A meme in the "IQ bell curve" format. On the left, stupid wojak says "If we don't stop AI, it will destroy humanity", while thinking about rogue robots from Terminator. On the right, sage wojak also says "If we don't stop AI, it will destroy humanity", but he's thinking about massive energy requirements and carbon emissions associated with AI. In the middle, average intelligence wojak is in favour of AI: "Noooo AI will make our lives easier, we can automate so many tasks. Only a few more years and we'll achieve AGI, just wait and see. Surely this time a couple exajoules of energy spent on training will do the trick."
It has triggered an economic race to the bottom for any industry that can incorporate it. Employers will be forced to replace more workers with AI to keep prices competitive. And that is a lot of industries, especially if AI continues its growth.
The result is a lot of unemployment, which means an economic slowdown due to a lack of discretionary spending, which is a feedback loop.
There are only 3 outcomes I can imagine:
AI fizzles out. It can't maintain its advancement enough to impress execs.
An unimaginable wealth disparity and probably a return to something like feudalism.
social revolution where AI is taken out of the hands of owners and placed into the hands of workers. Would require changes that we'd consider radically socialist now, like UBI and strong af social safety nets.
The second seems more likely than the third, and I consider that more or less a destruction of humanity
The way it's done at this current moment is in no way sustainable. Once we start seeing better dedicated hardware for doing ai on client side hardware and remove the need to use massive GPU farms. AI is cool but it's like driving a tank to the grocery store. We need the Prius of ai.
They're not really comparable. Crypto and blockchain were good solutions looking for problems to solve. They're innovative and cool? Sure, but they never had a widescale use. AI has been around for awhile, it just got recently rebranded as artificial intellectual, the same technologies were called algorithms a few years ago... And they basically run the internet and the global economy. Hospitals, schools, corporations, governments, the militaries, etc all use them. Maybe certain uses of AI are dumb, but trying to pretend that the thing as a whole doesn't have, or rather already has, genuine uses is just dumb
I feel like you're being incredibly generous with the usage of AI here. I feel as though the post and comment above refer to LLM/image generation AI. Those "types of 'AI'" certainly don't run all those things.
The term AI is very vague because intelligence is an inherently subjective concept. If we're defining AI as something that has consciousness then it doesn't exist, but if we're defining it as a task that a computer can do on it's own, then virtually everything that is automated is run by AI.
Even with generative AI models, they've been around for a while too. For example, lot of the news articles you read, especially about the weather or news aren't written by actual people, they're AI generated. Another example would be scientific simulations, they use AI to generate a bunch of possible scenarios based on given parameters. Yet another example would be the gaming industry, what do you think generates Minecraft worlds? The point here is that AI has been around for awhile and is already being used everywhere. What we're seeing with chatGPT and these other new models is that these models are now being released for public access. It's like democratization of AI, and a lot of good and bad things are bound to come of it. We're at the infancy stage of this now, but just like with the world wide web before it, these technologies are going to fundamentally change how we do many things from now on.
We can't fight technology, that's a losing battle. These AIs are here and they're here to stay. So strap on and enjoy the ride.
I think you misunderstood me, I'm not trying to make some point about "LLMs aren't 'real AI'" or even what is and is not AI. I'm just saying the post is talking about that type of AI specifically and I wouldn't say those types are controlling that much of the world.
In my country this kind of AI is being used to more efficiently find tax fraud and to create chatbots for users to understand taxes, that due to the much more reliable and limited training set does not allucinate and can provide clear sources for the information given.
Spain. AEAT is out tax authority and has begun using AI in recent years, as an early adopter. The Spanish government in general seems very favorable towards AI and it's funding a nationally trained model.
The relative number here might be more useful as long as it's understood that Google already has significant emissions. It's also sufficient to convey that they're headed in the wrong direction relative to their goal of net zero. A number like 14.3 million tCO₂e isn't as clear IMO.
Someone needs to tell google that AI powered search is not working right now, and that they better wait a few years to try massively implementing that in a successful way.
Other AI fields are working really good. But search engine "instant AI answers" for general use are not in a phase when they should be as widely used as google (or microsoft) is trying to use them right now.
