AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists. Enormous physical infrastructure designed to convert capital into power, and back into capital. Those who control the infrastructure, control the people subject to it.
While it sways away from the initial thesis of how the use of LLMs could be detrimental to our very being and expression of identity - at least that’s how I interpret what they’re saying - it ends in a fantastic claim on how AI is a tool of the ruling class. Worth a read!
A hammer can be used for good or bad but a shrapnel bomb can only kill and maim; not all tools are multivalent like that, some are realistically only used for evil. Additionally, divorcing discussion of a tool from the social context like this is blinding to the real consequences. We don’t have small scale LLMs running on personal machines (even if we could, that’s not how it is now), we have them at industrial scale controlled by a few billionaires. It’s purely fantastical thinking to say that just because you could imagine a world where they’d be used for good, that actually means anything.
Uhhh, it’s pretty trivial to set them up. I have a local Ollama instance set up on my PC with several different open source models available right now. Just because not everyone is doing it doesn’t mean it’s not possible. I don’t even have an especially fancy computer, either. Ryzen 7 3700X, 32gb RAM, Radeon 6600XT 8gb video RAM, not exactly top of the line. I struggle with programming logic sometimes, so I use it to help me figure out if I’m doing something right or not when I can’t find an answer online, an activity I wouldn’t exactly classify as “evil.”
I also wouldn’t consider a shrapnel bomb a tool, it’s strictly a weapon just like a gun is strictly a weapon.
I get all that, I just mean you can’t just ignore the social reality. Like you said elsewhere in this thread, Linux is barely cracking 3% of the desktop market. Can you run an LLM locally? Of course. Do people do it? No, except a couple of hardcore enthusiasts. That is an issue which can’t just be cleanly separated from the technology itself and has to be taken into account when discussing it.
Also, weapons are tools.