- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Absolutely needed: to get high efficiency for this beast … as it gets better, we’ll become too dependent.
“all of this growth is for a new technology that’s still finding its footing, and in many applications—education, medical advice, legal analysis—might be the wrong tool for the job,”
At some point, someone said the same thing about:
Is this /c/technology or /c/anti_technology because it’s hard to tell most of the time.
I’m genuinely excited about the possibilities of AI, just not in the hands of a bunch of self-serving, amoral cunts.
I completely agree. However the genie is out of the bottle. Not much we can do to prevent it at this point, but there is plenty we can do to learn about it and defend against is abuse against us.
We could nationalise it. Unless the government is also a bunch of self-serving, amoral cunts, of course.
Realistically not going to happen anytime soon in the US at least.
There’s always China… fuck.
A better analogy for AI is the discovery of asbestos or the invention of single-use plastics. Terrible fucking idea.
Well, it’s a bit better than that, simply because you can train AI with solar power. Probably nobody does that currently, as it’s easier, faster-to-market and probably (for whatever corrupt reason) cheaper for business to let it run on burning fossils/nuclear. Currently there’s an insane amount of waste, often 1000s of models are trained and only the best performing one is deployed - and then it’s just a fancy autocomplete. The better use is for prediction of material failure, new medicine and protein folding, generally improved processes.
With asbestos you get some convenience, but it’ll be for eternity a pain to find a waste management facility that will accept it.
I think it’s probably a bit early to tell for certain on that assessment. There is definitely pros and cons to all technology. Electricity production causes environmental damage, building wooden houses require logging. Plastics are a byproduct of a withering industry. Asbestos might have saved more lives than it took, but there were probably much better ways to solve fire resistant buildings.
Why all these destructive things? Capitalism requires maximizing profits above all else. So, really the question is how will capitalism fuck us over with AI? So, so many ways. That’s why it’s important that we build community understanding of this technology in order to combat it. It’s not going away. It’s here to stay. So we either put our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not here or we can embrace it and learn how it works and how to defeat it and come up with open source tooling to combat it.
I’m in the latter camp. I love technology breakthroughs and want to learn first hand the capabilities to understand how it will be used against me and how I can use it.
Plastics are great, what are you smoking, plastics?
You might have heard of these fossil fuels we’re busily running out of. And fossil is still 80% of primary energy use so there is no renewable energy transition, and renewable infrastructure is being built almost exclusively using fossil fuels.
So this means future energy rationing. What’s the business case for AI?
Restricting our energy use is not a very good end game. We need to learn how to unlock more energy production without destruction of the environment. This will happen through technological development. Temporarily rationing or conservation may be needed, but permanent is not the answer.
May I interest you in this resource? https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m
I’m not interested in books championing our reduction of human expansion. I want to see us reach out into the stars one day. Technological development and progress is needed. We need to also change our mindset on current systems. E.g., if it doesn’t maximize return on investment, forget about it. If there is a way to do it slightly cheaper even if it’s detrimental, do it cheaper. That mindset sucks.
Cars are literally privileged garbage that’s destroying the planet. Great comparison on that one.
Well only one of those is allowed to exist so you figure it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
People here are generally anti-anything. That’s what echo chambers are for.
It’s much better to be a critical thinker than mindlessly accepting whatever BS from some grifter just because it’s “accepted wisdom” in a completely brainwashed society.
I’m gladly you’re one of the few non-brainwashed humans on the Earth. So special!
Sounds like most of Lemmy. Honestly sometimes I feel it’s worse than Reddit with the constant bashing on anything except Linux, Firefox, or - for some reason - Steam. Still glad I left Reddit though.
I can hate on Firefox if it’ll make you feel better.
I didn’t leave reddit, because I consider useful the subs I use (mostly technical stuff). And yes, you’re right about the constant bashing on anything out of the herd mentality.
I am biased, I am having a ton of fun with LLMs and they are helping me achieve some personal goals. Do they use energy? Sure. Will new, more powerful technologies come along later that require even greater amounts of energy? I hope so one day. We need to find cleaner more abundant energy sources.