Tootfinder

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and this more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of manservant caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

@… Perhaps being an outsider to the faith makes it easier to analyze for what it is.
I agree that, if Christianity is largely right about an almighty deity, and they really did send someone to speak on their behalf 2000 years ago, the conclusion must inevitably be:
Most of the shit people have done “for god” throughout history, is directly …

"We can argue over the specific time at which empathy in software design entered the software engineering body of knowledge. Barry Boehm’s 1999 paper “Escaping the Software Tar Pit” introduces the modified golden rule to software engineering:
> Do unto others as you would have them do unto you — if you were like them."

“What AI sells is vastly different from what it delivers, particularly what it delivers out of the box.”
The post gives some great context on the study of “the difference between work-as-imagined (WAI) and work-as-done (WAD),” and says:
“If what we have to do to be productive with LLMs is to add a lot of scaffolding and invest effort to gain important but poorly defined skills, we should be able to assume that what we’re sold and what we get are rather different things. That gap implies that better designed artifacts could have better affordances, and be more appropriate to the task at hand.”
5/

Für die breite Verwendung von #KI, speziell im Kontext #Schule, muss sichergestellt sein, dass #LLMs user:innen nicht zu selbstgefährdendem Verhalten animieren.
Das Nonprofit Transluce arbeitet an verschie…

Surfacing Pathological Behaviors in Language Models
We train reinforcement learning (RL) agents to craft realistic natural-language prompts that elicit specified behaviors in frontier open-weight models (Llama 3.1/4, Qwen 2.5, and DeepSeek-V3), using a proposed variational lower bound to guide the search.

«We live in the future, and the future is cool. Or it would be cool, if it wasn’t for all these fucking bastards. Even for those of us too young to remember a less-algorithmic internet, we can all see the potential. We see what technology can do. […] We know what’s possible, but we see — whether we acknowledge it or just feel its sheer force shearing off bits of our fucking soul — what these companies are choosing to do to us.»
This, so many times.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forget-what-theyve-done/

I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld

A democracy is – how Pratchett puts it in Small Gods – a system where everyone distrusts the government, so everyone is somehow (un-)happy about it. And this is how it is meant to be and where checks and balances comes in.
And now there is a Trump administration where a alarming number of people just trust everything done by them regardless of what it is.¹ If we needed another sign² of Trumpism being far from being democratic: here it is.
I really hope people in Germany continue …

"Journalism screwed itself over by betting
on Meta and its profit-over-society peers.
Now, nobody trusts “the media” and
everyone is going bankrupt. The next bet
is on generative AI, with its inability to
distinguish truth from “hallucinations” –
fabrications that on the page become lies.
The Continent is an attempt to prove
journalism can be done differently.
Expect more of this in what our team
has decided to call our “serious era”.
We’re no longer a start-up. We’re going
to empower more people with quality
journalism. We’re going to help others
launch newspapers. We’re going to
stay sane. And we’re going to prove
that African excellence can set global
standards."
@… reaches 5 years and 200 issues. If you're not already receiving their copy via @… (or email, telegram or WhatsApp if you must) then it's really worth signing up to remind yourself just how big and diverse the world ist.
This weeks highlights are an extraordinary story about how Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe directly interfered with Mozambique's election. Plus a frankly beautiful photo piece on Addis Ababa

The liberal obsession with optics serves the right and persuades no one. There is literally an active ethnic cleansing happening in the US right now, and the only thing that matters is making that as hard as possible to carry out.
Anarchists destroying intelligence assets saves lives. Every escooter thrown at a cop car is one less escort for a goon too afraid to kidnap random brown people without being flanked by a branch full of bad apples. Spray paint is not violence. Vandalism is not violence. Community self defense in all forms is legitimate.
Make no mistake, these raids are about changing demographics. Demographic trends have been shifting blue for a long time, and the right has, for a long time, been blaming "white replacement." Conspiracy theory aside, Democrats have also been relying on the growth of black and brown voters as a block. The nuances of whiteness as an identity are lost on the current administration and their supporters. They see that "white people will be a minority by 2050" and equate that with the "end of Western Civilization."
The only way to "save Western Civilization" is to change those demographics. Forced birth and forced removal are two sides of the same white nationalist objective. Of course they can't have due process, because they need to be able to kidnap anyone who they see as a threat to their demographic future.
They don't care about optics. The plan is to murder away any threat and flood everyone else with propaganda. There is no mythical middle. There's no one unconvinced. They know this, but they win when democrats buy that myth and save the police the work of policing the protests.
If your protest is 90% "peaceful," they'll take pictures of the 10% that isn't. If it's 99% peaceful, they'll shoot rubber bullets and teargas until someone throws a brick and take 100 pictures from a dozen angles. If its 100% "peaceful" and no one can be provoked, they'll generate pictures with AI or photoshop like they did during the George Floyd uprising and the pictures from the CHOP/CHAZ. Do you have literally no memory?
#USPol #FiftyFiftyOne #50501movenent #resistance #NoKingsDay #NoKingsDayOfAction

Nach etwas Recherche (die man von Journalist*innen erwarten könnte) geht es um ein Videointerview, das JJ wohl dem spanischen Medium abc.es gab.
ABC hat 50 Sekunden als Short veröffentlicht:
#esc #eurovision #Israel #jj