[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What might Aaron Schwartz have said about AI...
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Ask HN: What might Aaron Schwartz have said about AI today?
I only had the pleasure of meeting Aaron once, at the YC open house
after the first startup school in Cambridge. I was pitching sort of
a competitor to Infogami and he helpfully whipped out his Sidekick
and showed me a bunch of stuff. For the first and only time in my
life, I was immediately struck by the thought of "now _this_ is a
kid who _understands_ things." His later work only reaffirmed my
view and, though I could only watch from afar, he was critical to
building a different kind of world. His blog was always insightful
and a source of value. Often, since the announcement of ChatGPT,
I've wondered "what might Aaron have thought about this?" Perhaps
those of you who had the good fortune to know him better might
share anything he might have said about AI or knowledge silos or
the nature of information or free will or anything related?
Author : abtinf
Score : 22 points
Date : 2023-11-20 20:14 UTC (2 hours ago)
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Perhaps we should scrape all of his known public works and
| sayings to then feed into an AI bot that would tell us what he
| might have thought of any topic, much less AI.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Not to nitpick, but it's spelled 'Swartz'.
| intellectronica wrote:
| It's painful to remember that we have to go through this without
| him. Hard to tell what his approach would be. If I had to guess,
| I'd say he would do everything he can and mobilise the community
| to create free (as in freedom), open-source, decentralised AI, to
| benefit humanity.
| kramerger wrote:
| Unfortunately you either die a hero, or live long enough to see
| yourself become the villain.
|
| Just look where his old buddies are now, start with the Reddit
| folks.
| daft_pink wrote:
| I never met him in person, but I wanted to use an rss script he
| wrote, so I just emailed him as a random person from the
| internet. He quickly responded and added authentication to the
| rss software he was distributing on his blog. He was still in
| high school at that point before he became famous.
|
| What an awesome guy! He will be missed.
| ruffrey wrote:
| Feed all this blogs through a LLM, then ask it.
| mkl wrote:
| I guess he might start with "AI would at least spell my name
| right." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
|
| You may be interested in Lex Fridman's interview with Eugenia
| Kuyda: https://lexfridman.com/eugenia-kuyda/. Among other things,
| they discuss what Eugenia did with machine learning in response a
| close friend's death, in an attempt to preserve him and
| conversation with him.
| pxc wrote:
| Most public intellectuals are not petty enough to chastise
| people for misspelling or mispronouncing their names. (I've
| noticed this recently watching various interviews with on
| current events with people who have Hebrew and Arabic names.)
| Idk why Swartz would be any different.
| racl101 wrote:
| The Schwartz is strong with OP.
| westurner wrote:
| Trying to find a link to the story of Aaron et. al (with declared
| intent) generating fraudulent ScholarlyArticles, submitting them
| to journals, and measuring the journal acceptance rate.
|
| I see US vs Aaron, but no link to the SchoarlyArticle about - was
| it markov chains in like 2007 - submission of ScholarlyArticles
| and journal acceptance rates.
|
| I mean, a reddit submission with markdown from nbconvert is
| basically a ScholarlyArticle if there's review and an IRB or
| similar.
| svaha1728 wrote:
| It's crazy to think that if he would have just made a training
| set of JSTOR documents for a large language model he might have
| skirted around the copyright issues entirely.
| foogazi wrote:
| Nobody will ever know
|
| www.988lifeline.org
| zingababba wrote:
| "Before I went to college I read two books. I read a book "Moral
| Mazes" by Robert Jackall which is a study of how corporations
| work, and it's actually a fascinating book, this sociologist, he
| just picks a corporation at random and just goes and studies the
| middle managers, not the people who do any of the grunt work and
| not the big decision makers, just the people whose job is to make
| sure that things day to day get done, and he shows how even
| though they're all perfectly reasonable people, perfectly nice
| people you'd be happy to meet any of them, all the things that
| they were accomplishing were just incredibly evil. So you have
| these people in this average corporation, they were making
| decisions to blow out their worker's eardrums in the factory, to
| poison the lakes and the lagoons nearby, to make these products
| that are filled with toxic chemicals that poisoned their
| customers, not because any of them were bad people and wanted to
| kill their workers and their neighbourhood and their customers,
| but just because that was the logic of the situation they were
| in.
|
| Another book I read was a book "Understanding Power" by Noam
| Chomsky which kind of took the same sort of analysis but applied
| it to wider society which you know we're in a situation where it
| may be filled with perfectly good people but they're in these
| structures that cause them to continually do evil, to invade
| countries, to bomb people, to take money from poor people and
| give it to rich people, to do all these things that are wrong.
| These books really opened my eyes about just how bad the society
| we were living in really is." -- Aaron Swartz
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Probably similar to what his compatriots in S05 YC Batch, Emmett
| Shear and Sam Altman, think:
|
| "Why You Should Fear Machine Intelligence"
|
| https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
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(page generated 2023-11-20 23:02 UTC)