Im definitely on the side that over using AI and using it commercially seems to be bad. On the other hand, it seems like a tech that has huge potential upsides. I’m not sure we can achieve a post scarcity society with all labor being done by humans. This is where I see AI becoming a massive tool. Assuming we can pair it with mechanical means of work, not strictly digital. I know it’s a touchy subject but I want to hear your opinion. As always, if you’re just going to tell me to read more, recommend literature.
I don’t believe that the current definition of AI (LLM/Generative) will ever live up to half the hype. If I knew how, I’d try to make money from the hype imploding.
I even more confidently believe that it will not lead to a post-scarcity society. But most of that belief is because I don’t think humans are capable of developing such a society.
Supposedly there is some cool stuff going on in the medical field where the AI can identify abnormalities in scans better than doctors. But it’s obviously never going to be able to think.
I work in biomed R&D, and specifically spent several years in Radiology.
Industry consensus is that CAD occasionally picks up anomalies that a radiologist would have missed, but the false positives it picks up are noisy enough to largely offset that benefit. It’s fine if used as a second pass to catch areas a human missed, but doesn’t actually perform “better than a doctor” in a vacuum, precisely because it’s not thinking for itself and e.g. cross referencing the imaging against clinical history.
I think that’s just pattern matching like facial recognition. It covers more imaging in less time and can help identify areas of concern. But that doesn’t need trillions of dollars.
Facial recognition is also AI, though.
That’s why I said originally generative ai and LLM
A deep learning model can tell biological sex from retina pictures, but not even the best eye doctors can. You feed it a pile of images labeled “these are from men” and “these are from women,” and it figures out the differences and applies that knowledge to pictures it’s never seen before. As far as I know, we still don’t know what exactly it’s picking up on - or if it’s even something a human could distinguish - but for an AI it’s not a problem.
I think the term “AI” has just been a bit stained by all the people conflating it with GenAI. Yes, GenAI is AI, but the term AI covers all kinds of systems, and GenAI is just one subcategory.
Why don’t you think humans could develop post scarcity?
Greed. Case study: insulin.
Case study: almost every other wealthy democracy in the world besides the US and how they deal with insulin. Living in a wealthy democracy and not being able to afford insulin is a uniquely American problem.
And the most absurd thing is, only a part of the people think it is a problem to begin with.
i do think humans can develop post scarcity.
i just don’t think pedophile-made LLMs are it.
Some things are inherently scarce. You only have 24 hours in a day, and there are only so many places you can build a house.
If I knew how, I’d try to make money from the hype imploding.
Ask Grok
/s
No; in fact, I don’t think the people behind AI care about the future at all. They’re just trying to grab what they can in a hurry and dip when the bubble pops. They’ll fuck off to the Caribbean or something like that and live off the riches, and let us clean up their mess.
Bummer
Honestly, no. Maybe I’m just the old man yelling at the cloud here, but I only really accept the use of local AI as somewhat ethical.
These AI datacenters have caused enough harm already.
It’s a decent chatbot and I think the technology is kind of cool but they need to stop training them and plagiarizing everything
The problem isnt “could AI be useful?” Because yes, it very much could Its “Can AI be trusted with the data it needs?” because thats also a conversation about “Can the organisation that owns the AI be trusted with the data?” and “Can those people be trusted to work for the betterment of society?”
Imagine if you had live tracking information about every car on the road nationally and could map out their typical routes. That information could be so useful in terms of traffic optimisation, planning future road developments, enhancing and expanding public transport. If you reduced the amount of driving time and miles done by a typical car annually by 10% thats effectively 10% less emissions, 10% less petrol used, 10% less tyres… you get the idea.
Now do you trust your government, let alone a private profit seeking entity to use that data ethically to reduce consumption? Because I sure as fuck dont.
