Absolutely needed: to get high efficiency for this beast … as it gets better, we’ll become too dependent.
“all of this growth is for a new technology that’s still finding its footing, and in many applications—education, medical advice, legal analysis—might be the wrong tool for the job,”
At some point, someone said the same thing about:
Is this /c/technology or /c/anti_technology because it’s hard to tell most of the time.
Cars are literally privileged garbage that’s destroying the planet. Great comparison on that one.
Well only one of those is allowed to exist so you figure it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
A better analogy for AI is the discovery of asbestos or the invention of single-use plastics. Terrible fucking idea.
I think it’s probably a bit early to tell for certain on that assessment. There is definitely pros and cons to all technology. Electricity production causes environmental damage, building wooden houses require logging. Plastics are a byproduct of a withering industry. Asbestos might have saved more lives than it took, but there were probably much better ways to solve fire resistant buildings.
Why all these destructive things? Capitalism requires maximizing profits above all else. So, really the question is how will capitalism fuck us over with AI? So, so many ways. That’s why it’s important that we build community understanding of this technology in order to combat it. It’s not going away. It’s here to stay. So we either put our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not here or we can embrace it and learn how it works and how to defeat it and come up with open source tooling to combat it.
I’m in the latter camp. I love technology breakthroughs and want to learn first hand the capabilities to understand how it will be used against me and how I can use it.
Plastics are great, what are you smoking, plastics?
Well, it’s a bit better than that, simply because you can train AI with solar power. Probably nobody does that currently, as it’s easier, faster-to-market and probably (for whatever corrupt reason) cheaper for business to let it run on burning fossils/nuclear. Currently there’s an insane amount of waste, often 1000s of models are trained and only the best performing one is deployed - and then it’s just a fancy autocomplete. The better use is for prediction of material failure, new medicine and protein folding, generally improved processes.
With asbestos you get some convenience, but it’ll be for eternity a pain to find a waste management facility that will accept it.
I’m genuinely excited about the possibilities of AI, just not in the hands of a bunch of self-serving, amoral cunts.
I completely agree. However the genie is out of the bottle. Not much we can do to prevent it at this point, but there is plenty we can do to learn about it and defend against is abuse against us.
We could nationalise it. Unless the government is also a bunch of self-serving, amoral cunts, of course.
Realistically not going to happen anytime soon in the US at least.
There’s always China… fuck.
I don’t think books ever had the same amount of discussion of how they impact our global carbon footprint, and where it comes to “houses” - I doubt people in the neolithic said about their new invention what is being discussed with AI. It is a disingenuous comparison. (And sure, someone somewhere may have said something like that about basically anything, but usually not a large part of professionals from within the field, like is the case with AI.)
This is also not simply Ludditism, the nature of how AI is used currently goes far beyond where it is genuinely useful in a case of investor hype FOMO, and the hidden costs for our efforts against climate change are real, as are the problems for creatives - who sadly need a lot of the “bullshit work” that AI can substitute to survive while honing their craft - as is the quality drop in journalism, as are fundamental questions about how far generative AI models can truly evolve in quality for the massive amount of energy invested, so the usual “just wait until the tech gets better” is not the easy way out to justify draining said energy (and fresh water) on top of what crypto mining has been wasting with data centres in the past years.
Now, those problems aren’t simply problems of the technology, but also of how that technology manifests within market dynamics. But the technology still is not just neutral, and even if we view it as an inevitability, that inevitability does not have to manifest without regulation and within the context of hyped, often unwanted application to basically everything.
Without mechanisms to address problems and to enforce regulation, in lieu of fundamental changes to what market/investment dynamics demand, this is indeed a very questionable technology at this point. And also: To truly love something abstract, like “technology”, means being able to - sometimes harshly - criticise it. Think the meme of a “tech bro” with a fully automated house vs the IT guy who barely has tech stuff beyond their PC and some stuff tinkered on passionately in their own time.
I’m not sure regulation is going to be an open for this in the US anytime soon. Maybe EU can show us the way.
What benefit for society does this crop of large language models and generative “AI” offer?
We already see students use it for homework, meaning they don’t learn their stuff.
We also see people treat the output of LLMs as gospel truth, despite the fact that LLMs often hallucinate complete BS!
LLMs and generative “AI” rely on stolen artwork. Which is a net negative for society.
Some people think you can use it as a replacement for therapy or to fight loneliness. Turns out, simply reading fiction is better.
https://neurosciencenews.com/reading-emapthy-loneliness-28972/
Cool article. Thanks for the link. As an older fellow, but a lifetime reader, mainly of sci-fi, I feel thankful that I’ve been doing something to offset the years of drug and alcohol abuse. :) I’m considering joining a book club, now.