In what sense does a small community working with open weight (note: rarely if ever open source) llm have any mitigating impact on the rampant carbon emissions for the sake of bullshit generators?
Not a small community by any means. It inherently is opposed to the unnecessarily large and wasteful models of corporations. But when people just lump i al l under "AI", the actually useful local models are the ones most likely to get harmed while Google, meta, and the other megacorps will be able to operate with impunity.
Those people doing the majority of the lumping, and it's not even close, are the corporations themselves. The short hand exists. Machine learning is doing fine. Intentionally misinterpreting a message to incidentally defend the actions of the corporations doing the damage you are opposed to ain't it.
The big companies are racing to get the best model, and they're using highly inefficient GPUs to get there. Not just Google, Meta is doing it as well. They're also completely missing their "climate target" goals because of it
The problem is the concentration of power, Sam "regulate me daddy" Altman's plan is to get the government to create a web of regulation that makes it so only the big tech giants have access to the uncensored models.
Of course, as usual with capitalism and basically everything, we had hope to recieve a tool making expressing themselves easy for workers lacking time and training to do art, and we will superexpensive proprietary software and monopolies quite possibly gatekeep by law. Again just as in software some hope is in open source.
Personally I think AI systems will kill us dead simply by having no idea what to do, dodgy old coots thinking machines are magic and know everything when in reality machines can barely approximate what we tell them to do and base their information on this terrible approximation.
Machines will do exactly what you tell them to do and is the cause of many software bugs. That’s kind of the problem, no matter how elegant the algorithm, fuzzy goes in, fuzzy comes out. It was clear this very basic principle was not even considered when Google started telling people to eat rocks and glue. You can’t patch special cases out when they are so poorly understood.
Disagree. The technology will never yield AGI as all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.
All it can do now and ever will do is destroy the environment by using oodles of energy, just so some fucker can generate a boring big titty goth pinup with weird hands and weirder feet. Feeding it exponentially more energy will do what? Reduce the amount of fingers and the foot weirdness? Great. That is so worth squandering our dwindling resources to.
I really don't know whats going about the Anti-AI people. But is getting pretty similar to any other negationism, anti-science, anti-progress... Completely irrational and radicalized.
Sorry to hurt your fefes, but I don't like theft and that is what AI content ALL is. How does it "know" how to program? Code stolen form humans. How does it speak? Words stolen from humans. How does it draw? Art stolen from humans.
Until this shit stops being built on a mountain of stolen data and stolen livelihoods, the argument is over. I don't care if you like stealing money from artists so that you can pretend you had any creative input into an AIs art output. You're stealing the work of normal people and think it's okay because it was already stolen once before by the billionaires who are now selling it to you.
Yes, please apply the logic of stealing form large multi-national corporations to individual artists. Sterling logic.
I know why my boss makes more money then me. Because he is my enemy in a class war.
If any of these AI models draws art that is slightly too close to looking like Mickey Mouse the Disney corporation is sharpening the lawyer axe. I wonder why. But sharing is caring, right? Why would they do that?
Oh right because they want to decide what their intellectual property is used for. A right that wasn't afforded to basically every single artist whose stuff was used to train these models. These artists often rely directly on selling their art for their daily survival. Maybe they would have liked some money to sell their art for this purpose? Maybe they didn't want to sell it at all? Doesn't matter, they weren't asked. If you don't have an army of lawyers, the corporations will do as they like. Which is why Disney is save, while normal artists are fucked and weren't even asked in what hole they would like it before they were.
So shut the fuck up about sharing is caring, it's easy to say that if you are the one taking advantage. I don't know what field you work in, but I hope you lose your job to a robot that they trained on recordings of your work. You can tell me then how good it feels to share your skills.
Disagree. The technology will never yield AGI as all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.
We definitely don't need AGI for AI technologies to be useful. AI, particularly reinforcement learning, is great for teaching robots to do complex tasks for example. LLMs have shocking ability relative to other approaches (if limited compared to humans) to generalize to "nearby but different, enough" tasks. And once they're trained (and possibly quantized), they (LLMs and reinforcement learning policies) don't require that much more power to implement compared to traditional algorithms. So IMO, the question should be "is it worthwhile to spend the energy to train X thing?" Unfortunately, the capitalists have been the ones answering that question because they can do so at our expense.
