The following is lifted directly from Zvi Mowshowitz with only light formatting changes because I think it’s Important, Valuable, and Good.
It is also buried deep in a blog post that many people would have neither the time nor inclination to read.
That Would Be Bad Therefore It Won’t Work
I strongly agree with Garrison Lovely that it is a big mistake, and one that both the left and right in America frequently make, to focus on whether you are ‘for or against’ something, in a way that conflates ‘that plan is trying to do something bad’ with ‘that plan will not work,’ and to treat those saying these two things as ‘on the same side.’
Garrison Lovely: When I wrote a post critical of Ed Zitron, one thrust of comments was, ‘i don’t get why you’re attacking a fellow critic,’ as if it didn’t matter if your analysis was correct, as long as it was negative on AI!
If you’re a union negotiating with management, you need to understand your power and your boss’s power to get the best deal. Pretending management is on the verge of going broke or has no idea what’s going on when they are actually flush and informed is malpractice for your members. We need to stop making this mistake with AI before it’s too late.
The historical example here: You could think, in 2022, any of the four combinations of Elon Musk’s remaking of Twitter is [good / bad] and it [will / will not] work. The plan of ‘create vibes of failure because the thing would be bad’ is not a good plan.
In AI, this is the left saying that AI is a stochastic parrot, that it will not work, or that the economics is all circular financing and will collapse Real Soon Now, that data centers are polluting the water, and so on, when the true objection is that they don’t like AI and don’t want it to work.
Or, in reverse and in AI from the right, we are constantly forced to hear about how open models ‘will win’ or are already winning, or cannot be stopped, and how soon the models will commoditize, by people who really mean that they would prefer this outcome and think you get there via vibes.
And of course, there’s the classic that cooperating to not die both cannot be done and also will not work, where if you are paying attention what they actually mean is that they don’t believe in superintelligence or don’t want to cooperate, or don’t want humans to not die.
The pure version of this is to say ‘your views are bad, therefore you are also stupid and ugly and unpopular and not funny’ and so on, especially when it escalates to talking about sexuality. This is super not cool. Intellectually I ‘get’ why it happens and is not only tolerated but celebrated on all sides, but in my gut I dunno if I ever will.