Recently, though, I went through and read all the novels of Robert Rankin up to ‘The Mechanical Messiah and Other Marvels of the Modern Age’, which kind of broke my mind a bit - I DO NOT recommend it, there’s like 50 of them - and it’s taken me a year or so to feel like starting to read novels again. They’re wildly entertaining if you’re a fan of running gags and sheer insane premises, but I shouldn’t have taken them all at once.
It’s pretty cool how books are more than just fuel for imagination, no? But I second the idea of joining a book club, because not only do you get the cognitive effects of a book, but you get the social benefits of a club!
Well for me, I enjoy pair programming my own projects with offline models. I also bounce ideas off it to attempt to ground myself in some type of reality (some models are better for this than others… probably has risk of delusions of grandeur. Some models will just verbally suck you off which is annoying).
I built ansible tooling for deploying k3s kubernetes and Ceph-backed Proxmox clusters and VMs and containers and services. Utilized the help of LLMs to structure my playbooks and figure out how roles work.
I love learning new things and LLMs have a lot to offer in that regard. You have to watch out for the bullshit and independently look at other sources as well, but it’s a great starting point and I can sometimes have sone deep conversations around some topics.
You might have heard of these fossil fuels we’re busily running out of. And fossil is still 80% of primary energy use so there is no renewable energy transition, and renewable infrastructure is being built almost exclusively using fossil fuels.
So this means future energy rationing. What’s the business case for AI?
printing money by deception. oh and also votes, probably.
Also telling me how to install arch Linux but sing it to me as a Kenny Loggins
Verse 1 Reboot your rig and hit the USB, Boot it up live from the Arch IS-OOOHH-B! You’re in the zone now, terminal’s lit, You gotta ping that net and make sure it’s legit!
(CHORUS) Highway to the Arch install, (Gonna fly into the…) Highway to the Arch install!
Verse 2 Partition time with cfdisk — no fear, Format your root with mkfs.ext4 my dear. Mount it up with a little mount /dev/sdX, Now you’re rolling smooth, yeah you’re onto the next!
(CHORUS) Highway to the Arch install, (Gonna fly into the…) Highway to the Arch install!
Bridge Mirror, mirror, set 'em fast, reflector knows how to make that last. Then pacstrap /mnt base linux — so fly, Installin’ Arch, baby, you’re touching the sky!
(Slow breakdown) genfstab, then chroot in, Now you’re living life like a power sysadmin…
Final Chorus – belt it! Highway to the Arch install, You’re flying, configuring it aaaaall! Bootloader, locale, make that call — You’re livin’ the dream with no safety net at all!
Highway… to the Arch install…
Restricting our energy use is not a very good end game. We need to learn how to unlock more energy production without destruction of the environment. This will happen through technological development. Temporarily rationing or conservation may be needed, but permanent is not the answer.
May I interest you in this resource? https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m
I’m not interested in books championing our reduction of human expansion. I want to see us reach out into the stars one day. Technological development and progress is needed. We need to also change our mindset on current systems. E.g., if it doesn’t maximize return on investment, forget about it. If there is a way to do it slightly cheaper even if it’s detrimental, do it cheaper. That mindset sucks.
Just develop fully autopoietic artificial photosynthetic systems. Piece of cake.
When AI was getting popular, the media released an absolute war against it. A lot of us are swayed by what the media tell us
That’s probably going to be one of the main weapons against us, the media generating fake news using AI to control us.
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People here are generally anti-anything. That’s what echo chambers are for.
I am biased, I am having a ton of fun with LLMs and they are helping me achieve some personal goals. Do they use energy? Sure. Will new, more powerful technologies come along later that require even greater amounts of energy? I hope so one day. We need to find cleaner more abundant energy sources.
It’s much better to be a critical thinker than mindlessly accepting whatever BS from some grifter just because it’s “accepted wisdom” in a completely brainwashed society.
I’m gladly you’re one of the few non-brainwashed humans on the Earth. So special!
Sounds like most of Lemmy. Honestly sometimes I feel it’s worse than Reddit with the constant bashing on anything except Linux, Firefox, or - for some reason - Steam. Still glad I left Reddit though.
I can hate on Firefox if it’ll make you feel better.
I didn’t leave reddit, because I consider useful the subs I use (mostly technical stuff). And yes, you’re right about the constant bashing on anything out of the herd mentality.
Nuclear power seems to be one of those things that are anything but bashed here but instead gets treated with an almost worship-like reverence.
Take all that shit with a grain of salt. Such things don’t matter. Imagine getting riled up over a fucking web-browser. LOL.
or about an operating system, LOL! oh nevermind that it’s been uploading all your personal documents and pictures to a questionable cloud storage service without your given informed consent, for years, or that it recently started screenshotting the everydays of millions if not billions of users (among them businesses dealing with your data), to scrape together as much information as they possibly can
Go get 'em, Tiger!