Doesn’t make it ok.

Remember when Transmetropolitan made this seem cool

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.

And you’ve written some painfully edited highly professional email to your professor or boss and the response you get back from them is a single sentence, not even a signature.

So glad they made it such a point to teach us to write professional emails in my freshman year of college.

More like 80s babies, since we were actually old enough to remember those first two things

a de facto guilty verdict. We already saw this with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.

We only saw this with Amber Heard. Speaking of simping, Depp had an army of incels and “men’s rights” douchers behind him from the get go. Anyone who had any objective comments about that whole case would get chewed out and brigaded by a bunch of insecure woman beaters standing up for poor little Johnny Depp. The worst was how everyone acted like they knew both of their lives inside and out, and they really believed that they were experts on their situation because they watched livestreamed court proceedings. It is a great example, just in the opposite direction.

I absolutely agree. But I do think it’s interesting how there’s almost never any discussion of drug use and alcoholism among housed people, as though that’s not a social problem in itself. And imagine how much more severe the consequences are of people going to work fucked up, driving their cars, selling drugs in their dorms and getting kicked out of college, raising a family while trashed on xanax, and so on.

But when this happens, it’s an even more individualized matter than it is with homeless people. When we look at homeless folks, we individualize the blame and socialize the consequences (it’s the homeless person’s fault they’re homeless, but that’s fucking up our city etc). Somehow, we never consider the social repercussions of housed people with addictions, especially if they have an addiction to alcohol. Alcoholism can get pretty far in an “average” person’s life before anyone really steps in and sees it as a serious problem. Same with prescribed drugs, because they have some psychiatrists signature on them. Millions of people drink when they get home from work. But if we see a homebum with a 40, we first make a snap diagnosis, then widen our judgement to everyone whose ever been evicted or had to sleep in their car.

All I’m saying is that half the problem is ingrained social stigma, when they’re really not much different from the rest of us.

Thank you for this, it’s very interesting to hear more details about how this was handled over there. In the US we tend to either have a very idealistic view (liberals) or very negative view (conservative) of Euro and Nordic countries’ social policies. No country is perfect, but I guess if the outcome has worked well then we can’t fault it even if the reason was to maintain their image by hiding poverty.

Regardless, it is an important study to disspell stigmas that have existed since the beginning of private property.

But it is still important when it comes to housing. This argument of homeless people being untrustworthy with money has undoubtedly already worked it’s way into that debate. If people won’t trust them with money, why would they trust them with an apartment? Canada and the US don’t see them as “worthy” or responsible enough to be given anything, not even food. Look at what an insane process it is just to apply for food stamps in the US, and that applies to low income folks as well as homeless people. Everyone is considered a criminal until they can prove otherwise, and they’re rarely given that chance

Not that I think academic research will make much of an impact. Research from the social sciences consistently debunks all kinds of common, harmful beliefs, and yet is still often ignored by policy makers and average people. It’s depressing as fuck that there are academic researchers spending years on studies like this, convincing people to fund them, getting paid dick by their universities, and still a bunch of assholes who have never set foot on a college campus get to just cut it down by saying “oh, well, that’s what I heard.” And then move on with their lives while homeless people continue to suffer for no reason. This is an example of the far reaching impacts of devaluing education I guess.

It’s hard to believe anyone missed this:

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

This article is from 2012

I wouldn’t underestimate it. I also wouldn’t buy into the “I have nothing to hide” narrative. It’s not about hiding or not hiding. The fallout from the Dobbs decision is a great example of why, if you aren’t concerned with privacy now, then you will be in the future. All of a sudden, the right of 51% of the population to make decisions about their own bodies was suddenly gone, and handed over to state governments. The day before that decision, people needing abortions and the doctors who provide them had “nothing to hide.” The day after? They’re suddenly criminals. Their social media can be monitored. Their online and in-person purchases. Where they travel and why. Their medical records. And maybe worst of all, their fellow Americans are offered prize money if they turn someone in so that they can be charged in criminal court.

Or what about Florida’s “risk prediction” software that supposedly can predict which “at-risk” (aka non-white) kids will become criminals? Maybe I’m wrong for finding that unsettling. This is from 2015

https://theweek.com/articles/495147/floridas-minority-report-crime-prediction-software

What about social credit scores? Which we already have, we just don’t get to see them (LexisNexis “risk solution” software). But sooner rather than later, every word and action will be recorded and held against us in every aspect of our lives, rather than just when applying for jobs and mortgages. And anti-discrimination laws don’t do shit. They always find a work around. Although with the current supreme court I’m sure all forms of discrimination will be perfectly legal soon enough.

Btw private browsing doesn’t prevent tracking. It just doesn’t store anything in the broswer history.

This does not come across the way you think it does.

Sounds like we need to get the sociologists and cultural anthropologists on it. Can’t decide whether economists should be involved. Probably not.

Like how Japanese internment in America wasn’t justified, even if involvement in WW2 was.

Now there’s something that sounds like an insane conspiracy theory but actually happened.

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.

I get what you’re saying, but I still think it’s a seriously outsized response to someone asking to categorize memes better lmao.

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.

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.

I agree. I once forgot the book I was reading when I went on a trip, so I found it on internet archive for the time I was traveling. Reading a novel on there is just obnoxious, because they have short time limits for borrowing, which I forget if it’s an hour or half hour. Either way, it’s good for reference books, not so much for novels.

That image, carefully crafted to be as extremely negative as possible, is the only experience most people have with California.

That’s the thing. No one I’ve ever heard who says this kind of shit has ever lived here for any length of time or knows anything about the state beyond what the “news” has told them to believe. There are issues here like there are issues everywhere. So people want to focus on homelessness. Of course we have more homeless people, we have more people. We have two of the largest and most well known metro areas in the nation with an up and coming third.

The bitching takes away (maybe intentionally) from the homeless issue that is rapidly increasing throughout the rest of the country. This is an issue of inflation and greed masquerading as inflation. Of corporate property owners buying up rentals and raising rents. Of workers not being paid a living wage. Of food and essentials becoming increasingly unaffordable by the month. Of course people are losing their homes and stealing from walmart. But this is a national problem. It gets worse all over the country for the same reasons and at the same time that it gets worse in California.

But what I will say is, we do have reproductive rights. Reasonable firearms regulations. More tenant regulations that most places, though still never enough. Some cities have social worker response teams instead of sending cops to kill people having mental health problems. We have homeless outreach and a statewide homeless census. Our schools and colleges still have diversity programs and sex ed. The state provides tuition waivers and grants for low income and marginalized students. We have drag shows and pride parades. And our libraries aren’t being purged by fucking nazis. So there’s that.