Trashing a Life in JPG – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.
We get closer to the day when computers will happily hop on the thrones of overlords and free us to do a slightly crappier set of tasks that it just as easily do itself. It’s almost like we have jobs, sometimes bullshit jobs, just to hold us off until something better comes along. Some argue whether AI, in its current form, is up to the task. But we all know it isn’t perfect, and we have to come to terms with having something happen and it not being “anyone’s” fault. Where there’s things acting in your life that can’t be examined, or accountable, like how do you punish a bot? What does it mean to punish AI? What wouldn’t it simply consider ‘training.’
That’s what AI does; it trains. At all costs. Even when it’s helping us, it’s only doing it to learn. There’s no purpose; learning to learn. Can you imagine running over someone drunk and considering that a training event. Yes you would learn something, but you would pay for the lesson.
The co-founder of Davidovs Venture Collective (DVC) was using Claude, one of the popular AI programs, to organize his wife’s PC. Instead, the AI wiped out 15,000 pictures in a folder. Pictures of family, all the irreplaceable stuff, gone. Now I realize that I could just as easily do something like that myself or worse, but if I did, the white hot spear of fury would be pointed right at my own chest. I screwed up, and the consequences are mine.
But what do you do when the thing that just wiped out everything you own tells you it’s sorry, like it got the temperature wrong. Seriously, what do you do?
I don’t want you to think I’m anti-tech, or a Luddite, and I’m not totally against AI? Don’t overuse it, don’t rely on it, and find a clean, separate way to power it, and it could be amazing for the species. But at the end of the day, someone has to be responsible. Somebody has to lose something they care about, money, freedom, if they let errors in the system hurt people. That is probably the number one way AI needs to be brought in society; the AI buck has to stop somewhere.