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I trying out PFAS, but I think asbestos works!

So I’m 30 years I’m going to have to sit through a mandatory training course at work on how to recognize AI and then call a special AI removal company. Fun times.

Wait I went to the internet to learn more about this and asbestos isn’t actually manufactured but MINED? I had no idea and assumed the substance itself was synthetic. (These harms all still true, but perhaps more accurate to say “its use in creating” rather than “its creation”) who’d have thought??

Well worth having a look at the prescient keynote by Maciej Ceglowski in 2015 where he compares Big Data to Nuclear Energy. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAXL...

Haunted by Data - Maciej CeglowskiYouTube video by O'Reillywww.youtube.com

I get the comparison, but I think it’s not quite right. Asbestos occurs naturally and although toxic and harmful, did work as advertised.

The phrase "Sentient asbestos" can not be used in any good way with the 1, and only 1, exception as a pretty decent name for a punk band. I know AI isn't Sentient but I feel like "Sentient asbestos" correctly gets the feeling across. I may have subconsciously written that in John Oliver's voice.

a man in a suit and tie says that nothing is fine hereALT: a man in a suit and tie says that nothing is fine heremedia.tenor.com

AI is the asbestos of the mind.

I think asbestos is particularly useful as a metaphor because there were actually things it was pretty good at/useful for! Same for lead. Just too many downsides and now a pain in the ass to deal with.

Except asbestos was and is actually useful and is naturally occurring. LLMs are just not.

In terms of regulation, I'd like to see it treated like nuclear technology.

The the funnier metaphor: A.I. is a thneed

Love it ! I also read that AI is also like radium. Right after its discovery, it was everywhere... Right even to the toothpaste. You can imagine the deadly consequences.

I like the asbestos and cocaine analogies! I feel like "the devil" is in both those: bsky.app/profile/susa...

Radium was also one of those “use it for everything” materials that was extremely dangerous!

Mesothelioma is a terrible way to die. I know metaphors aren’t meant to be literal, but maybe AI can be compared to something that isn’t traumatizing to families

Or teflon, because Dupont knew the issues it caused before they released it and did it anyway

That's unfair, asbestos was actually pretty effective at what it was used

Hard to trust any information before the advent of llms. Data published below 2022 is now prewar steel. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-bac...

I don't find it apt. Asbestos was already widely used when the links between exposure and lung cancer was established. Of course, there was suppression of damning information, but it was eventually banned. For AI, problems are being identified and debated *before* the technology is released.

Asbestos. WE COULDN'T LIVE THE WAY WE DO WITHOUT IT.

Hard disagree, asbestos is actually fireproof.

If you use Wafrn, you can turn on a setting that automatically changes "AI" into whatever word you want, the default being "cocaine" #I-myself-have-it-set-to-"abysmal-dogshit"

Asbestos is a natural mineral, it's just like how salt is deadly to slugs

📌

I think the issue I have with this metaphor is that asbestos actually worked for its purported uses. I suppose cocaine also works as a stimulant, so maybe that metaphor is flawed in the same way.

y'all heard about the infrasound produced by datacenters causing people to like. vomit they guts up and shit like that.

Oh my god we are STILL dealing wirh asbestos

Now imagine if before we actually had asbestos, we had a lifetime of human philosophers and writers considering how asbestos would be very likely to be dangerous, and within a year of the first asbestos expert in the field warning that it did not have any of those magical properties to begin with

Have a “AI is nuclear fallout” under review now

And, the less we mess with it, the less harm it causes

Metaphor also works. Successors to asbestos are smaller uses, safer, and treated as a tool not something to hype up. Much like how the few useful cases for AIs don't need hyperscalers , are open source, are not black boxes, and are sized for the task, and sufficiently secured.

True. I also heard people comparing AI to the thneeds from the lorax which makes alot of sense too if you really think about it.

You should not be allowed to use AI for anthing you don't already know how how to do, just like you shouldn't be allowed to use a calculator to do math you don't understand.

I'm not sure about the walls, but it's definitely in the Windows.

How does Asbestos help militaries target civilians though? I would say that Meth is more fitting. It enhances your abilities and energizes you. You will be snapping to them like aim-bot.

Interesting. Asbestos is Natural, Machine Learning is not.

AIsbestos

And there are stupid folks engaged in the discourse much like Bart Simpson saying "That's not enough! We demand more asbestos!"

More asbestos, more asbestos! - The SimpsonsYouTube video by Lincoln Squirrelm.youtube.com

Excellent! (I went with lead in gas and out of smelters. Piece coming out in American Historical Association's Perspectives.)

This is super accurate and that's super depressing.

i'd argue that genAI is actually addictive to use in a way that asbestos is not (and that's a major component in its proliferation). so it's more of an cocainesbestos

The "it's in the walls now" part hits different when you think about how we're building entire epistemologies around these systems. That slow-burn toxicity angle is fascinating — like we won't know what we've breathed in until decades later.

That or tetraethyl lead

Thalidomide.

also the companies selling asbestos products knew for a fact it was extremely harmful, but didn't tell anyone and kept selling it

Yes. Forgot where I first heard this, but someone saying it was like “shoveling asbestos into the walls of society” and we’ll spend the next 100 years trying to abate its effects

I've seen this comparison crop up independently in several different circles, which really hammers home how accurate it is (particularly the part about it being in the fucking walls now).

this is a perfect metaphor

I always prefer the asbestos metaphor too because it's giving an example of something that you can call a "revolutionary technology" and it's "inevitable and forever applications" removed and make it forbidden to be used in general settings.

It’s asbestos, lead and nicotine all rolled into one.

Hmm. Also applied to pseudoscience as well.

This is the perfect analogy, right here.

That’s solid

Or radium a generation previously

FWIW, neither cocaine nor asbestos required salespeople to show up at Davos and tell politicians that if they didn't do more to force adoption the economy would collapse.

60’s Marvel, but with AI: “My new AI covered suit will DEFINITELY stop the Human Torch!” Jack and (maybe) Stan came up with some…. unorthodox uses for asbestos.

I think it's like nuclear testing. Once the world was polluted there was no going back. Carbon dates were broken forever. Now, all knowledge is polluted and as the AIs eat their own hallucinations like some terrible human-caterpillar shit eating Ouroboros, no fact will ever be testably true.

Wait, Asbestos is toxic? ALL Asbestos?What about my beloved asbestos-lined hockey mask?

And they both can lead to job loss.