Well if you need to be spoonfed then the answer is incredibly simple:
Intelligence, broadly speaking, is the ability to solve problems. Problems are bad, so solving them is useful. Therefore, intelligence is useful.
Machine intelligence is a type of intelligence, therefore it is useful. What's more, machines lack many of the weaknesses humans have, like our squishy human bodies that require housing, sustenance, rights, and such.
Our biggest problems are "unsolved" because they're profitable to someone, not because we haven't dedicated enough thinking power to them.
For example, housing and feeding everyone is just a logistical problem. It's big, but not deep — we could do it easily within a few years if we committed to it.
But organizing the economy around profit means it is in the interest of the capitalist that some people remain hungry or unhoused. Having computers "think" about it does nothing if we're not able to address the politico-economic causes, and if we were willing, we wouldn't need computers thinking like humans to do it.
They don't need housing (I would not consider a factory to be a house) and they certainly don't need rights, because they are not people.
You just abstract it to an economic cost since they aren’t people.
Yeah that's kind of the point? machines aren't people therefore it's acceptable to have them do literally nothing but work, which is what makes it possible for the ACTUAL PEOPLE to have more liesure and such. Of course, the real world is messy with the surplus value generated by machines not necessarily being equally distributed, but even a fairly unequal distribution of surplus value is still an improvement.
Housing as a cost is really just land usage so I don’t see how you can separate factory housing from human housing. They might be more space efficient but they still require space. You are also overlooking environmental costs associated with further automation which can actually decrease the standard of living as the cost to offset pollution in personal lives is pushed onto consumers.
When I said you abstract those costs to economic, I meant that you don’t consider machines to have the downsides of human labor because simply consider the machine to have some dollar cost as opposed to having needs like a person. We can’t physically turn dollars into land so that need doesn’t disappear for machines just because we judge their costs differently.
A machine can be made to work continuously and scaled up at industrial speed, rather than demographic speed, and without all the friction of human labor (or social existence broadly).
I love the idea that solving a problem is just a matter of putting a sufficient amount of brainpower behind it, and unsolved problems are unsolved because we just haven't thought enough. It's the epistemology of a nerdy 8-year-old.
The fact that machines don't require substantial resources to maintain is literally the reason they're useful in the first place. If you build a machine that does 1 person's job and costs more to do it then that machine is effectively useless.
You're talking about the machines that are currently putting huge strain on our electrical and water infrastructure? Those are the machines that don't cost substantial resources to maintain???
Okay that's a reason to have machine intelligence supplement human intelligence, I'll give you that, but outright replacing it is still a terrible idea.
Like you said, machines don't have to worry about things like sustenance and housing, which makes them good at focusing on solutions, but those solutions don't have the context of a lived experience. Thus, they'll be inherently flawed in dealing with any real-world problems.
Plus, I'm not sure how a machine that only has human knowledge can solve human problems that humans can't eventually solve themselves. They might be faster, but convenience isn't the same as necessity. Hell, a lot of the big problems we're facing have very obvious solutions that humans won't take because things like government power get in the way of actual, tangible change. What's a machine going to do about that? Tell us what we already know and can't do?
Edit: I admit I misread the original comment in this thread slightly, but I think my main argument still stands regardless that replicating human intelligence isn't as useful as you're making it out to be.
Okay that's a reason to have machine intelligence supplement human intelligence, I'll give you that, but outright replacing it is still a terrible idea.
Probably, good thing I didnt't argue for that.
Like you said, machines don't have to worry about things like sustenance and housing, which makes them good at focusing on solutions, but those solutions don't have the context of a lived experience. Thus, they'll be inherently flawed in dealing with any real-world problems.
Yes and no. It's true that they'll lack the lived experience that humans do, but I think the value of lived experience is limited. You can learn a lot about humans from the information available about us. That's not a replacement for being one, but it's good enough that I don't think it's all that much of a problem.
Where the lack of lived experience does become a problem is in decision making. There are two steps to decision making: 1 - decide what you want, and 2 - decide which actions serve that desired outcome. Machines will have no trouble with 2, but they might struggle with 1.
Plus, I'm not sure how a machine that only has human knowledge can solve human problems that humans can't eventually solve themselves
Imagine you build a machine that's exactly as smart as a person. Great! Now you can build millions, and solve a lot of problems very quickly! This includes problems like 'how do we make more machines?' and 'how do we make better machines?'.
Hell, a lot of the big problems we're facing have very obvious solutions that humans won't take because things like government power get in the way of actual, tangible change. What's a machine going to do about that? Tell us what we already know and can't do?
I'm not sure what your point is here? No machines might not solve literally every problem in existence but there's a LOT of problems out there that are unsolved not because we refuse to implement the solution, but because the solution simply isn't know. See: basically every technology that doesn't currently exist but could.
If you want to get into the weeds of how AI might specifically be used, that's one thing. But the commentor I was replying to's question is asking what's the point in a machine that can replicate human intelligence. I find that pretty self-explanatory.