For a person without access to big computing resources (me lol), there's also the fact that transfer learning is possible for both LLMs and reinforcement learning. Easiest way to explain transfer learning is this: imagine that I want to learn Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Computer Science. What should I learn first so that each subject is easy for me to pick up? My answer would be Math. So in AI speak, if we spend a ton of energy to train an AI to do math and then fine-tune agents to do Physics, Engineering, etc., we can avoid training all the agents from scratch. Fine-tuning can typically be done on "normal" computers with FOSS tools.
all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.
IMO that can be an incredibly useful approach for solving problems whose dynamics are too complex to reasonably model, with the understanding that the obtained solution is a crude approximation to the underlying dynamics.
IMO I'm waiting for the bubble to burst so that AI can be just another tool in my engineering toolkit instead of the capitalists' newest plaything.
Sorry about the essay, but I really think that AI tools have a huge potential to make life better for us all, but obviously a much greater potential for capitalists to destroy us all so long as we don't understand these tools and use them against the powerful.
How will these reasonable AI tools emerge out of this under capitalism?
How does any technology ever see use outside of oppressive structures? By understanding it and putting to work on liberatory goals.
I think that crucial to working with AI is that, as it stands, the need for expensive hardware to train it makes it currently a centralizing technology. However, there are things we can do to combat that. For example, the AI Horde offers distributed computing for AI applications.
And how is it not all still just theft with extra steps that is imoral to use?
We gotta find datasets that are ethically collected. As a practitioner, that means not using data for training unless you are certain it wasn't stolen. To be completely honest, I am quite skeptical of the ethics of the datasets that the popular AI products were trained on. Hence why I refuse to use those products.
Personally, I'm a lot more interested in the applications to robotics and industrial automation than generating anime tiddies and building chat bots. Like I'm not looking to convince you that these tools are "intelligent", merely useful. In a similar vein, PID controllers are not "smart" at all, but they are the backbone of industrial automation. (Actually, a proven use for "AI" algorithms is to make an adaptive PID controller so that's it can respond to changes in the plant over time.)
A deep neural adaptive PID controller would be a bit overkill for a simple robot arm, but for say a flexible-link robot arm it could prove useful. They can also work as part of the controller for systems governed by partial differential equations, like in fluid dynamics. They're also great for system identification, the results of which might indicate that the ultimate controller should be some "boring" algorithm.
This has been going on since big oil popularized the "carbon footprint". They want us arguing with each other about how useful crypto/AI/whatever are instead of agreeing about pigouvian energy taxes and socialized control of the (already monopolized) grid.
Pollock's paintings are art. a bunch of paint buckets falling on a canvas in an earthquake wouldn't make art, even if it resembled Pollock's paintings. there's no intent behind it. no artist.
because if you teach me to pronounce some japanese words without teaching me what it means, i may say them perfectly, and even trick some people who don't see my face into thinking I'm speaking native japanese, even though i don't know what the fuck I'm saying. the fact that i tricked some people into thinking otherwise does not make me a japanese person.
Any work made to convey a concept and/or emotion can be art. I'd throw in "intent", having "deeper meaning", and the context of its creation to distinguish between an accounting spreadsheet and art.
The problem with AI "art" is it's produced by something that isn't sentient and is incapable of original thought. AI doesn't understand intent, context, emotion, or even the most basic concepts behind the prompt or the end result. Its "art" is merely a mashup of ideas stolen from countless works of actual, original art run through an esoteric logic network.
AI can serve as a tool to create art of course, but the further removed from the process a human is the less the end result can truly be considered "art".
As a thought experiment let's say an artist takes a photo of a sunset. Then the artist uses AI to generate a sunset and AI happens to generate the exact same photo. The artist then releases one of the two images with the title "this may or may not be made by AI". Is the released image art or not?
If you say the image isn't art, what if it's revealed that it's the photo the artist took? Does is magically turn into art because it's not made by AI? If not does it mean when people "make art" it's not art?
If you say the image is art, what if it's revealed it's made by AI? Does it magically stop being art or does it become less artistic after the fact? Where does value go?
