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Shunning AI is the human choice

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#431

Post by tavavex »

velcrovan wrote: post #318
egui wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who hate "AI" are correctly understanding it as a political project, not simply a technology. Ali Alkhatib's definition here is clarifying in this regard: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai

To me this just muddies the waters further. If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project? I would agree that there is a political project happening in the AI space (and that it predates modern AI); I think it's worth giving that political project a distinct name, rather than conflating a term already widely used and understood very differently by normal people.

> If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project?

No. Obviously, what you do on your PC is inconsequential to the rest of society. But despite this, AI and its consequences in big tech have become so thoroughly linked because the entities that develop and profit off of AI use are so big and influential over the rest of us. The hobbyist space isn't what people even think about.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#432

Post by saulpw »

user34283 wrote: post #392
hack1312 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is plainly delusional. There already is abundance, global crop lands produce enough calories to feed twice the world’s population[0]. Greed is the reason for inequality and “AI” is not solving that. It is pure wishful utopian thinking to believe that there will be some massive AI-initiated abundance. [0] https://www.oneearth.org/half-the-worlds-food-never-feeds-pe...

It would seem to me that the main source of food insecurity is violent conflict rather than greed.

The main source of famine is corruption. Ireland had enough food, but it was exported to rich people.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#433

Post by jesse_dot_id »

seidleroni wrote: post #379
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ecological considerations are wildly overstated. Data centres in general != AI, and other industries, including meat production and (ironically) paper for print all use far more water and create more damage. This might change in the future if the planned insanely huge data centres get built and used. But today the situation is clear - AI isn't any more ecologically damaging than other popular data centred activit…

Also, I just listened to the latest Volts podcast and they make the claim that data centers will actually lower the cost of electricity fairly soon (~2030). Very counterintuitive but it does make sense. We'll find out soon enough. https://www.volts.wtf/p/sooner-than-you-think-electricity

I've been telling my friends this since LLMs launched. If your interest is in lowering the use of fossil fuels, then a global race for compute is great because the increased demand is probably going to usher in a nuclear/solar revolution in the energy sector.

It feels like a very large segment, on both sides of this argument, is completely incapable of forming nuanced opinions on this stuff.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#434

Post by rf15 »

BosunoB wrote: post #93

Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need to in order to survive is probably in the low single digits. Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against hum…

> Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good.

It's this "path of least resistance life style" that ruins a lot in our society. Yes, being wasteful is bad, but not appreciating the work is also bad.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#435

Post by vrganj »

bmink wrote: post #427
vrganj wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't even get me started on the socioeconomic considerations! AGI is a savior figure for the capitalist class. A tech version of the Second Coming, delivering them from the pesky demands of workers, like a living wage or (gasp!) sick leave. That's why they're all so obsessed with it, it has religious-ideological component to them. When you hear them talk about AGI, there's always this weird eschatological vibe with…

> Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further. Yes, our new generation of overlords seem to be socially and emotionally stunted and exhibit an alarming naivete about the world. This worries me almost as much as the tech itself. It is impossible to predict the future but in the past when a ruling class completely disregarded the effects of their greed and excess…

I blame the disdain for humanities, philosophy and the liberal arts.

Not just with the overlords, but also with our fellow nerds. We're all so busy trying to see if we can build something that we don't stop and think if we should build something, what consequences that might have or what history has taught us.

Theres a reason those fields of study are important.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#436

Post by orangecoffee »

dspillett wrote: post #337
splittydev wrote: post #2

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

To be frank I'm having a hard time already. I was already wanting to be out of tech as a job because after years of mental issues since 2020ish I've come to realise that remote working is a significant factor in that. Being in a company where all I hear day-in day-out when I do talk to people is “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI…

One idea we have discussed in my network is if as an industry reset we all said CS should become a 2X to 6X minimum wage career. So say 30k beginner to 100K senior/lead. This would keep many more jobs available and open. But I guess it would not be acceptable to many?

