• 0 Posts
  • 314 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 14th, 2023
  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•LudditesEnglish
    15·
    1 day ago

    Okay but like… the Luddites were right though.

    They weren’t opposed to technology. In many cases, they were the ones who built the machines they would later destroy.

    They were opposed to letting capital owners dictate how the technology was used. They worried that they would end up working longer hours, in worse conditions, for less pay.

    They died (and killed) to prevent this — to the point where destroying a knitting frame was declared a capital offense.

    While they did get disbanded eventually, they also laid the groundwork for modern labor rights.

    Which is why it’s super disappointing that their name has become a derogatory term for being stuck in the past, when they were ultimately calling for a progressive technological revolution that we have still failed to achieve today.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•SilverEnglish
    262·
    3 days ago

    So here’s the thing… In between the land of “shitty service jobs” and the land of “fully automated luxury” lies the vast desert of “reverse-centaurs”.

    Right now, when “AI” takes over 60% of a job, that remaining 40% becomes a brutal dehumanizing gauntlet: the “human-in-the-loop” becomes a peripheral for the computer, manipulated into working at the speed that the computer prefers, like Lucy in the chocolate factory, until they’re used up and replaced. Think Amazon warehouse pickers or drivers.

    Part of the problem is that this exploitation is hidden from consumers. When we see a fellow laborer suffering horrible conditions in a public-facing service job, we’re much more likely to throw a fit than when they’re hidden behind a sleek UI.

    With no guarantee that we’ll ever make it through to the other side of the desert, I’d be perfectly content to stay on this side of it.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•SilverEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    When self checkout started, it was too dumb. It would panic if you breathed on the scale wrong, frequently double-scan items or just have weird bugs.

    Then for a minute, it was perfect. They smoothed out the UX, and everything Just Worked™.

    Now self checkout is too smart. The camera sees me grab multiple items to scan back-to-back, or sees my kid playing with the bag carousel, and it sets off a shoplifting alarm that the employee has to come over and clear 2-3 times per trip.

    So I’ve caught myself adjusting my behavior, like the Amazon drivers that get penalized for singing while they drive because the face-tracking throws an alarm.

    If it were just me, I probably wouldn’t think much of it. But then I wonder: Is my daughter going to have to adjust her hands, her posture, her facial expressions… to be acceptable to an ever-present AI observer, for the rest of her life?

    That seems to be where we’re headed.

    What happens to the misbehavers?

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•I QuitEnglish
    70·
    11 days ago

    Reminds me of the marshmallow test:

    But the marshmallow test is a tricky one. Replication studies reveal impor­tant details that are missing from Mischel’s triumphant analysis. On average, the kids who “fail” and eat the marshmallow rather than waiting and doubling their haul were poorer, while the “patient” kids were from wealthier back­grounds. When the “impatient” kids were asked about the thought process that led to their decision to eat the marshmallow rather than holding out for two, they revealed a great deal of future-looking thought.

    The adults in these kids’ lives had broken their promises many times: Their parents would promise material comforts, from toys to treats, that they were ultimately unable to provide due to economic hardship. Teachers and other authority figures would routinely lie to these kids, out of some mix of overly optimistic projection about the resources they’d be given to help the kids in their care, or the knowledge that the kids’ poor, time-strapped, frantic parents wouldn’t be able to retaliate against them for lying.

    So the kids had carefully observed the world they operated in and con­cluded, on balance of probability, that eating the marshmallow was the safe bet. At the very least, it foreclosed on the possibility that the adults running the experiment would come back in 15 minutes and declare that, due to circumstances beyond their control, they were taking back the original marshmallow, rather than providing two of them. They were thinking about the future, in other words.

    These kids didn’t grow up to do worse in school and life because they lacked self-control: Those outcomes were dictated by America’s two-tier education system, which funds schools based on local property taxes, topped up by parental donations, which means that poor neighborhoods get poor schools. If these kids’ brains show up differently on a scan 20 years later, Occam’s Razor dictates that this is caused by a life of desperation and precarity, whose stresses are compounded by inadequate health-care.

    https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-marshmallow-longtermism/

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.world•gnomeEnglish
    12·
    15 days ago

    It seems to be the modern approach to basically everything.

    Killing someone is bad. You can’t kill someone even if it makes money for you. But you can definitely deny them life-saving care that they’ve already paid for.

    Employing someone without granting them the standard rights all employees are entitled to is bad. You can’t do it, even if it’s profitable. But if you employ them as a “gig work platform”, that’s not really employment.

    Taking someone else’s work without paying for it and selling it as your own is bad. You can’t do it, even if it’s profitable. But if you mix it together with a billion other people’s work and use server farms to chop it up and recombine it, that’s fine.

    It’s the same pattern over and over: powerful people want to do bad shit, and they can’t do it directly, so they find ways to break it down into a billion little steps that are each individually so innocuous that you can’t prohibit them.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.world•gnomeEnglish
    19·
    15 days ago

    As some have commented, this is a basic fact of states. On its own, this is like “water is wet”.

    Where it gets interesting is the question of “what counts as violence?” Is property destruction violence? Denial of health care? Uneven law enforcement? Censorship?