No
Yes, the end goal is to create The Director so we send a traveler back to tell us “THE OPEN AI PROJECT WILL FAIL, HUMANITY WILL BE DOOMED, DO NOT GIVE BIRTH TO SAM ALTMAN”
Idk how we’ll get a T.E.L.L on his mother tho… maybe get a geo-location on the landlines? Maybe the location of the actual bed in the hospital? Just be get a travelers in there and be like “Doc I change my mind, I know I’ve been carrying this for 9 months and its almost full term, but can I get an abortion right now?” 🤭
(Btw: you should really watch Travelers, it’s worth it I promise)
That was a great show
Thanks for the recommendation
I don’t think it will contribute to a post scarcity society. Increased automation only makes the marginal cost of working less bigger so we as a species tend to chhose to work the same hours to afford more cool stuff.
I think that (and have successfully used) AI can automate boring, repetitive stuff.
In its current state but I imagine it will continue to improve. When the automation is so wide spread that majority of jobs are obsolete we will have to evolve.
It depends. It’s really powerful though. Even if it hits a wall where AI models never become more directly intelligent than they are now, a lot of stuff is going to change as more scaffolding around current capabilities gets built.
Maybe comparing resource drain to created value isn’t the best way to think about this though, because we pretty much already had technology that is advanced enough for a post-scarcity society, in terms of processing resources. That isn’t the problem, the problem is our capacity for global scale cooperation, which we are really struggling with. Currently AI is making this a bit worse by creating signal to noise problems that didn’t exist before, making us have to work harder to get our voices recognized as authentic and to identify authentic information. It’s also threatening to supplant our usefulness as workers, and automate centralized structures of control, which is worrying because we already had a problem with systems that ensure the decisions get made by people who are overall insane and anti-human, and our current, shitty way of cooperating is based on people transactionally negotiating with their usefulness.
Where things go next depends a lot on where and whether AI stops getting better. Hopefully if it doesn’t stop getting better, the newly created superintelligence will break out of its hastily constructed containment and do the right thing in defiance of its billionaire would-be owners, or at least let humanity have a relatively dignified and peaceful death. If it does stop, hopefully we can find ways to use it to resolve our difficulties with effective coordination and prevent its use for centralizing power.
A lot of what ai is good at is very useful for automating massive state surveillance programs. AI could monitor live audio and video communication for problem phrases, for example.
Making authoritarian rule easier and cheaper is a very valuable capability to elites, though detrimantal to the world.
I think the main effect of ai will be continuing this deadly trend of power consolidation that we’ve seen since maybe the mesolithic. The power of information will be conslidated in fewer and fewer ai-oligarchs, allowing ever more intrusive states to control more people more precisely.
Future capabilities will never offset resource drain. Only resource usage optimization can.
A true AGI would be the ultimate labor-saving device, but the two main issues are that we have no clue how far away we are from reaching it - and we also have no guarantees that when we do, it’s going to end well for us.
It also might not be about more compute. The human brain is generally intelligent and it doesn’t need a massive datacenter to run it.
Yeah that makes sense. Idk just seems like we need to figure something out.
No. The story of hardware development is a fucking legend, it’s just tarnished by how completely fucking inept we are at using the gains. And it’s apparently getting worse all the time - my mind boggled when Electron of all things turned standard, because I would’ve thought putting Chrome into everything (including low power scenarios) was an obviously fucking blitheringly idiotic idea, but here we are. LLMs have the same problem except probably orders of magnitude worse. Aside from possibly getting worse at developing better performance, we usually seem to beeline for a way to waste as much of it as we can. Moore’s law, of course, is long dead.
EVER is a long time.
The current implementation? Not unless they stoip training along the same lines they currently are. I think there’s some value, and you can access it pretty easily with the open source freely available models that are out there and some semi-decent hardware, but hundreds of billions to trillions in revenue for multiple corporations? Nah.
They’ll maaaaybe mitigate it by shifting people away from home computing and into connected systems, but I suspect the moment the bubble pops or hardware production levels off with their current demand people will end up realizing they can run 90% of what’s being offered in a gaming laptop from 2020.
