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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

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Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#61

Post by Kiro »

mwhitfield wrote: post #57
Kiro wrote: post #53

> it’s a useful technology that is very likely overhyped to the point of catastrophe I wish more AI skeptics would take this position but no, it's imperative to claim that it's completely useless.

I've had *very* much the opposite experience. Very nearly every AI skeptic take I read has exactly this opinion, if not always so well-articulated (until the last section, which lost me). But counterarguments always attack the complete strawman of "AI is utterly useless," which very few people, at least within the confines of the tech and business commentariat, are making.

Maybe I'm focusing too much in the hardliners but I see it everywhere, especially in tech.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#63

Post by amunozo »

exceptione wrote: post #46
philipkglass wrote: post #3

I think that what is really behind the AI bubble is the same thing behind most money, power, and influence: land and resources. The AI future that is promised, whether to you and me or to the billionaires, requires the same thing: lots of energy, lots of land, and lots of water. If you just wanted land, water, and electricity, you could buy them directly instead of buying $100 million of computer hardware bundled wit…

Valid question. What the OP talks about though is that these things were not for sale normally. My takeaway from his essay is that a few oligarchs get a pass to take over all energy, by means of a manufactured crisis. When a private company can construct what is essentially a new energy city with no people and no elected representation, and do this dozens of times a year across a nation to the point that half a centu…

I did not think about it that way, but it makes perfect sense. And it is really scary. It hasn't even been a year since Trump's second term started. We still have three more years left.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#64

Post by m463 »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #26

My experience with AI in the design context tends to reflect what I think is generally true about AI in the workplace: the smaller the use case, the larger the gain. This might be the money quote, encapsulating the difference between people who say their work benefits from LLMs and those who don't. Expecting it to one-shot your entire module will leave you disappointed, using it for code completion, generating docume…

> frees you up from a lot of little trivial distractions.

I think one huge issue in my life has been: getting started

If AI helps with this, I think it is worth it.

Even if getting started is incorrect, it sparks outrage and an "I'll fix this" momentum.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#65

Post by DennisP »

muldvarp wrote: post #60
sockgrant wrote: post #14

“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…

> IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. How are we building _for_ ourselves when we literally automate away our jobs? This is probably one of the _worst_ things someone could do to me.

Software engineers been automating our own work since we built the first assembler. So far it's just made us more productive and valuable, because the demand for software has been effectively unlimited.

Maybe that will continue with AI, or maybe our long-standing habit will finally turn against us.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#66

Post by jaketoronto »

> It can take enormous amounts of time to replicate existing imagery with prompt engineering, only to have your tool of choice hiccup every now and again or just not get some specific aspect of what a person had created previously.

Yes... I don't think the current process of using a diffusion model to generate an image is the way to go. We need AI that integrates fully within existing image and design tools, so it can do things like rendering SVG, generating layers and manipulating them, the same as we would with the tool, rather than one-shot generating the full image via diffusion.

Same with code -- right now, so much AI code gen and modification, as well as code understanding, is done via raw LLM. But we have great static analysis tools available (ie what IDES do to understand code). LLMs that have access to those tools will be more precise and efficient.

It's going to take time to integrate LLMs properly with tools. And train LLMs to use the tools the best way. Until we get there, the potential is still more limited. But I think the potential is there.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#67

Post by Profan »

carlosjobim wrote: post #25
bix6 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could communicate with people before LLMs just fine though? We have hand gestures and some people learn multiple languages and google translate was pretty solid. I got by just fine in countries where I didn’t know the language because hand gestures work or someone speaks English. What is the value of losing our uniqueness to a computer that lies and makes us all talk the same?

You can maybe order in a restaurant or ask the way with hand gestures. But surely you must be able to take a higher perspective than your own, and realize that there's enormous amounts of exchange between nations with differing language, and all of this relies on some form of translation. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world have to deal with language barriers. Google Translate was far from solid, the qu…

LLMs are here and Google Translate is still bad (surely, if it was easy as just plugging the miraculous perfect llms into it, it would be perfect now?), I don't think people who think we've somehow solved translation actually understand how much it still deals extremely poorly with.

And as others have said, language is more than just "I understand these words, this other person understands my words" (in the most literal sense, ignoring nuance here), but try getting that across to someone who believes you can solve language with a technical solution :)

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#68

Post by kulahan »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #26

My experience with AI in the design context tends to reflect what I think is generally true about AI in the workplace: the smaller the use case, the larger the gain. This might be the money quote, encapsulating the difference between people who say their work benefits from LLMs and those who don't. Expecting it to one-shot your entire module will leave you disappointed, using it for code completion, generating docume…

An agentic git interface might be nice, though hallucinations seem like they could create a really messy problem. Still, you could just roll back in that case, I suppose. Anyways, it would be nice to tell it where I'm trying to get to and let it figure out how to get there.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#69

Post by xeckr »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #55
xeckr wrote: post #35

The AI race is presumably won by whomever can automate AI R&D first, thus everyone who is in an adjacent field will see the incremental benefits sooner than those further away. The further removed, the harder the takeoff once it happens.

This notion of a hard takeoff, or singularity, based on self-improving AI, is based on the implicit assumption that what's holding AI progress back is lack of AI researchers/developers, which is false. Ideas are a penny a dozen - the bottleneck is the money/compute to test them at scale. What exactly is the scenario you are imagining where more developers at a company like OpenAI (or maybe Meta, which has just laid o…

It's not hard to believe that adding AI researchers to an AI company marginally increases the rate of progress, otherwise why would the companies be clamouring for talent with eye-watering salaries? In any case, I'm not just talking about AI researchers—AGI will not only help with algorithmic efficiency improvements, but will probably make spinning up chip fabs that much easier.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#70

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

xeckr wrote: post #43
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But rather than AGI god building, a regular technology. A valuable one, but not infinite growth. AGI is a lot of things, a lot of ever moving targets, but it's never (under any sane definition) "infinite growth". That's already ASI territory / singularity and all that stuff. I see more and more people mixing the two, and arguing against ASI being a thing, when talking about AGI. "Human level competences" is AGI. Su…

Once you have AGI, you can presumably automate AI R&D, and it seems to me that the recursive self-improvement that begets ASI isn't that far away from that point.

We already have AGI - it's called humans - and frankly it's no magic bullet for AI progress.

Meta just laid 600 of them off.

All this talk of AGI, ASI, super-intelligence, and recursive self-improvement etc is just undefined masturbatory pipe dreams.

For now it's all about LLMs and agents, and you will not see anything fundamentally new until this approach has been accepted as having reached the point of diminishing returns.

The snake oil salesmen will soon tell you that they've cracked continual learning, but it'll just be memory, and still won't be the AI intern that learns on the job.

Maybe in 5 years we'll see "AlphaThought" that does a better job of reasoning.

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