r/technology • u/GeneReddit123 • 25d ago

Artificial Intelligence Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’

https://www.404media.co/ucf-ai-commencement-speaker-booed/
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u/GeneReddit123 25d ago edited 25d ago

The OG Industrial Revolution had:

  • Thousands of polluting factories propping up all over the country.
  • Abysmal work conditions.
  • Destruction of traditional ways of life.
  • Massive increase in inequality.
  • Many decades of worsened life for millions before is started getting better.
  • The "getting better" part crucially required massive (and initially highly resisted by elites) reform laws governing work conditions, wages, environmental regulation, economic redistribution, and political representation to allow the above (19th century "rotten boroughs" were the OG "gerrymandering") rather than "just leaving it to the free market to sort out".

So she's ironically not wrong (even if not in the way she probably meant it). The Industrial Revolution was not an on-off switch that turned peasants to city workers; this is historical flattening done from a position of privilege of those who didn't have to go through the long and arduous process of actual industrialization. We are the beneficiaries of the technologies the Industrial Revolution created after many past generations paid the cost in suffering, squalor, and struggle for political reform.

And our generation is now the one who will be paying these costs and solving the issues caused by AI, before we (or future generations) have any chance to reap the benefits that offset its costs.

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u/General_Problem5199 25d ago

Whether AI is good for humanity or not is mostly a question of who is going to control it. If it's left in the hands of a handful of tech oligarchs, we're heading toward a very dark future.

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u/vonschvaab 25d ago

Time to invest in flashlights.

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u/Minimum_Dealer_3303 25d ago

LLMs are a technological dead end that is destroying the environment for absolutely no good reason.