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The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

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Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#321

Post by salawat »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #118
schoen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concern I hear the most (which I don't think is common among the general public) is the existential risk one (that an AI may be created that drastically exceeds human intelligence, and that it may accidentally be incentivized to take actions that destroy most or all of human civilization).

> concern I hear the most (which I don't think is common among the general public) is the existential risk one Altman and friends' "stop us before we shoot grandma" PR tour in 2023 and '24 is largely the cause of this AI backlash. If you tell everyone you're building something that will kill us all, you will scare up investors. But you'll also turn the public against you. In truth, we have zero evidence of the alignm…

The "Alignment Problem" is already here. We just call it Corporate Governance. We happen to be failing at it massively right now.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#322

Post by mvdtnz »

omikun wrote: post #311
troosevelt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

People complain UBI doesn’t make mathematical sense doesn’t realize our current economy doesn’t make mathematical sense either. All this prosperity we in the developed world get comes at the cost of extracting wealth from the rest of the world and all government taking on ever more debt.

That's an absolutely enormous claim to make with zero evidence.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#323

Post by BrenBarn »

cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

There is another critique that is not specific to AI but I think is bigger than all of these: that a relatively small number of large companies, and the small number of very wealthy people who control those companies, have an outsize influence on many aspects of society. AI is the poster child for this right now, but tech companies in general are also reviled, and more generally all kinds of companies (media, fossil fuels, etc.) are targets of opprobrium.

From this perspective, the main irritation of AI is that it is the biggest, most intrusive case of "some rich guy is messing with my life". This is driven largely from the willingness of a small number of rich people to lose large amounts of money shoving AI down everyone's throats in the hope that that will eventually lead to them recouping those losses.

I believe a significant amount of AI criticism is really about this, and that means we need to resolve the overall issues of wealth inequality and economic skewing. People would be much less angry about AI if its development and ownership were more diffuse, and if the patterns of its use were more directly connected to its current observable abilities, rather than based on what some group of insiders thinks about how much its stocks may go up in the future.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#324

Post by JuniperMesos »

retired wrote: post #183
JuniperMesos wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For The Netherlands, construction work causes emissions. There are limits to these emissions. Building a data center means you can't simultaneously build a house anywhere nearby the construction site as that would cause the local emissions to go over the set limits. This is an insane regulation, and I wonder if it was passed by NIMBYs whose actual goal is to prevent the construction of housing near them.

I recently read an article that 8 cows needed to be moved 5 kilometers so they could build a bicycle path. The cows combined with the construction of the new bicycle path caused too much local emissions. The municipality bought the emissions rights from the farmers that held those 8 cows and the farmers then had to move/remove/slaughter 8 cows. Welcome to The Netherlands.

This is the sort of thing that people are willing to elect politicians who deny the existence of global warming in order to avoid.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#325

Post by contingencies »

mvdtnz wrote: post #322
omikun wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People complain UBI doesn’t make mathematical sense doesn’t realize our current economy doesn’t make mathematical sense either. All this prosperity we in the developed world get comes at the cost of extracting wealth from the rest of the world and all government taking on ever more debt.

That's an absolutely enormous claim to make with zero evidence.

The modern (social or economic) history of China, Europe, Russia, UK, US are all good case studies. In aggregate, I think they underscore the reality of the system. Every year we now have high profile people coming out of the system screaming about how insane it is: bankers, traders, politicians, military intelligence. If you had to boil it down to a single book debunking late 20th century pax Americana international macro-economics, it's hard to go past Confessions of an Economic Hitman, although not written formally. I've personally had chapter one verified by an Indonesian diplomat. Alternatively, take the quippy summary of a world-recognized capitalist, George Soros: Classical economics is based on a false analogy with Newtonian physics.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#326

Post by TheScaryOne »

cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

>The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society.

This was the argument about robots. It did not pan out. No taxes materialized. Robots and Automated Machines have not shared productivity. In fact, things like self-checkout has spread the labor load to the customer, instead of the company.

>We have the technology to produce energy in sustainable ways, but it is expensive

AI Datacenters should be completely sustainably self-powered. Full stop. We did not spend decades bringing down the cost of power only to have it all hoovered up by robber barons who "need" it to be the first immortal AI God. We did not install water treatment plants to bring down our water usage rates just to feed the machine spirit.

