Ah, yes, “when used responsibly.” Like how we use drugs, alcohol, guns, cars, money, power, and everything else responsibly? Humans can’t be trusted with things that do more harm than good when used irresponsibly.
AI is the car of modern times. It’s convenient, ruinous for the environment, and a danger to anyone in proximity of one. Hell, we even wasted tons of land on highways kinda like what we’re doing with datacenters. But boy, does it get you from point A to point B quick.
boy, does it get you from point A to point B quick.
Not so long ago, face to face interaction was the only way business was transacted, people were employed and paid.
In today’s world, if we could get past the baseless RTO mandates and let the 60% or whatever it is of modern workers work from home or wherever is convenient for them to work, get the commuters off the roads, restructure the food distribution systems to eliminate that need for cars, we really could make a significant improvement in the environmental impact of cars and trucks.
In the world of AI, I suspect a huge chunk of current AI usage, energy burned in data centers, etc. is “wasteful” - investigational, experimental, learning usage. If we can get past that kind of usage and eventually use it for what it’s good for and leave it alone for counterproductive wastes of time, it should also be a clear net-benefit for “getting stuff done” not only faster, but more correctly and valuably. Which software is more valuable: one coded by humans over the course of a year, with a half dozen undiscovered security vulnerabilities, or one coded by those same humans over the course of a month with those vulnerabilities exposed and fixed?
If you’re concerned about the environment, those humans commuting to work for an extra 11 months add up to far more environmental impact than the AI they used to accelerate their work. Good luck getting their employer to give them 10 months off with pay for delivering the same valuable product faster and better.
Sorry, I don’t really feel like reading anything from Anthropic atm (I might later, it sounds interesting), but my actual, non-sarcastic position on the matter is fuck LLMs; they should not be doing any sort of policymaking.
Long story short: AI using AI can find ways to run itself on TV set top boxes and similar common IoT devices, as part of a bot-net. It can also find ways to self-propogate such bot-nets across many surprisingly low powered and widely distributed devices in our world.
Correct - knives do more good than harm, even when some people use them irresponsibly. My point is that AI doesn’t; even when some people could arguably say that they use it responsibly and do good work, those that use it for slop, to perpetuate disinformation, and to further degrade our ability to think critically outweigh those people.
There’s an example used in regulatory circles: electricity would never be permitted in homes under today’s regulatory standards - we only accept it and its hazards because it is so incredibly common and useful in daily life and we’ve been accepting it since before we cared so deeply about safety.
So, have today’s goalposts moved so much that “AI” no longer passes modern society’s definitions of acceptable? I feel like such a technology would have been cheerfully embraced in the 1960s.
Ah, yes, “when used responsibly.” Like how we use drugs, alcohol, guns, cars, money, power, and everything else responsibly? Humans can’t be trusted with things that do more harm than good when used irresponsibly.
AI is the car of modern times. It’s convenient, ruinous for the environment, and a danger to anyone in proximity of one. Hell, we even wasted tons of land on highways kinda like what we’re doing with datacenters. But boy, does it get you from point A to point B quick.
There is one key difference though, drivers and car manufacturers are sometimes held accountable for their actions
Very weak theater.
Not so long ago, face to face interaction was the only way business was transacted, people were employed and paid.
In today’s world, if we could get past the baseless RTO mandates and let the 60% or whatever it is of modern workers work from home or wherever is convenient for them to work, get the commuters off the roads, restructure the food distribution systems to eliminate that need for cars, we really could make a significant improvement in the environmental impact of cars and trucks.
In the world of AI, I suspect a huge chunk of current AI usage, energy burned in data centers, etc. is “wasteful” - investigational, experimental, learning usage. If we can get past that kind of usage and eventually use it for what it’s good for and leave it alone for counterproductive wastes of time, it should also be a clear net-benefit for “getting stuff done” not only faster, but more correctly and valuably. Which software is more valuable: one coded by humans over the course of a year, with a half dozen undiscovered security vulnerabilities, or one coded by those same humans over the course of a month with those vulnerabilities exposed and fixed?
If you’re concerned about the environment, those humans commuting to work for an extra 11 months add up to far more environmental impact than the AI they used to accelerate their work. Good luck getting their employer to give them 10 months off with pay for delivering the same valuable product faster and better.
Then just let AI use AI. I’ll collect my Nobel prize now thx.
You might want to rethink that position: https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai
Sorry, I don’t really feel like reading anything from Anthropic atm (I might later, it sounds interesting), but my actual, non-sarcastic position on the matter is fuck LLMs; they should not be doing any sort of policymaking.
Long story short: AI using AI can find ways to run itself on TV set top boxes and similar common IoT devices, as part of a bot-net. It can also find ways to self-propogate such bot-nets across many surprisingly low powered and widely distributed devices in our world.
Some humans cannot own knives responsibility. It doesn’t mean I have to cut the pineapple with a spoon.
Correct - knives do more good than harm, even when some people use them irresponsibly. My point is that AI doesn’t; even when some people could arguably say that they use it responsibly and do good work, those that use it for slop, to perpetuate disinformation, and to further degrade our ability to think critically outweigh those people.
There’s an example used in regulatory circles: electricity would never be permitted in homes under today’s regulatory standards - we only accept it and its hazards because it is so incredibly common and useful in daily life and we’ve been accepting it since before we cared so deeply about safety.
So, have today’s goalposts moved so much that “AI” no longer passes modern society’s definitions of acceptable? I feel like such a technology would have been cheerfully embraced in the 1960s.