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#437

Post by sifar »

squidbeak wrote: post #356
sifar wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swords, bows and arrows, castles were all here to stay. Technologies fade away when they are no longer useful, cost/benefit ratio is too high or something better comes along. It is question of when.

What tech can you imagine that would make the conversion of electricity into thought 'no longer useful'?

This is an interesting question that I haven't thought about, thanks.

What we currently have is a simulacrum of thought - albeit a good one.

Any technology is useful only in the sense that it helps us with solving the problems we are dealing with in that time. When we face issues that a pseudo-thought is not useful in tackling or worse is one of the causes - this will recede in the background.

Beyond that, the implicit assumption in the question is that thinking is the highest form of activity that is useful to us.

I don't know how my thoughts arise but thinking happens when I engage with them. I think what we look for is meaning in our lives and thinking helps us generate/achieve one, whether real or illusory.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#438

Post by jesse_dot_id »

esseph wrote: post #368
52-6F-62 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you would be banning trains if they were built to just run smack into the centre of town squares loaded with bombs, rendering the cities to dust, as a part of their design and boasted about by the owners. At least until the maniacally evil train ownership debacle was better organized to prevent such harm in their core application.

There are datacenters all over the place and have been for a very long time. Some of them host physical servers for people and companies, maybe only a literal closet somewhere in a building. Others are giant hyperscaler datacenters that have tons of 24/7 lighting and are the size of multiple football fields. We need to be very careful here, or we're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

That is also my concern. This feels like a Satanic panic type of thing and if people don't form nuanced opinions, politicians will latch on to the issue and before you know it, many people who are heavily reliant on machine learning who don't realize it are going to have a bad time when stuff starts getting banned.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#439

Post by layer8 »

vrganj wrote: post #349
frizlab wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.

Don't even get me started on the socioeconomic considerations! AGI is a savior figure for the capitalist class. A tech version of the Second Coming, delivering them from the pesky demands of workers, like a living wage or (gasp!) sick leave. That's why they're all so obsessed with it, it has religious-ideological component to them. When you hear them talk about AGI, there's always this weird eschatological vibe with…

> who's gonna buy all their stuff then?

The top 10% earners in the US account for half of all consumer spending. The capitalist class may be counting on that imbalance to only strengthen.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#440

Post by ihumanable »

thrw045 wrote: post #65

To me AI is a really strange technology. When it works it works very well, but at the same time it can't be trusted because of hallucinations. I still get hallucinations just as I did 2 years ago. Nothing has changed. Some part of me feels like it should be shut down for that alone so that it doesn't spread misinformation all over the place. I also think most of what AI generates is slop and nowhere near the quality…

I don't use much AI, but we have an AI agent that reviews all of our PRs at work.

It's pretty good, I actually like it because it's very thorough and catches real things.

On a recent PR though it very confidently pointed out an "error" and suggested a "fix." Now I authored this code by hand and the "error" was it going "this one doesn't look like all the other ones" and I'm a relatively consistent person so it's not the kind of mistake I would make, which means I probably put thought in and the difference was intentional.

I looked at it's suggestion carefully and my original code was correct, the "fix" would have broken the logic. Not a huge deal all things said.

But I'm looking back at it's original report, it's comprehensive, confident, and ends with "Reply 'fix this for me' and I will fix it" and it made me think about more junior engineers.

I double checked it because I had written the code by hand, I understood the context, I also have enough experience to know that if I wrote this one function differently there was probably a good reason. But if I were earlier in my career, with less experience, would I have just clicked the easy button?

Probably. Especially if everyday I'm clicking the easy button.

Highway engineers used to think it was a good idea to make highways as straight as possible, people going in a straight line is easiest right? They realized that if you didn't put some curves in the road that people would just disengage and a perfect straight "easy" highway was much more dangerous than one with curves. I feel like AI is an "easy" highway

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