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Tech Needs Humanists More

https://passo.uno/tech-needs-humanists-more-than-ever/
41•eigenBasis•57m ago

Comments

sevenzero•31m ago
Tech specialists ignoring human feelings about AI and the future of tech, while also looking at the amount of downright evil tech out there makes reconsider about wanting to continue to work in this profession over and over again.

Before I knew how to program I used to think software developers were smart wizards capable of creating cool stuff out of thin air but the recent years proved me differently given how many of them outright water out of their mouths at the mere thought of replacing the human in the loop with some bullshit parrot we call AI.

Especially on this website I rarely find people having human first thoughts and it makes me despise software engineers.

hardbass•27m ago
What are the examples of evil tech?
ungovernableCat•14m ago
Autonomous flying drones, mass surveillance, AI trained to deny health insurance claims
hardbass•4m ago
The trouble with some of these techs is that its good or bad depending on use. Flying drones are great for disaster aid, delivery of items in difficult regions, mapping your farm, etc. Mass surveillance, yes, thats unpleasant, but its a bit hard to see how for instance we can't also have advances in camera technology and not incentivize it happening anyway due to people just installing cameras of their own accord. AI trained to deny insurance claims, well, I'd put that on using AI as an excuse to launder the insurer's own wishes.
askonomm•13m ago
Pretty much anything Microsoft does, for example.
hardbass•22m ago
Big tech has provided me immense improvements in life. Governments are great at fumbling things at best, experts at killing millions at worst. How is tech worse than governments or other businesses? I am every day grateful to Google, Amazon, OpenAI etc for the wonderful services they provide for so cheap or free. The people who whine are precisely the problem people. Many shopkeepers used to be lazy, rude and think themselves kings. After amazon and home food delivery services, they have gotten whipped into shape. Many items were simply not available at all in one's city, and I can now easily have them at my doorstep.
ChickeNES•4m ago
> "human first thoughts"

And what exactly do you define those as?

Liftyee•27m ago
I like the idealism, but an important factor making this viable is that people (i.e. employers) must realise that this fundamental reasoning is scarce and pay enough for it to support life, and this must happen before AI takes over.
moolcool•24m ago
People often complain about the humanities requirements for CS degrees, and now the world is run by tech executives who don’t have a clue.
princewills_1•19m ago
i totally agree with this, but i think at this point there's no going back, this AI wave isn't stopping anytime soon and it will continue growing.
hardbass•17m ago
I have better hopes about China at least. I hope the Chinese people haven't fallen to hysterical psychoses about "AI doom".
card_zero•13m ago
Surely the threat of being left behind by China fuels US AI investment, and vice versa, like a space race except nobody knows where the moon is.
hardbass•6m ago
I can't say without studying, but I feel Chinese people might be more sane about AI and not suffer from this psychotic "fear" of AI that causes them to lose all grip and regress back to things like dualism, false arguments, etc. They tend to be less religious or at least spiritually different from the West too, that might help.
pet_the_bird•15m ago
I like the approach that the writer takes, emphasizing the importance of humanistic experience into technology. Language will be the deciding factor for what technology becomes, and on this point I have some critique of the language that the author uses.

> Become the most flexible, underscore-shaped mind you can cultivate, the best-prepared proto-diplomat and translator of cultures, the family philosopher (because you no longer need someone to fix your printer).

In previous sentences, but here explicitely, the language used reflects that of the AI labs themselves. We do not need to find a metric to reduce our human experience to. We will not address systematic issues by pushing ourselves to become perfect. We need to start talking to our friends and families and question why we use the words we use in technology.

neuroticnews25•13m ago
When I was young, I used to think that humanists are just unproductive people wasting time on unfalsifiable bullshit. I still think that.
Papazsazsa•10m ago
Then you're still young.
card_zero•5m ago
You needed the philosophy of science to give you that term "unfalsifiable".
crabbone•3m ago
Let me introduce you to medical ethics... Unlike in engineering, ethics is a mandatory subject for medical students. And while there's a long-winded explanation for why it is that way, the short and an immediate explanation is that if you don't understand ethics, you, and the hospital that employed you, and the insurance company that pays for you will be sued out of profession. Because people's health and ultimately lives are at stake, and people become very touchy when someone dies or loses a limb unnecessarily.

I don't know what the situation is with other (mechanical, electrical etc.) engineering students, but I'm very much certain that the legal fiction that software comes with no warranty whatsoever is going to expire. Perhaps sometime soon. And then users of the said software will be allowed to sue, and, what do you know, ethics will suddenly be factored into CS curriculum ;)

hardbass•1m ago
See for example 'philosophers' of consciousness who can't do thermodynamics, turing computability and information theory. One would expect these three fields are the basic and inexhaustive baseline requirements to put any theory on consciousness.

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