>How do we treat AI creative work? How much creative work do we feel comfortable handing over to AI?

Someone said it as a joke, but I want AI to be doing my dishes and sorting my laundry while I write books and compose music. I don't want AI writing books and composing music so I have more time to do my dishes and sort my laundry.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#327

Post by rvz »

YZF wrote: post #255
rvz wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a surprise. Seems like AI is more hated than crypto and this shows that the AI industry is in a bubble. At least crypto does not take away more jobs than it creates, where as we all know AI takes away more jobs and no-one can give a solution or explain what the "new jobs" are. Because the value from AI is to automate the jobs from humans. Claiming otherwise is being intellectually dishonest. Same goes for definin…

Crypto sucks energy and creates no value. It's complete and utter speculative garbage that also destroys the planet. AI has real value. We can argue about whether the cost is worth the value, whether we're on an exponential improvement curve or not, whether it ends up creating jobs or destroying jobs, but AI is mind blowing science fiction that nobody would have believed you will exist 10 years ago.

> Crypto sucks energy and creates no value. It's complete and utter speculative garbage that also destroys the planet.

All of what you said is false.

Stablecoins are not speculative and have value, and you can send money at a low fee, low cost, worldwide to wallets on the same day, right now with far less energy than today's "AI".

> AI has real value.

What do you mean by "AI" specifically? LLMs in data centers?

The value in for this mysterious "AI" or even "AGI" paradise is not even for you. It is actually used against you.

> We can argue about whether the cost is worth the value, whether we're on an exponential improvement curve or not

You understand that the current iteration of "AI" needs tens of gigawatts of energy and hundreds of billions of dollars and wasteful amounts of water which causes electricity prices in certain cities to skyrocket?

The way that it is financed appears to be close to fraudulent with vague "commitments" and mountains of debt that would take almost a trillion dollars in revenue to pay off the data centre build out.

> whether it ends up creating jobs or destroying jobs, but AI is mind blowing science fiction that nobody would have believed you will exist 10 years ago.

Assuming after the data centers will be built (if they ever will be), can you name what are those new jobs that will be created from "AI"?

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#328

Post by card_zero »

zozbot234 wrote: post #304
cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

The main critique of AI is that it's a dumb hallucinating parrot. It can't do genuine human quality work at all, outside of extremely narrow domains like basic translation and copyediting. Even for Q&A, while it can be useful by quickly accessing a huge storehouse of learned knowledge, the vulnerability to hallucinations means that human expert verification will always be required.

I'll note that there can be multiple main critiques coming from an incoherent set of viewpoints, since this is public opinion we're talking about.

Between "AI doing creative work", if you believe, and "fraud", there's all the low-key filler material that's sub-creative and sub-fraudulent. There's a similarity between the phrase it was made with AI and phrases like I didn't bake your cake myself, it came from a store or sorry, it's just a cheap plastic one. So part of AI's image is that it's a flourishing new source of disappointment.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#329

Post by keybored »

lpcvoid wrote: post #110
keybored wrote: post #65

Weird to have these threads and then fifteen minutes later there will be a 350+ comment, 500+ votes thread about some 200 USD/month AI subscription service which is now the I Have Seen The Light moment and My Beautiful Side Projects Are Finally Materializing. This is creative destruction in a whole new sense. Just chugging through genuine (or human) creativity, then training on human prompting, then finally ascending…

Vibecoders are by now completely dependent on their subscriptions. Their skills are in the process of deterioration, they have no other choice. It's like heroin.

I don’t really think that’s the case. I think that any deterioration is temporary. They can get back on that horse with some starting issues.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#330

Post by danaris »

cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

Your first critique has a massive hole in it, because it assumes that every person whose job is replaced by "AI" is actually going to be done as well by the "AI" as it was by the human.

To the extent that it's even true that this is going to happen, that is laughably false.

Yes; LLMs can answer some questions well (but unreliably) and with the right setups, can be rigged to perform some tasks well (but unreliably).

There is no way they are ready to take over a single full-time job. If any employer tried, the number of errors in the performance of that job would jump by a huge amount, because LLMs are not reliable and cannot be made so.

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