4 ms·

It’s always interesting to see these ideas on a tech forum. Should we as humanity stop right here? Draw a line in the sand and not do anything new? Maybe we sh

• amelius 3y ago
  > Should we as humanity stop right here? Draw a line in the sand and not do anything new? There will be a point when the answer is "yes". For example, when we can produce hobby 3d printers for biological viruses. Or DIY kits for nuclear weapons. Or cameras that are the size of a grain of sand and cost only 1 cent. Stuff that some individuals might want, but society will never be ready for.
• makerdiety 3y ago
  What people want is limited by their ability level. And there's no reason to ever be bullish on liberal (classical) society's capacity for intentional change. Human agency doesn't mean shit.
• korijn 3y ago
  We should invent solutions for problems that we have, instead of wildly trying to apply this tech to everything we can think of. We are skipping the benefit/cost considerations.
  • okr 3y ago
    Is AI not a solution for our problems? I can imagine a declining population, a younger generation, that does not want to reproduce, neither working off the available work. We need a solution for that. So we need systems, that learns human knowledge, refines it, makes it better and takes over all of the work. And for programmers: is sitting not the new cig smoking and drinking alcohol for early death?
    • skydhash 3y ago
      What about education for all, better healthcare and a solution to hunger. Or discriminations? I’m not seeing anything trying to solve that in the AI space right now. It’s all about replacing workers and artists.
      • avery17 3y ago
        Well yeah cause its bad at all the things you want it to solve.
    • bru3s 3y ago
      How does AI help in solving the issues you brought over in your post? > a declining population, a younger generation, that does not want to reproduce, neither working off the available work. We need a solution for that. And what do you reckon is the reason for that? "Kids these days are lazy and only want to have fun", or something to that extent? Or is that because the cost of living has skyrocketed, the future is uncertain and people are afraid of the planet becoming more and more inhospitable for humans in the following decades or even years? Maybe people do not want to work despite the job availability because those jobs offer piss poor conditions and no security? If not for all these reasons, why would people act so differently than in the past? Once you put your precious A"I" in the equation, what do you get out of it? Even less job security, more leverage for bad employers to threaten workers with the magic wand of "you'll get substituted", and arguably way shittier quality of products all around (cases in point: A"I" customer service that fails to be satisfactory in resolving customer issues or become a huge nuisance to deal with, or A"I" "art" in articles and blogs that' so easy to spot that you could arguably be better off with no illustrations at all). > So we need systems, that learns human knowledge, refines it, makes it better and takes over all of the work. First off, who is "we"? And secondly, once it "takes over all of the work" (whatever that means), what are people going to do? Do you really think we'll get some utopian fantasy like UBI? > And for programmers: is sitting not the new cig smoking and drinking alcohol for early death? How tf does that have anything to do with A"I" helping? If I use Copilot to "help" me out in programming I'll still have to sit, will I not?
      • 3y ago
  • parpfish 3y ago
    People are doing cost/benefits analyses. It’s just that defining costs and benefits are subjective and you disagree with their decisions
  • infecto 3y ago
    Many companies and individuals are figuring out the benefits. There are number of companies that are seeing real value. We are not skipping anything.
• timeon 3y ago
  Engineers like to create solutions, not problems.
  • ggpsv 3y ago
    Prone too at creating solutions to problems that do not exist.
• jairuhme 3y ago
  I'd argue that the innovation with these models is making smaller. Just throwing compute resources to make a model with more parameters is easy and doesn't really expand our knowledge. IMO, larger and larger LLM's aren't that impressive. Being able to shrink that model down, retain its accuracy (to a degree) and be able to run it on smaller hardware is impressive and will more likely lead to AI/ML being intertwined within people's day-to-day
  • infecto 3y ago
    Don’t disagree and I think it is natural evolution similar other aspect of tech. We innovate and then make it more efficient. I don’t want to stop the opportunity to innovate because of electricity usage though.
• atoav 3y ago
  > Should we as humanity stop right here? Draw a line in the sand and not do anything new? Maybe someone with the knowledge of hindsight in a few generations will say that, yes, we should stop and draw a line in the sand. We are still used to the idea that we can treat externalities to the systems we build as infinite and boundless, while it is getting increasingly clear that they are not. I am not saying we should stop working on LLMs. I just say we probably should factor in (that means: assign economic value to) downstream consequences of said high energy consumption if we don't wanna destroy our own habitats. And that then would probably lead to a world where LLMs are used for actually important problems instead of furthering the goals of the few who truly profit from surveillance-capitalism. But hey, let's continue wasting a years worth of energy on training LLMs on cat pictures, they are cute after all.
  • PeterisP 3y ago
    There are unaccounted externalities in many areas, but energy use of LLMs isn't one of them - people are paying full market price for the energy of training or using LLMs, that energy cost is large enough so that people care a LOT about it, and make intentional tradeoffs about what is worth it. And if people vote with their wallets that they are willing to pay for a years worth of energy on training LLMs on cat pictures, we should respect their choice that apparently this is what they consider a valuable use of the limited resources they have.
    • atoav 3y ago
      Jup, and the market price for energy doesn't reflect where it is going towards, which was my point. Whether you train the LLM to predict extreme weather events or put funny hats on pictures of cats, you have to pay the same — in fact, the latter will drive the price up for the former. Sure, there are still people out there who believe the invisible hand of the market will regulate everything to give us a good outcome despite every real world evidence to the opposite. But in a market more demand for bullshit reasons drives the prices up for everybody, also for things that are essential for the survival of the poorest, the long term sustainability of environment, health services, etc. The question I laid out was whether it is really a good idea to treat some random bullshit the same as essential services and externalities? Especially considering we are walking into a climate catastrophe that is the result of too much energy use. Granted, we live in a society that is kinda built on ignoring these connections — otherwise we would go mad or cynical, but lying to ourselves has a hidden cost that will come due at some point.
• LegibleCrimson 3y ago
  It's not just "progress" vs "no progress". Some technical innovations, like leaded gasoline, have had more of a negative impact than a positive. It's not a binary, and not all technology is without cost. The argument against current AI progress isn't anti-technology, it's pointing out that these things can have a hugely negative impact that's mostly being shouted down or swept under the rug in the name of "progress". The climate crisis is pretty serious business, and the AI power consumption is making it worse, not better. The risk of huge amounts of unemployment are being mostly handwaved away as "yeah, that's not gonna happen, we always make jobs out of somewhere".
• bee_rider 3y ago
  I think it is not very generous to interpret somebody suggesting that we try different things, as > Because you are not able to pick and choose what humanity tries out, so shall we stop entirely? I don’t see anything that dictatorial in their suggestion. There’s clearly something wrong in the current LLM based ecosystem. They take gigawatt-hours to train and digest the entire corpus of the internet to produce a model that writes at, what, the level of an erudite college freshman? > not focusing on ever increasing the size of ai models, so that we don't need to build all those power-hungry ai training datacenters? I read the italic bit as not a command to stop, but a suggestion to come up with better algorithms. Which researchers are presumably working on. Hopefully chatGPT & friends don’t suck up all the oxygen.
  • infecto 3y ago
    > There’s clearly something wrong in the current LLM based ecosystem LLMs are in their infancy and we have individuals calling for reduced usage of electricity along withothers like yourself saying something is wrong with them. I simply believe those are wild opinions to have for a space that is still so new. Either business finds these tools useful in the long run or not and that will drive prices and efficiency.
• m463 3y ago
  Yes, you can't save yourself rich. I think these kinds of things will be solved by market forces.
• bamboozled 3y ago
  “Thou shalt not question”