Im definitely on the side that over using AI and using it commercially seems to be bad. On the other hand, it seems like a tech that has huge potential upsides. I’m not sure we can achieve a post scarcity society with all labor being done by humans. This is where I see AI becoming a massive tool. Assuming we can pair it with mechanical means of work, not strictly digital. I know it’s a touchy subject but I want to hear your opinion. As always, if you’re just going to tell me to read more, recommend literature.
Overall no but mainly from wasteful business usage without any real return. If an individual uses one instead of like streaming video or such to entertain themselves then im not sure they are not using less electricity than they otherwise would. If they are using it for searching and can get a response that is equivalent to several searches in one query then it just might break even. I they are minipulating images or creating content and they otherwise might use other software to do. Well I don’t know as I have not done a comparison and I have a suspicion that its to variable to get a good call but I would not be surprised if it ends up being pretty even. The other real problem is people doing things they otherwise would not. So before people who spent a lot of time learning and getting good at it made digital art but now its whoever and many are making things of far less value than they think it is. Also they might tell it to do the same thing again and again and it pretty much remakes the whole thing whereas a human would be just editing it a bit. The result is a bit like graffitti. A lot of garbage for the resources used but sometimes someone here and there does something good.
I don’t believe that the current definition of AI (LLM/Generative) will ever live up to half the hype. If I knew how, I’d try to make money from the hype imploding.
I even more confidently believe that it will not lead to a post-scarcity society. But most of that belief is because I don’t think humans are capable of developing such a society.
Some things are inherently scarce. You only have 24 hours in a day, and there are only so many places you can build a house.
Why don’t you think humans could develop post scarcity?
Greed. Case study: insulin.
Case study: almost every other wealthy democracy in the world besides the US and how they deal with insulin. Living in a wealthy democracy and not being able to afford insulin is a uniquely American problem.
And the most absurd thing is, only a part of the people think it is a problem to begin with.
i do think humans can develop post scarcity.
i just don’t think pedophile-made LLMs are it.
Supposedly there is some cool stuff going on in the medical field where the AI can identify abnormalities in scans better than doctors. But it’s obviously never going to be able to think.
I work in biomed R&D, and specifically spent several years in Radiology.
Industry consensus is that CAD occasionally picks up anomalies that a radiologist would have missed, but the false positives it picks up are noisy enough to largely offset that benefit. It’s fine if used as a second pass to catch areas a human missed, but doesn’t actually perform “better than a doctor” in a vacuum, precisely because it’s not thinking for itself and e.g. cross referencing the imaging against clinical history.
I think that’s just pattern matching like facial recognition. It covers more imaging in less time and can help identify areas of concern. But that doesn’t need trillions of dollars.
A deep learning model can tell biological sex from retina pictures, but not even the best eye doctors can. You feed it a pile of images labeled “these are from men” and “these are from women,” and it figures out the differences and applies that knowledge to pictures it’s never seen before. As far as I know, we still don’t know what exactly it’s picking up on - or if it’s even something a human could distinguish - but for an AI it’s not a problem.
I think the term “AI” has just been a bit stained by all the people conflating it with GenAI. Yes, GenAI is AI, but the term AI covers all kinds of systems, and GenAI is just one subcategory.
No
No; in fact, I don’t think the people behind AI care about the future at all. They’re just trying to grab what they can in a hurry and dip when the bubble pops. They’ll fuck off to the Caribbean or something like that and live off the riches, and let us clean up their mess.
Bummer
The kind of AI you’re talking about that could replace human labour to the point of making something like a post-scarcity society happen isn’t even on the horizon, and I don’t believe the llm hype has any chance of leading to it at any point. But even if it were the case, imo there’s no scenario where capitalist societies transition to a post-scarcity utopia where human labor is replaced by machine labor through technological innovation.
The 19th and 20th centuries are a history of human labor being displaced rather than replaced by innovation. People are made obsolete in their own jobs, but the fundamental threat of “work or starve” remains structural. So people who are older, already specialized and who can’t easily change occupations become atrociously poor or straight up die, and younger people find and invest their formative years in new ways to work, producing stuff that’s not yet automated.
So before you can even think about a post-scarcity utopia you need something like ubi and a socialist organization where people who get innovated out of their jobs can still live, but if you have that kind of society I think it would naturally orient itself toward degrowth and production of what is needed through human labor, rather than the kind of overproduction frenzy necessary for everyone’s labor to be continuously replaced with metal and silicium.
Honestly, no. Maybe I’m just the old man yelling at the cloud here, but I only really accept the use of local AI as somewhat ethical.
These AI datacenters have caused enough harm already.
A true AGI would be the ultimate labor-saving device, but the two main issues are that we have no clue how far away we are from reaching it - and we also have no guarantees that when we do, it’s going to end well for us.
It also might not be about more compute. The human brain is generally intelligent and it doesn’t need a massive datacenter to run it.
Your analogy is bad.
The human brain doesn’t need a massive data center, but neither does the compute to run a single agent.
We build entire cities to apply multiple human brains to problems.
Yeah that makes sense. Idk just seems like we need to figure something out.
A lot of what ai is good at is very useful for automating massive state surveillance programs. AI could monitor live audio and video communication for problem phrases, for example.
Making authoritarian rule easier and cheaper is a very valuable capability to elites, though detrimantal to the world.
I think the main effect of ai will be continuing this deadly trend of power consolidation that we’ve seen since maybe the mesolithic. The power of information will be conslidated in fewer and fewer ai-oligarchs, allowing ever more intrusive states to control more people more precisely.
No. The story of hardware development is a fucking legend, it’s just tarnished by how completely fucking inept we are at using the gains. And it’s apparently getting worse all the time - my mind boggled when Electron of all things turned standard, because I would’ve thought putting Chrome into everything (including low power scenarios) was an obviously fucking blitheringly idiotic idea, but here we are. LLMs have the same problem except probably orders of magnitude worse. Aside from possibly getting worse at developing better performance, we usually seem to beeline for a way to waste as much of it as we can. Moore’s law, of course, is long dead.
I don’t think it will contribute to a post scarcity society. Increased automation only makes the marginal cost of working less bigger so we as a species tend to chhose to work the same hours to afford more cool stuff.
I think that (and have successfully used) AI can automate boring, repetitive stuff.
In its current state but I imagine it will continue to improve. When the automation is so wide spread that majority of jobs are obsolete we will have to evolve.
Future capabilities will never offset resource drain. Only resource usage optimization can.
Yes, the end goal is to create The Director so we send a traveler back to tell us “THE OPEN AI PROJECT WILL FAIL, HUMANITY WILL BE DOOMED, DO NOT GIVE BIRTH TO SAM ALTMAN”
Idk how we’ll get a T.E.L.L on his mother tho… maybe get a geo-location on the landlines? Maybe the location of the actual bed in the hospital? Just be get a travelers in there and be like “Doc I change my mind, I know I’ve been carrying this for 9 months and its almost full term, but can I get an abortion right now?” 🤭
(Btw: you should really watch Travelers, it’s worth it I promise)
That was a great show
Thanks for the recommendation
EVER is a long time.
The current implementation? Not unless they stoip training along the same lines they currently are. I think there’s some value, and you can access it pretty easily with the open source freely available models that are out there and some semi-decent hardware, but hundreds of billions to trillions in revenue for multiple corporations? Nah.
They’ll maaaaybe mitigate it by shifting people away from home computing and into connected systems, but I suspect the moment the bubble pops or hardware production levels off with their current demand people will end up realizing they can run 90% of what’s being offered in a gaming laptop from 2020.
