Burning the planet for a ponzi scheme isn't normal. The healthiest thing for /actual/ AI to develop is for the current addiction to LLMs to die off. For the current bets by OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc to lose steam. Prompts are a distraction, and every single company trying to commodify this are facing an impossible problem in /paying for the electricity/. Currently they're just insisting on building more power pla…
All data centres consume ~1% of global electricity. A very small fraction.
AI as Normal Technology
91–96 of 96 posts
Re: AI as Normal Technology
#92"The normal technology frame is about the relationship between technology and society. It rejects technological determinism, especially the notion of AI itself as an agent in determining its future. It is guided by lessons from past technological revolutions, such as the slow and uncertain nature of technology adoption and diffusion. It also emphasizes continuity between the past and the future trajectory of AI in terms of societal impact and the role of institutions in shaping this trajectory."
Why write it so overblown like this? You can say the same thing much more cleanly like, "AI doesn’t shape the future on its own. Society and institutions do, slowly, as with past technologies."
Re: AI as Normal Technology
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't call it a "middle" road rather a "nuanced" road (or even a "grounded" road IMO). If its a "middle" road what is it in the middle of (i.e. what "scale")? And how so? I'm not trying to be pedantic. I think our tendency to call nuanced, principled positions as "middle" encourages an inherent "hierarchy of ideas" which often leads to applying some sort of...valence to opinions and discourse. And I worry that m…
>If its a "middle" road what is it in the middle of (i.e. what "scale")? That's pretty clear. We already have two "sides": AI is the latest useless tech boondoggle that consumes vast quantities of money and energy while not actually doing anything of value vs. AI is the dawn of a new era of human existence that will fundamentally change all aspects of our world (possibly with the additional "and lead to the AGI Singu…
Re: AI as Normal Technology
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
We do not assume a status quo or equilibrium, which will hopefully be clear upon reading the paper. That's not what normal technology means. Part II of the paper describes one vision of what a world with advanced AI might look like, and it is quite different from the current world. We also say in the introduction: "The world we describe in Part II is one in which AI is far more advanced than it is today. We are not c…
My point was that you’re comparing this to other advances in human evolution, where people either remain essentially the same (status quo), but with more technology that changes how we live, or that technology will advance significantly, but to a level that we coexist with it, such that we live in some Star Trek normal (equilibrium). But, neither of these are likely with a superintelligence. We polluted. We destroyed…
People have a long history of predicting doomsday from technological change. "This time is different" is said every time, and every time is different. If we gave into fear, we would never progress, and we would just be sitting ducks to be wiped out by something other than technological change.
LLMs are very far behind human intelligence, and even non-human animal intelligence, in ways that fundamentally limit their power. They can't see the world in any way except the way that humans have chopped it up and spoon-fed it to them (e.g. can't count the number of r's in strawberry). Their capacity to notice and correct their own errors is very limited. They have no capacity to accumulate knowledge by self-initiated interaction with the world, and no credible proposal yet exists to endow them with this capability in a way that could approach human or non-human animal ability levels.
Without these basic abilities, LLMs can only be considered intelligent in the sense shared by other normal technologies, like autocomplete and optimal planning algorithms. Intelligence in a truly human sense is not really even on the horizon yet, let alone superintelligence.
Re: AI as Normal Technology
#95Re: AI as Normal Technology
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think to the parent's point it is as you say: there is already untapped capacity that isn't being used due to (geo)political forces maintaining the scarcity side of the argument. Using your agriculture example, a simple Google search will yield plenty of examples going back more than a decade of food sitting/rotting in warehouses/ports due to red tape and bureaucracy. So, we already can/do produce enough food to fe…
And that sort of analysis is exactly what is suspect to me about this. Have people considered why an onion might be in a warehouse or why it might go unsold after a time? The answer is no and reveals a lack of understanding of nuance of how the global economy actually works. Everything has some loss factor and removing it all to nill might not be realistic at all at the scale we do things to feed ourselves. Its like…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cost+of+militarism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-competition/
https://www.pop.org/overpopulation-myth/
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/298-june-19-1979/the-ori...
https://archive.org/details/AdvancedAutomationForSpaceMissio...
https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanE...
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSoc...
https://pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-pers...
https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080930065642/http://www.whywor... "I [Bob Black] don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."
And so on...