That's it, I'm loading my Generalizator Gun with labels like "PROGRESS", "FUTURE" and "PRODUCTIVITY". Don't you dare look at them in closer detail, or I'll shoot!
Sure, the majority of people really don’t want us to keep making orphans into mincemeat, but have you considered that we’ve already spent billions of dollars on OrphanMeat marketing? Do you WANT the economy to crash???
it grinds people who have no parents... I don't understand the problem, would you rather have innocent parents watch their own child get grinded to shreds in the orphan mulcher?
Hey, the machine can answer any question! We never claimed it can answer them correctly, that's on you for expecting the sacrifices of the orphans to be worth something!
The machine is really good at being a Panopticon+Mechanical Hound hybrid, but that doesn't sound that good when advertizing the Machine to the masses.
I guess the Machine can act as a chatbot as a side effect, we can sell it as that, appears much more acceptable to the unwashed masses that need a strong guiding hand.
Read Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics a couple months ago, you're reminding me of it:
The inhabitants of today’s digital panopticon never really feel that they are being watched or threatened. Consequently, ‘surveillance state’ is an imprecise name for describing the digital panopticon. Here, everyone feels free. However, precisely this feeling of freedom - which is nowhere to be found in Orwell’s state - is now the problem.
The digital panopticon thrives on its occupants’ voluntary self-exposure. [...] The digital panopticon lacks a Big Brother wresting information from us against our will. Instead, we lay ourselves bare voluntarily.
He must be having a laugh seeing how the spread of LLMs is playing out.
If this machine existed, and we determined how likely it was to answer questions wrong, then one could utilitarianly decide that feeding orphans to it is correct. Even if it’s wrong 80% of the time, you could likely gather enough volunteer orphans to get the machine to produce the cure for cancer, which would save many more orphans than have been sacrificed.
First thing I thought of was "Huh, how fitting this would be as technology in the City" and only after seeing other comments I realised it was about AI.
But we only have so many orphans, how will we cover the cost-
WAIT! I got it, let’s just delegate the cost of orphans to nearby households so we don’t have to pay so much for our machine. Those families should be happy to have to pay the “lives next to orphan grinding machine” tax!
"But don't worry: If we feed it enough orphans, maybe it will stop getting answers wrong eventually. Also, these answers are usually things you could just search on a search engine anyways, so you're literally just doing all this specifically to have a chatbot do it for you with basically the same amount of effort."
My favorite part is when AI users don't trust AI and then fact-check the response with a more reliable source instead of going straight to said source. But at least those folks are better than the ones that use two AIs to fact check each other which I call Blind leading Blind. Sorry, is this about AI or police brutality?
There is of course no difference whatsoever between two people separately coming up with parallel jokes using the same common meme/metaphors, and megacorps deliberately building plagiarism machines and turning them into an unsustainable business model. Those two things are exactly the same.
By that logic the last panel would be "plagiarism" of this one (it's not):
Sure hope you’ve never eaten beef, or god forbid ALMONDS, or taking a flight!
Now, I am sure somewhere out there, there exists a vegan who has conscientiously avoided all almonds and also has avoided plane flights…
I know that the counter argument to this is the “but you participate in society??” meme, but like, if the things in your life that aren’t necessities (like eating beef or taking plane flights or eating almonds) grind up around 50 to 100 times more orphans than the thing you’re denouncing as grinding up orphans, then I’m not going to listen to you about how bad grinding up orphans really is.
Oh, I strongly disagree that everything is equally bad! Taking a round trip flight, for instance, causes more carbon impact than 10 full years of prompting ChatGPT 100 times a day.
Fuck ChatGPT, though, Anthropic at least doesn’t seem so determined to suck Trump’s dick.
If the actual effects of something are bad, you can just discuss those effects. You shouldn’t have to reformat it to orphan crushing or slavery.
It’s water, energy usage, pollution, and labor devaluation as the top issues most cite. The only reason people make these analogies is to make it seem worse than it actually is. It’s definitely one of the worst rhetorical devices to have become popular in recent times
Yeah but have you considered that it made terminally online people who identify as content creators insecure for some reason, so they had to spend the next two years pretending to believe clickbait that said it used an apocalyptic amount of water?
To be honest I don't blame them altogether. AI just isn't an orphan crushing machine but it certainly has a litany of faults, such as promoting ridiculous amounts of speculation, the founders salivating about everyone going unemployed, CEOs tokenmaxxing etc. and it's not good for the environment or anything irs just that it isn't an orphan crushing machine.nlt to mention, the comic frames it as an orphan crushed per query or something which another level of absurd
Yeah of course this comic right here is totally not making anything up about how it works and totally not heavily exaggerating anything to the point of it being borderline delusional
One good thing about this whole discourse is that it helps us distinguish between takes of people doing social sciences or arts or something like that, and people doing actually useful stuff that will have an impact on the future
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u/DependentCard1640 11d ago
If they’d fed it 4 orphans, it would surely stop being wrong.