The way I see it is that you're trying to gatekeep art by arbitrarily claiming AI art isn't real art. I think since we're the ones assigning a meaning to art, how it is created doesn't matter. After all if you're the artist taking the photo isn't the original art piece just the natural occurrence of the sun setting. Nobody created it, there is no artistic intention there, it simply exists and we consider it art.
there's something's highly suspect about someone not understanding the difference between art made by a human being and some output spit out by a dumb pixel mixer. huge red flag imo.
and yes, the value does go. because we care about origin and intent. that's the whole point.
if the original Mona Lisa were to be sold for millions of dollars, and then someone reveals that it was not the original Mona Lisa but a replica made last week by some dude... do you think the buyer would just go "eh it looks close enough"? no they would sue the fuck out of the seller and guess what, the painting would not be worth millions anymore. it's the same painting. the value is changed. ART IS NOT A PRODUCT.
there's something's highly suspect about someone not understanding the difference between art made by a human being and some output spit out by a dumb pixel mixer. huge red flag imo.
Translation. I can't argue your point so I'm going to try characters assassination.
if the original Mona Lisa were to be sold for millions of dollars, and then someone reveals that it was not the original Mona Lisa but a replica made last week by some dude... do you think the buyer would just go "eh it looks close enough"? no they would sue the fuck out of the seller and guess what, the painting would not be worth millions anymore. it's the same painting. the value is changed. ART IS NOT A PRODUCT.
Pretty ironic to say art is not a product and then argue that its monetary value would decrease, which can happen only if you treat art as a product.
Imagine if instead of a physical painting Mona Lisa was a digital file and free on the internet, would people think Mona Lisa is less impressive as an art piece because anyone could own it? I think it's artistic value wouldn't decrease, only its value as a product would decrease because everyone could get it for free.
it's not a product in the sense that its value does not come from its function, otherwise it would not lose value when it would be revealed to be of a different origin, but otherwise exactly the same. i spoke of the monetary value just because it's quantifiable; it's not otherwise relevant.
if Mona Lisa was free and digital it would be as valuable as a digital Mona Lisa could be. being free and digital doesn't make it pointless, without agency or intent like AI art is.
It seems like you're agreeing with me on the reasoning why AI art is art, you just refuse to accept AI as art. So let's try a different way. Who says art has agemcy or intent? Clearly it's not just "everything made by humans" because if I showed you the toilet paper I used to wipe my ass we can both agree that it's not art. Neither is the comment I'm writing right now. So there needs to be something more that separates not art and art. The two most common ways would be the intent of the artist and the perceived intent of the viewer.
If it's what the artist intended the am artist can prompt AI until AI generates the image the artist intended. Since the artist intended the AI generated image to look that way the intent is inherited from the artist.
If it's what the viewer perceived we can reach the original question I postulated. If an image makes you feel something and you can't know if it's made by the artist or by AI, how do you know it's art or not? If we take by whether you perceive intent of not then you're attributing intent to art and it doesn't matter how it was made. If you feel something and after the fact you find out it was AI generated image then it doesn't invalidate what you felt.
You can come up with whomever to validate intent or agency and I'll show you how AI wouldn't play a role in that decision because AI isn't sentient. It's a tool like a camera or a paint brush or just chalk. We give the intent by using the tools we have.
AI is a tool used by a human. The human using the tools has an intention, wants to create something with it.
It's exactly the same as painting digital art. But instead o moving the mouse around, or copying other images into a collage, you use the AI tool, which can be pretty complex to use to create something beautiful.
Do you know what generative art is? It existed before AI. Surely with your gatekeeping you think that's also no art.
I'm so sick of this. there are scenarios in which so-called "AI" can be used as a tool. for example, resampling. it's dodgy, but whatever, let's say the tech is perfected and it truly analyzes data to give a good result rather than stealing other art to match.
but a tool is something that does exactly what you intend for it to do. you can't say 100 dice are collectively "a tool that outputs 600" because you can sit there and roll them for as long as it takes for all of them to turn up sixes, technically. and if you do call it that, that's still a shitty tool, and you did nothing worth crediting to get 600. a robot can do it. and it does. and that makes it not art.
