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To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

musings.martyn.berlin

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Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#81

Post by SoftTalker »

ambicapter wrote: post #40
derac wrote: post #24

It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a par…

Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.

Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#82

Post by cm2012 »

mlyle wrote: post #15
217 wrote: post #8

First ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment" GUYS PLEASE The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing? There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it

Parts of it (e.g. water consumption per query) are overblown. But the degree of data center buildout and resource use, if exponential growth just continues a little longer, is going to end up being a big number. AI datacenters are already stretching electrical power grids and increasing peaker power plant use. Data centers right now are about 5% of electricity use in the US. AI could easily double that share.

Yes, any major manufacturing ends up as a big number. It is still usually worth doing!

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#83

Post by wuhhh »

senko wrote: post #6

This post, like many others, confuses AI with Big Tech (or maybe that's intentional). I can wholehartedly agree with everything said there, if I mentally replace "AI" with "big tech profitmaxxing using this new tech". I however, don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: https://blog.senko.net/how-i-want-to-use-ai

That the frontier models and subs are all big tech is probably what bothers me most about “AI” right now, but I’m bullish on advancements in the capabilities of local models. I suspect and hope that, in time, the field will level and we will have very capable local, offline models and the landscape will be much as it is now with subscription compute in the cloud for enterprise and self host / local first for indies / hackers etc.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#84

Post by toasty228 »

Silagi wrote: post #31

Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic. You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn…

Who's "they", the vast majority devs work for non tech companies doing very boring shit. We're not all hellbent on making the most $$$ while burning the world down like the silicon valley degenerates

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#85

Post by bensyverson »

derac wrote: post #24

It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a par…

Nuance was banned from the internet circa 1996, sorry

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#86

Post by skeledrew »

helterskelter wrote: post #20

This is becoming a mainstream position for a number of reasons but I think the unifying concern across many demographics is the concern about the effects on power it will have. Nobody wants an omnipresent big brother in anybody's hands, and people are waking up to the fact that the infrastructure is already there without any real safeguards, all that's really needed is cheap intelligence to handle all the data.

I'd say this is a huge reason to actually push for more AI, especially open models. I agree that there are serious environmental, etc concerns BUT there will be an even larger problem in the future when this tech becomes incorporated into pretty much everything if there are only a couple providers with a -poly on the really good models. This thing is here to stay and will only get qualitatively better, and the way to prevent/offset the "omnipresent big brother" is to ensure that everyone has reasonable access to models with decent capability and know how to properly evaluate and use them.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#87

Post by thewebguyd »

derac wrote: post #24

It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a par…

> you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech.

I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now.

Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying to stand up for your right to a safe public space brands you as evil.

There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#88

Post by cm2012 »

Tubelord wrote: post #23
217 wrote: post #8

First ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment" GUYS PLEASE The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing? There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it

Care to elaborate? Just taking the impact of data centers on locals is enough to validate his point. (Noise pollution, heat pollution and emissions from on-site gas turbines)

Local governments can do the trade off on tax revenue vs inconvenience

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#90

Post by 65 »

I do judge people for using AI. Especially engineers.

Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.

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