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It’s been a while since I’ve seen this meme template being used correctly
So the problem isn’t the technology. The problem is unethical big corporations.
Same as it ever was…
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.
But not al users of AI are malignant or causing environment damage.
Saying the contrary would be a bad generalization.
I have LLM models running on a n100 chip that have less consumption that the lemmy servers we are writing on right now.
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. I’m just not fear mongering things I do not understand.
Technology is technology. Most famously nuclear technology can be used both for bombs or giving people the basic need that electricity is.
Rockets can be used as weapons or to deliver spacecraft and do science in space.
Biotechnology can be used both to create and to cure diseases.
A technology is just an applied form of human knowledge. Wanting to ban human progress in any way is the true evilness from my point of view.
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?
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.
Always has been
Considering most new technology these days is merely a distilation of the ethos of the big corporations, how do you distinguish?
Not true though.
Current AI generative have its bases in# Frank Rosenblatt and other scientists working mostly in universities.
Big corporations had made an implementation but the science behind it already existed. It was not created by those corporations.
It’s wild how we went from…
Critics: “Crypto is an energy hog and its main use case is a convoluted pyramid scheme”
Boosters: “Bro trust me bro, there are legit use cases and energy consumption has already been reduced in several prototype implementations”
…to…
Critics: “AI is an energy hog and its main use case is a convoluted labor exploitation scheme”
Boosters: “Bro trust me bro, there are legit use cases and energy consumption has already been reduced in several prototype implementations”
This conveniently ignores the progress being made with smaller and smaller models in the open source community.
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.
As with literally every technical progress, tech itself is no problem, capitalism usage of it is.
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.
Nowadays you can actually get a semi decent chat bot working on a n100 that consumes next to nothing even at full charge.
I guess someone needs to tell google.
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.
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.
Not only the pollution.
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
There are some pretty smart/knowledgeable people in the left camp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ziuPUeewK0Miles 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.
Plenty of smart people are focused on stupid ideas that are useless in general. Plenty of people who only appear smart also do the same.
Since when does wearing a brown hoodie convey that one is a genius?
It’s supposed to represent Ben Kenobi from the original star wars I think. Or more generally, a wizard-y sage robe.
Edit: it’s also just a meme, with its own understood meaning.
I always interpreted it as a person that has devoted their life to the topic of the meme with monk-like devotion.