So do you not what generative art is. And you pretend to stablish catedra on art.
Generative art, that existed before even computers, is s form of art in which a algorithm created a form of art, and that algorithm can be repeated easily. Humans can replicate that algorithm, but computers can too, and generative art is mostly used with computers because obvious reasons. Those generative algorithms can be deterministic or non deterministic.
And all this before AI, way before.
AI on its essence is just a really complex and large generative algorithm, that some people do not understand and this are afraid of it, like people used to be afraid of eclipses.
Also, you seems not to know that photographs also take hundreds or thousands of pictures with just pressing a button and just select the good ones.
cameras do not make random images. you know exactly what you're getting with a photograph. the reason you take multiples is mostly for timing and lighting. also, rolling a hundred dice is not the same as painting something 100 times and picking the best one, nor is it like photographing it. the fact that you're even making this comparison is insane.
If you know how to use an AI you also know how it's working and what are you going to get, is not random. It's a complex generative algorithm where you put in the initial variables, nothing more.
the AI itself doesn't know what it's doing, neither are you. the fact that you're putting in words to change the outcome until the dice fall somewhat close to where you want them to fall doesn't make it yours. you can't add your own style to it, because you're not doing it.
Please, do not extend your lack of knowledge to me. Thanks.
Also, most traditional artists never develop a style of their own. If you believe that every single artist has its own unique style... You'd be much incorrect. That does not make it less of an artist.
I remember back in the day when lots of people followed the Bob Ross style to do some nice paintings. Luckily you are here to gatekeep them from doing art.
Nothing forbid anyone to train an AI with its own drawings in its own style.
Once again, AI is a tool. Like many others used in digital art. It's just a statistically driven generative algorithm. People can use a tool as they please to make art, same as they can use any other tool, and you have not the authority to gatekeep an artist of doing art just because you think their tool, their style, the object or anything about the artist does not fit with your morals.
And they also can, and will, mix it with other tools to produce the piece of art they want to create.
Also all this discussion about "the style(tm)" could be just disproven given the fact that if you weight your variables and use a specific dataset you can generate consistent images in a determined style. And some AI artists does have a representative style due to this... So...
People said exact same thing about CGI, and photography before. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody scream "IT'S NOT ART" at Michaelangelo or people carving walls of temples in ancient Egypt.
the "people" you're talking about were talking about tools. I'm talking about intent. Just because you compare two arguments that use similar words doesn't mean the arguments are similar.
Intent is not needed for the art, else all the art in history where we can't say what author wanted to express or the ones misunderstood wouldn't be considered art. Art is in the eye of the beholder. Note that one of the first regulations of AI art that is always proposed is that AI art be clearly labeled as such, because whomever propose it do know the above.
I get you but it's really not necessary. In case of (somewhat) realist art you can still recognize AI artifacts, but abstract art is already unrecognizable (and this is the precise reason they want AI art to be marked, so they won't embarrass themselves with peans over something churned out by computer in few seconds), not to mention there is also art created by animals, and it is considered art but it's not created with intent, except maybe the intent of people dipping dog's paw in paint. Thus we again just get to the distinction that art needs to be created just by living things? It's meaningless.
Anyway, i guess next few years will make this even more muddled and the art scene will get transformed permanently. Hell recently i've encountered some AI power metal music which is basically completely indistinguishable from normal, but in this case it mostly serve to show how uninspired and generic entire genre is.
Technology is a cultural creation, not a magic box outside of its circumstances. "The problem isn't the technology, it's the creators, users, and perpetuators" is tautological.
And, importantly, the purpose of a system is what it does.
So you're using a different specific and niche technology (which directly benefits and exists because of) the technology that is the subject of critique, and acting like the subject technology behaves like yours?
"Google is doing a bad with z"
"z can't be bad, I use y and it doesn't have those problems that are already things that happened. In the past. Unchangeable by future actions."
No one wants to ban technology outright. What we're saying is that the big LLMs are actively harmful to us, humanity. This is not fear mongering. This is just what's happening. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are stealing from humanity at large and setting the planet on fire to do it. For years they told us stealing intellectual property on an individual level was a harmful form of theft. Now they're doing the same kind of theft bit its different now because it benefits them instead of us.
