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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

blog.jakesaunders.dev

81–90 of 570 posts

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#81
post #74
post #18

AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

> incredible amounts of ... energy So tired of seeing this trope. Data center energy expenditure is like less than 1% of worldwide energy expenditure[1]. Have you heard of mining? Or agriculture? Or cars/airplanes/ships? It's just factually wrong and alarmist to spread the fake news that AI has any measurable effect on climate change. [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-...

It's not just the absolute expenditure. It's the type of expenditure.

https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-...

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#82
post #54

I’m confused why the hype and the investment got so high. And why everyone treats it like a race. Why can’t we gradually develop it like dna sequencing.

To be fair, DNA sequencing was very hyped up (although not nearly as much as AI). The HGP finished two years ahead of schedule, which is sort of unheard of for something in it's domain, and was mainly a result of massive public interest about personalized medicine and the like. I will admit that a ton of foundational DNA sequencing stuff evolved over decades, but the massive leap forward in the early 2000s is comparable to the LLM hype now.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#85
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No, it’s… fine. Useful in a limited capacity. Not the machine god, but not machine Satan either. The reality is kind of boring.

This summarizes mostly how I feel about it. It's a tool like any other tool we have advanced since the beginning of human civilization

Machine tools replaced blacksmiths

CNC machines replaced manual machines.

Robots replaced CNC machine tenders

CAD replaced draftsman (and also pushed that job onto engineers (grr))

P&P robots replaced human production lines.

The steam train replaced the horse and cart

This is a tale as old as time itself

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#88
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't see the threat from AI as capitalist at all, but more so feudalist. I mean, if things go in the direction of the worst-case scenario. It seems like the power potential transcends the problems of capitalism entirely. But for now it's strictly hypothetical. Nothing I'm doing with AI matters enough to really make any statements about a broader scale in my field, let alone in entire economies.

Capitalism is just feudalism that works for the merchant class

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#90
post #77

The debate around "AGI" is the thing that gets me. People just moving goalposts and arbitrarily applying their own standards makes for a lot of wheel spinning

AI enthusiasts love to misuse and abuse the goalpost metaphor. It’s practically always an attempt to silence opponents.
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