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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • Seeing technology consistently putting people out of work is enough for people to see it as a problem. You shouldn’t need to be an expert in it to be able to have an opinion when it’s being used to threaten your source of income. Teachers have to do more work and put in more time now because ChatGPT has affected education at every level. Educators already get paid dick to work insane hours of skilled labor, and students have enough on their plates without having to spend extra time in the classroom. It’s especially unfair when every student has to pay for the actions of the few dishonest ones. Pretty ironic how it’s set us back technologically, to the point where we can’t use the tech that’s been created and implemented to make our lives easier. We’re back to sitting at our desks with a pencil and paper for an extra hour a week. There’s already AI “books” being sold to unknowing customers on amazon. How long will it really be until researchers are competing with it? Students won’t be able to recognize the difference between real and fake academic articles. They’ll spread incorrect information after stealing pieces of real studies without the authors’ permission, then mash them together into some bullshit that sounds legitimate. You know there will be AP articles (written by AI) with headlines like “new study says xyz!” and people will just believe that shit.

    When the government can do its job and create fail safes like UBI to keep people’s lives/livelihoods from being ruined by AI and other tech, then people might be more open to it. But the lemmy narrative that overtakes every single post about AI, that says the average person is too dumb to be allowed to have an opinion, is not only, well, fucking dumb, but also tone deaf and willfully ignorant.

    Especially when this discussion can easily go the other way, by pointing out that tech bros are too dumb to understand the socioeconomic repercussions of AI.


  • I think more than one party can be at fault at the same time, but it also depends on the situation.

    For example. Google maps kept taking rideshare drivers to the wrong entrance of my apartment complex. When I say “wrong,” I mean “nonexistent.” So multiple uber drivers were literally pulling over on the side of a busy street near a freeway on ramp with no bike lane or shoulder. They’d hit their flashers and stop in the middle of the road, blocking the on ramp lane. I’m in the actual parking lot, not tracking them in the app, so I don’t know they’re around the corner. I had two drivers just leave. Did they let me know they were going to cancel and drive away? Fuck no. The actual parking lot and driveway is only a few yards away. If they don’t pass right by it, they can at least see the driveway. I mean, come on. Use your brain.

    After the first time this happened, I tried to move the pin in the app, but it just kept sending drivers to the same place. I started texting them after they accepted the ride, but not all would see it. I contacted google and the pickup spot did change - to a back entrance on the opposite side of the complex that has no parking lot or place to stop unless you have a gate opener. For fuck’s sake.

    Anyway, it’s both of their faults.











  • I think their question is more about how we would implement that. Marx believed that proletariat uprising would be the “how,” and that it is an inevitability of end stage capitalism. But the nature of capitalism keeps people from attempting that. This is a system that we are forced to participate in if we want to survive. We need food and shelter and we don’t want to get arrested and/or murdered by cops for revolting. With that in mind, we have to get to a point where we collectively have nothing left to lose.



  • Or some of us might have multiple sociology degrees and/or are in academia. But I’m sure if they wrote comments about Marx (or Weber or Gramsci or Veblen etc) you’d just assume they got it from wikipedia anyway. Though I’m not sure why that’s a bad thing. It’s not like it makes a difference whether someone read primary texts online or overpaid at the college bookstore. It’s the same information. The fact that anyone has a desire to learn, better themselves, and then try to use that knowledge is admirable and a service to society at large. More people should try it.


  • They definitely have it in other California cities too. And not just in restaurants.

    A chain resale/consignment hipster shop in NorCal started adding a percentage service charge years ago with the same excuse, and you’d only find out about it if you looked at your receipt. The fucked up part is that they also raised their prices so high that I couldn’t shop there anymore. It’s one of those buy/sell/trade clothing stores, so the whole point was to pay less for decent clothes. But if they’re already raising prices significantly, why the fuck do they need yet another charge to pay their workers.

    I also think they really must believe it makes them seem “progressive” somehow. Like “oh look, we’re on the workers’ side!” and they hope no one eating/shopping there will think about it any more deeply than that.


  • Here’s a somewhat tangential counter, which I think some of the other replies are trying to touch on … why, exactly, continue valuing our ability to do something a computer can so easily do for us (to some extent obviously)?

    My theory prof said there would be paper exams next year. Because it’s theory. You need to be able to read an academic paper and know what theoretical basis the authors had for their hypothesis. I’m in liberal arts/humanities. Yes we still exist, and we are the ones that AI can’t replace. If the whole idea is that it pulls from information that’s already available, and a researcher’s job is to develop new theories and ideas and do survey or interview research, then we need humans for that. If I’m trying to become a professor/researcher, using AI to write my theory papers is not doing me or my future students any favors. Ststistical research on the other hand, they already use programs for that and use existing data, so idk. But even then, any AI statistical analysis should be testing a new hypothesis that humans came up with, or a new angle on an existing one.

    So idk how this would affect engineering or tech majors. But for students trying to be psychologists, anthropologists, social workers, professors, then using it for written exams just isn’t going to do them any favors.