What we are arguing is that this is bad. Its especially extra bad because with the death of big search a piece of critical infrastructure to the internet as we know it is now just simply broken. The open source wonks you celebrate are working on fixing this. But just because someone criticizes big tech does not mean they criticize all tech. The truth is the FAANG companies plus OpenAI and Microsoft are killing our planet for it to only benefit their biggest shareholders
I did not believe in Intelectual Property before. I'm not going to start believing now.
The same I think that corporations having a hold on media is bad for humandkind I think that small artists should not have a "not usable by AI"hold on what they post. Sharing knowledge is good for humanity. Limitate who can have access or how they can use that knowledge or culture is bad.
The dead of internet have nothing to do with AI and all to do with leaving internet in hands of a couple big corporations.
As for emissions.. are insignificant relative to other sources of CO2 emissions. Do you happen to eat meat, travel abroad for tourism, watch sports, take you car to work, buy products made overseas? Those are much bigger sources of CO2.
You dont think polluting the world is going to have a net negative effect for humanity?
What exactly is there to gain with AI anyways? What's the great benefit to us as a species? So far its just been used to trivialize multiple artistic disciplines, basic service industries, and programming.
Things have a cost, many people are doing the cost-benefit analysis and seeing there is none for them. Seems most of the incentive to develop this software is if you would like to stop paying people who do the jobs listed above.
What do we get out of burning the planet to the ground? And even if you find an AI thats barely burning it, what's the point in the first place?
What exactly is there to gain with AI anyways? What’s the great benefit to us as a species? So far its just been used to trivialize multiple artistic disciplines, basic service industries, and programming.
The whole point is that much like industrial automation it reduces the number of hours people need to work. If this leads to people starving then that's a problem with the economic system, not with AI technology. You're blaming the wrong field here. In fact everyone here blaming AI/ML and not the capitalists is being a Luddite.
It's also entirely possible it will start replacing managers and capitalists as well. It's been theorized by some anti-capitalists and economic reformists that ML/AI and computer algorithms could one day replace current economic systems and institutions.
Things have a cost, many people are doing the cost-benefit analysis and seeing there is none for them. Seems most of the incentive to develop this software is if you would like to stop paying people who do the jobs listed above.
This sadly is probably true of large companies producing big, inefficient ML models as they can afford the server capacity to do so. It's not true of people tweaking smaller ML models at home, or professors in universities using them for data analysis or to aid their teaching. Much like some programmers are getting fired because of ML, others are using it to increase their productivity or to help them learn more about programming. I've seen scientists who otherwise would struggle with data analysis related programming use ChatGPT to help them write code to analyse data.
What do we get out of burning the planet to the ground? And even if you find an AI thats barely burning it, what’s the point in the first place?
As the other guy said there are lots of other things using way more energy and fossil fuels than ML. Machine learning is used in sciences to analyse things like the impacts of climate change. It's useful enough in data science alone to outweigh the negative impacts. You would know about this if you ever took a modern data science module. Furthermore being that data centres primarily use electricity it's relatively easy to move them to green sources of energy compared to say farming, or transport. In fact some data centres already use green energy primarily. Data centres will always exist regardless of AI and ML anyway, it's just a matter of scale.
No. I'm just not fear mongering things I do not understand.
Neither am I. When you're defending whatabputism, it's best you at least try to represent the arguments of the person you're arguing with accurately.
False equivalence is a classic. Biotechnology is not a technology, for example, it's billions of technologies informed, designed, and implemented, by humans, technology is a cultural feature.
Technology as this thing free from the ethics of its use is tech bro ancap cope to justify technological pursuits with empty ethical value. You can think "banning human progress in any way" is evil. But that would make you wildly uncritical of your own beliefs.
Feel free to take your arguments back to e/acc, where that level of convenience induced niavety is considered rhetorically valid.
Technology is a product of science. The facts science seeks to uncover are fundamental universal truths that aren't subject to human folly. Only how we use that knowledge is subject to human folly. I don't think open source or open weights models are a bad usage of that knowledge. Some of the things corporations do are bad or exploitative uses of that knowledge.
