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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#481

Post by dont__panic »

keeda wrote: post #455
whilenot-dev wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and we're OK with it Are we? Is anybody? Criticism doesn't need to be directed towards one thing at a time.

Well, the food industry continues churning billions in profits at the expense of our health, so statistically speaking, looks like "we" are OK with! Totally agreed that criticism should be directed where it's due. But what this thread is saying is that criticism of GenAI is misdirected. I haven't seen nearly as much consternation over e.g. the food industry as I'm seeing over AI -- an industry that increasingly looks…

Have you considered that there is a difference between:

- food, a thing that literally every human needs every 24 hours (really 6-12) to continue to live

- GenAI, a new product with dubious value that contributes significantly to the systemic enshittification of the US and global economy?

FYI whataboutism is a well known (and honestly quite lazy) fallacy and propaganda strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#482

Post by jtr1 »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #387
jtr1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly, there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology.

> the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology Especially since so many anti-crypto people immediately pivoted to anti-AI. That sudden shift in priorities makes it hard to take them seriously.

On the flip side, the crypto hype machine pretty seamlessly flipped to the AI hype machine, so it makes sense the same anti crowd shifted pretty seamlessly. Given the practical applications of crypto were minimal and the externalities were mostly crime and pollution, I’m not at all surprised that many people expect the same for AI.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#483

Post by Windchaser »

gishh wrote: post #213
roywiggins wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The water intensity of American food production would be substantially less if we gave up on frivolous things like beef, which requires water vastly out of proportion to its utility. If the water numbers for datacenters seem scary then the water use numbers for the average American's beef consumption is apocalyptic.

I appreciate that you feel this way, it’ll never happen. The US will never give up on eating meat. Full stop. For every vegan/vegetarian in the US there are probably 25 people that feed beef products to their pets on a daily basis.

> I appreciate that you feel this way, it’ll never happen. The US will never give up on eating meat. Full stop.

I don't see any signs that the US is going to give up on AI and data centers, either. (The coming AI winter notwithstanding)

For what it's worth, I've cut back quite a bit on my beef and pork consumption, and now mostly eat chicken. The environmental and ethical arguments finally got to me.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#484

Post by pessimizer »

lordleft wrote: post #59

The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.

Emmanuel Todd has been going on about "zombie" and "zero" religion in a way that is really resonating with me.

If I understand his idea correctly, these societies that were developed with a religious justification, and a huge religious component, are of course losing it in the scientific age. The first stage they go through is "zombie religion" where people don't pretend to believe in the religion any more, but still insist that they share all of its values, and often become even more fanatical in the functions that the old religion served. The second stage is "zero religion" where both the belief and the functions are gone, and all that's left is a religion shaped hole that is filled with nihilism: the strong preying on the weak, self-indulgence, and an elite retreat into often paranoid fantasy.

These stages are shaped by the particular religion that disappeared, so the Zero Catholicisms aren't the same as Zero Protestantisms aren't the same as the Zero Islams. Science, being about what works rather than why you should be doing anything, simply didn't fill up these holes that once held morality and justification. For him, it seems, the Western world is primarily in a moral crisis, and we're seeing it in the mental decay of an elite that doesn't have to justify itself to anyone, ever (after religion has died.)

Personally, I can also see this in the deep desire of some people to obey AI, but I can't see it being fruitful at all. "Because the AI said so" is not particularly inspiring or ecstatic. It's just an extension of middle-class materialistic money as grace and job as devotion, which is notoriously unfulfilling. Will AI help you succeed if it can't tell you what it means to succeed?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#485

Post by buu700 »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #457
buu700 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they're separate issues. Someone could plausibly take the position that air travel should be banned for environmental reasons, but that has no relevance to the utility of air travel. If a group of people were loudly proclaiming that planes were not only bad but useless, anyone who routinely uses planes would obviously find them non-credible.

They're not separate at all, especially if the question is "How hard should we push people to use this." To be clear, there are a lot of people who routinely used airplanes who don't post-covid, but insisted that they had to. Yeah, I think it's pretty wasteful to fly across the country for a 30 minute meeting. Most don't fly at all. I don't know what mass-psychosis white collar industries were under to think that was…

They're 100% separate. "Planes aren't useful" and "planes don't work" are completely different sentiments than "it's pretty wasteful to fly across the country for a 30 minute meeting" and "we shouldn't push people hard to use air travel".

I know for a fact that planes work, because I've been on a plane and observed it lifting me high off the ground and rapidly transporting me to a distant location. The fact that planes typically emit CO2 doesn't make their existence and utility some kind of mass hallucination.

