Quote of the Day

A Psychotherapist Who Uses AI to Transcribe Sessions So They Can Refresh Their Memory About an Exact Phrase While They’re Making Notes Is a Centaur. A Psychotherapist Who Monitors 20 Chat Sessions with LLM “Therapists” in Order to Intervene If the LLM Starts Telling Patients to Kill Themselves Is a “Reverse Centaur.” This Situation Makes It Impossible for Them to Truly Help “Their” Patients; They Are an “Accountability Sink,” Installed to Absorb the Blame When a Patient Is Harmed by the AI.

—Cory Doctorow describing how the real goal of AI is to eliminate the possibility of independence and professional standards among what should be professional employees.

As I have noted before, the way to deal with this is to suspend IP protections on AI data sets and models.

Once you eliminate the profit motive, the people remaining in the field will not spend their time figuring what sort of reckless shit that they can do to get their cut of the next funding funding round. 

Growing up, I assumed that being a "professional" meant that you were getting paid to do something. That's a perfectly valid definition (I still remember feeling like a "pro" the first time I got paid for my writing), but "professional" has another, far more important definition.

In this other sense of the word, a "professional" is someone bound to a code of conduct that supersedes both the demands of their employer and the demands of the state. Think of a doctor's Hippocratic Oath: having sworn to "first do no harm," a doctor is (literally) duty-bound to refuse orders to harm their patients. If a hospital administrator, a police officer or a judge orders a doctor to harm their patient, they are supposed to refuse. Indeed, depending on how you feel about oaths, they are required to refuse.

There are many "professions" bound to codes of conduct, policed to a greater or lesser extent by "colleges" or other professional associations, many of which have the power to bar a member from the profession for "professional misconduct." Think of lawyers, accountants, medical professionals, librarians, teachers, some engineers, etc.

While all of these fields are very different in terms of the work they do, they share one important trait: they are all fields that AI bros swear will be replaced by chatbots in the near future.

………

I hold a bedrock view that even though an AI can't do your job, an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:

But why are bosses such easy marks for these gabby AI hustlers? Partly, it's because an AI can probably do your boss's job – if 90% of your job is answering email and delegating tasks, and if you are richly rewarded for success but get to blame failure on your underlings, then, yeah, an AI can totally do that job. 

……… 

That certainly explains why bosses are so thrilled by the prospect of swapping professionals for chatbots. What a relief it would be to fire everyone who is professionally required to tell you to fuck off when you want them to do stupid and/or dangerous things; so you could replace them with servile, groveling LLMs that punctuate their sentences with hymns to your vision and brilliance!