophe as the Soviets were responsible for several with profit motives.
Markets respond only to profit changes, and even then they are far from perfect. It’s simply an economist fiction that they are uniquely good at adaptation, one proof being the utter failure of markets to handle the global catastrophe climate change is going to cause.
Markets respond to the needs of the market. Historically speaking this works much faster in market based economies than centrally planned economies because market economies don’t require prestidigitation to function correctly.
No one claims market economies are perfect just that they function better than planned ones at our current technological levels.
Central planned economies have resulted in devastated ecology as well. Industrialized economies are the real cause not the economy running them.
I get the sentiment and I wish it were true.
Some of the issues stem from material and energy limitations regardless of human organisation structures. Fossil Fuels are stored sunlight over a long period of time that means that burning them has a high yield and that’s given us a very high EROI society (one where there’s an abundance of energy for purposes that aren’t basic functioning).
I recommend reading The Collapse of Complex Societies by Tainter who discussing the energy limitations of society. Its before our understanding of energy limitations of technology and he’s by no means a leftist but it is still a good introductory text to it.
I’ve read Limits to Growth. I understand there are physical limits and that we can’t just grow our way through this crisis. Industrial civilization can not continue as it is.
But central planning would allow for us to transition to a lower energy society.
I agree but there’s a lot of detail about what activities a lower energy society precludes and my point is that energy intensive “AI” (mostly thinking about LLMs rather than targets applications of ML) probably aren’t part of it.
Deepseek showed that these chatbots can be run much more cheaply than they have been and it isn’t really necessary to build giga warehouses of servers. It might be possible to run them on even tighter hardware specifications too.
Of course, chatbots aren’t AI and the fact that they’re trying to use them as AI isn’t going to work out anyway lol
Yes its clear that the path of throwing more and more resource at LLMS to improve quality has been a lazy growth focused approach that we could do better if we actually try a design focussed approach.
For me though it comes back to the fact we are facing a polycrisis and most of our resource should be focused on looking for solutions to that and I’m not sure what problem* this technology solves yet alone what problem relating to the polycrisis.
*I realise what they are designed to solve is a capitalist problem. How can we avoid paying staff for service and creative type jobs to increase profit.
There’d be no crisis if we ditched oil and coal companies and just put solar and nuclear everywhere.
So we can have solar and nuclear oligarchs instead of oil oligarchs. Yeah, that would be slightly better
Well yeah, “nuclear oligarch” and “solar oligarch” just sound cooler than oil.
Other than a solar oligarch is impossible since anyone can put up panels.
And other than the premise of the thread is that capitalists are already to blame.
Let’s say its true that doing that would stop the problem getting worse (e.g. no more emissions after 5 years)*.
We still have the legacy issues to deal with and I need anticaps who are thinking seriously about what can replace capitalism to take seriously how dependent we are on natural systems that are very close to collapse. We are already passed the point where just stopping the harm is job done. The climate is not the one we have evolved and developed civilisation under its far less stable.
And none of the issues are helped by a further moving target by pursuing something that pushes our energy usage even higher like some forms of “AI” that produce very little meaningful outside of capitalism anyway.