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Comment by minikites | Hacker News Reader

>I feel like AI is pointed AT us rather than working FOR / WITH us more often than not.

That's not AI, that's capitalism. It's not profitable to use AI for wholesome and healthy things for people, so nobody does. It's more profitable to cram advertisements into every corner of our life, it's more profitable to mine our personal information and personal friend networks, it's more profitable to sell us a service instead of a tool. The next time you're upset at how technology is being used, think about who benefits and what their politics are, because everything is political.

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I would like to push back against this a bit. You, along with most people in this thread, probably suffer from availability bias. People only interact with AI/ML systems when they are surfaced to them, and currently the most popular channel to surface ML is ads. Of course I have my own biases, but I think is an important critique. As Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

> It's not profitable to use AI for wholesome and healthy things for people, so nobody does

The purpose of the ML systems I build is to detect when things go wrong in order to keep people safe. These systems are both important and extremely valuable. They just aren't quite as sexy as the latest computer vision or large language models. But that's ok. Normal people only become aware of such systems when things go horribly wrong. It's sort of like plumbing in that regard.

I'd say there's just outright negativity bias in society nowadays when it comes to technology.

Even if ads were the biggest use of AI today, a glass-half-full view would be that other markets will benefit from the AI development done today for ads, as the performance gets sufficiently good enough for those fields too.

you'd be better off thinking of who benefits and what their incentives are. Because people by and large are acting based on incentives, and if you can reshape the incentive structures then you can discourage the action (by opposition eg. making it punishable) or remove the incentive altogether (through systems interventions).

Blaming it on politics leaves you with no actions to take beyond trying to talk people into acting against their incentives - which you can do, but it's not easy to get people to change their minds en-masse.

>if you can reshape the incentive structures then you can discourage the action

Yes, which is why it's important to be politically involved, governments are the ones with power to change incentive structures at the scale of large companies or society-wide. I do agree with your first paragraph, but your second paragraph does not make sense to me, it's not "blaming it on politics", politics is the exact mechanism to enact the changes you refer to in your first paragraph.

perhaps we're thinking of politics in different senses - it is, after all, quite an overloaded word. I meant politics as in people's personal perspective and beliefs about the world. I agree that engaging in the politics of changing our governance for the better is necessary.

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