You should really try and consider what it means for technology to be a cultural feature. Think, genuinely and critically, about what it means when someone tells you that you shouldn't judge the ethics and values of their pursuits, because they are simply discovering "universal truths".
And then, really make sure you ponder what it means when people say the purpose of a system is what it does. Why that might get brought up in discussions about wanton resource spending for venture capitalist hype.
That's not at all what I am doing, or what scientists and engineers do. We are all trained to think about ethics and seek ethical approval because even if knowledge itself is morally neutral the methods to obtain that knowledge can be truly unhinged.
Scientific facts are not a cultural facet. A device built using scientific knowledge is also a product of the culture that built it. Technology stands between objective science and subjective needs and culture. Technology generally serves some form of purpose.
Here is an example: Heavier than air flight is a possibility because of the laws of physics. A Boeing 737 is a specific product of both those laws of physics and of USA culture. It's purpose is to get people and things to places, and to make Boeing the company money.
LLMs can be used for good and ill. People have argued they use too much energy for what they do. I would say that depends on where you get your energy from. Ultimately though it doesn't use as much as people driving cars or mining bitcoin or eating meat. You should be going after those first if you want to persecute people for using energy.
It does not appear to me that you have even humored my request. I'm actually not even confident you read my comment given your response doesn't actually respond to it. I hope you will.
Think, genuinely and critically, about what it means when someone tells you that you shouldn’t judge the ethics and values of their pursuits, because they are simply discovering “universal truths”.
No scientist or engineer as ever said that as far as I can recall. I was explaining that even for scientific fact which is morally neutral how you get there is important, and that scientists and engineers acknowledge this. What you are asking me to do this based on a false premise and a bad understanding of how science works.
And then, really make sure you ponder what it means when people say the purpose of a system is what it does.
It both is and isn't. Things often have consequences alongside their intended function, like how a machine gets warm when in use. It getting warm isn't a deliberate feature, it's a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. We actually try to minimise this as it wastes energy. Even things like fossil fuels aren't intended to ruin the planet, it's a side effect of how they work.
It's a very common talking point now to claim technology exists independent of the culture surrounding it. It is a lie to justify morally vacant research which the, normally venture capitalist, is only concerned about the money to be made. But engineers and scientists necessarily go along with it. It's not not your problem because we are the ones executing cultural wants, we are a part of the broader culture as well.
The purpose of a system is, absolutely, what it does. It doesn't matter how well intentioned your design and ethics were, once the system is doing things, those things are its purpose. Your waste heat example, yes, it was the design intent to eliminate that, but now that's what it does, and the engineers damn well understand that its purpose is to generate waste heat in order to do whatever work it's doing.
This is a systems engineering concept. And it's inescapable.
The purpose of a system is, absolutely, what it does. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned your design and ethics were, once the system is doing things, those things are its purpose. Your waste heat example, yes, it was the design intent to eliminate that, but now that’s what it does, and the engineers damn well understand that its purpose is to generate waste heat in order to do whatever work it’s doing.
Huh? Then why is so much money spent on computers to minimize energy usage and heat production? This is perhaps the biggest load of bullshit I think I have heard in a long time. Maybe there is some concept similar to this, but if so you clearly haven't articulated it well.
Anyway I think I am done talking about this with you. You are here to fear-monger over technology you probably don't even use or understand, and I am sick of lemmings doing it.
More likely you're more interested in finding a way to disagree with the concept of posiwid than in doing basic research or listening.
It's funny when y'all use "fear mongering" for people pointing out systemic issues with ai and its hype. Though it's honestly tragic how uninterested you are in considering why AI and its hype is being criticized. Whatever makes the exploitative slave labor trained energy hungry silicon make venture capital money disappear, eh?
Miles is chill in my book. I appreciate what he is tackling, and hope he continues.
It seems that there are much worse issues with AI systems that are happening right now. I think those issues should be taking precedent over the alignment problem.
Some of the issues are bad enough right now that AI development and use should be banned for a limited time frame (at least 5 years) while we figure out more ethical ways of doing it. The fact that we aren't doing that is a massive failure of our already constantly-fucking-up governments.