This distinction may sound a bit silly, because I assume we all agree that planes literally work. But the point I'm making is as it applies to AI. Like many people, I know from experience that AI isn't vaporware and is extremely useful for many purposes. I'm sure many others haven't had the same experience for various reasons, and factually report their observations in good faith — but that's different from pushing a narrative which one wishes to be true, regardless of how valid the reasons for that wish may be.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#486

Post by tialaramex »

jimbokun wrote: post #365
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That one struck me as... weird people on both ends. But this is Musk, who is deep into the Roko's Basilisk idea [0] (in fact, supposedly he and Grimes bonded over that) where AGI is inevitable, AGI will dominate like the Matrix and Skynet, and anyone that didn't work hard to make AGI a reality will be yote in the Torment Nexus. That is, if you don't build the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create T…

It's never been explained to me why a god like AI would care one way or another whether people tried to bring it into being or not. I mean the AGI exists now, hurting the people that didn't work hard enough to bring it into existence won't benefit the AGI in any way.

God-like AI feels like we're really overestimating how tough the problem "Destroy humans" would be and so we've imagined this very impressive reason it could happen when actually we're fragile and might more or less blow away by mistake.

It seems we're much more likely to accidentally build something dumb that kills us via an unanticipated side effect. Like actual Weaboo but for society not just one business. AI helps Coca-Cola develop a new beverage that initially seems very popular and cheap so it's quickly the world's top selling drink - and then we realise, too late, that it's actually extremely addictive and withdrawal induces violent rage. Oh dear. That sort of thing.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#487

Post by tonetegeatinst »

Many arguments I see from people skeptical of AI or other revolutionary theory's seem to overlap.

I'm confident the same arguments could have been used in the industrial revolution....the industry rapidly outgrowing the supply of energy, the overinvesting by people hoping they found a golden goose by being first to market etc.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#488

Post by titzer »

wilkommen wrote: post #177
travisgriggs wrote: post #161

> As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment). Me too. But, I worry this “want” may not be realistic/scalable. Yesterday, I was trying to get some Bluetooth/BLE working on a Raspberry CM 4. I had dabbled with this 9 months ago. And things were making progress then just fine. Sud…

In the short term, it may be unrealistic (as you illustrate in your story) to try to successfully navigate the increasingly fragmented, fragile, and overly complex technological world we have created without genAI's assistance. But in the medium to long term, I have a hard time seeing how a world that's so complex that we can't navigate it without genAI can survive. Someday our cars will once again have to be simple…

While I generally agree with this, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, AI could be smart enough to reach the "enlightened master engineer" and can reach super-human levels of...simplification. In some ways, complexity can result from improper layering and abstraction inversion. It takes a holistic view to realize that the lines (i.e. interfaces) between layers were drawn improperly and redesign everything together, achieving an overall simplification.

A good example is the web platform. It's just enormous...to the point that no human can really understand how it all even works. And I say that as someone who worked for a long time on a narrow part of that stack (V8). It being only a little over a million lines of code, it is incredibly intricate and subtle, because it implements a pretty weird language, has lots of optimizations, advanced GC, multiple compilers, etc. And that's just the JS engine. Add in the layout engine, rendering engine, multi-process architecture...it's beyond the comprehension a single mind.

We're not yet at the level that an AI can understand code really deeply yet, but may we will reach the point where an AI understands enough of it and can code competently enough to start over from scratch and build something we can both understand and does the things we actually want it to do.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#489

Post by MangoToupe »

daerogami wrote: post #479
MangoToupe wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with organized religion was the "organized" part What on earth is "unorganized" religion? How is such a concept distinct from the concepts of "worldview" or "ideology"? When people use the term, I assume automatically they're referring to abrahamic faiths—especially in contrast to "atheism".

It just means a religion with a formal structure and leadership behind it. The term points to the institution and its influence, not the beliefs themselves. An unorganized religion is basically personal or informal practice without a central authority, like an individual or essentially a book club.

> An unorganized religion is basically personal or informal practice without a central authority, like an individual or essentially a book club.

Right, but I don't know what is referred to by "practice" that is at all distinct from "worldview" or "ideology".

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#490

Post by simianwords »

danaris wrote: post #372
simianwords wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is also a fraction of golf courses which you again ignore. this is just typical "don't do anything!!" ism. there's no argument here.. even if data centres used .00001 millilitre of water you would say the same thing.

Oh, I think golf courses shouldn't exist. They're awful in a number of ways. You want to play golf? VR or minigolf. But (as I pointed out elsewhere in this discussion [0]) why should I have to mention everything that uses water in a way I think is detrimental in order to be allowed to talk about why I think this thing uses water in a way that is detrimental? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927558

if you are at the point where you have to suggest golf courses shouldn't exist then sorry we are completely on different page here.

your logic will extend to just doing nothing at all because it will take resources from other things that you value.

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