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To me this line of questioning is perplexing, because the history of civilization and technological development is essentially a story of applying more energyin

To me this line of questioning is perplexing, because the history of civilization and technological development is essentially a story of applying more energyin place of human work. We burned wood to cook food and unlock more calories from it. We replaced wagons and horses with cars, trucks and gasoline. We harnessed the sun and the atom and sent probes throughout our solar system to do research. We have always required more energy to advance civilization. Sure we should improve efficiency and sustainability, if we don't we may cause a calamity which could take out many of us as well as lot of other critters (though on a geological scale, it'll basically be meaningless). But if we start thinking that using more energy is inherently a bad thing that needs to oppose, civilization will regress.

GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
We (industrial societies) didn’t know for a long, long time that eventually, more energy usage (especially the type of energy usage we practice) would impact the planet the way that it has. Now we have the choice to put more effort into finding better ways to use the energy we have and develop newer energy tech, but populist politics and entrenched energy interests actively work against that.
_heimdall 2y ago
The underlying problem, as I see it, that underlies these questions is whether we will ever learn what "enough" really means for ourselves. At some point people have to decide for themselves when they have enough and when they can just enjoy life as much as possible rather than chasing the next thing. I'm not proposing that its a clear line, or that the line is the same for everyone, or that the line should be decided by someone else and forced on you. My point is simply that we're screwed as a species if we continue to just want more and more of everything, especially convenience, regardless of the cost.
- Ukv 2y ago
  May come down to philosophical differences - but I'd prefer humanity to continue progressing, curing diseases, learning about the Universe, improving quality of life, etc. as far as we can, as opposed to deciding at some point (or gradually) that we've had enough. Threshold for new advancements should not be whether we absolutely need it, but whether it does more good than harm - which I think is easily the case for LLMs and other machine learning models.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    > continue progressing Honest question here, hopefully it comes across that way but you never know with text. I've never quite understood "progress" as a goal. The word is directional, it needs a goalpost to move towards and I often feel like its used more to mean "just keep changing stuff." How do you define that goal post, and if we got there would you be happy to stop there? For me that's the challenge. I think I said it elsewhere in this thread, but people rarely know what "enough" means for them. To me that seems like and endless loop of changing stuff and consuming all along the way because we've zoomed in on the approach of always wanting things to be better rather than setting an expectation of what is good enough.
    - Ukv 2y ago
      > The word is directional, it needs a goalpost to move towards [...] How do you define that goal post, and if we got there would you be happy to stop there? I'd claim you can in theory have a direction without an end-point - where even if some measure is at 9^99 there's always still 9^99 + 1. At the very least, you can definitely have a direction without setting an artificial end-point. May be that in reducing malaria cases/infant mortality rates we hit 0 and thus literally cannot go lower, and so hit a goalpost in that sense, but if we're at 500 malaria cases and can reduce it further (without equal/greater degradations in other areas) then I don't see why we should ever be "happy to stop there". > To me that seems like and endless loop of changing stuff Might agree about, say, website redesigns or fast fashion, but I consider humanity's position as a whole (such as standard of living) to be on a significant upwards trend.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        > Might agree about, say, website redesigns or fast fashion, but I consider humanity's position as a whole (such as standard of living) to be on a significant upwards trend. Sure, and I'm not trying to say we haven't made significant impacts with technological advancements. We do still gave to define how we'd even measure humanity's position though, without that we don't have direction and can't know if we're getting closure or further away. Trends require a similar context. On a 30 year scale I'd say we may have moved upwards (though significantly is a stretch). On 100 years we have almost certainly made significamt movement upwards on some metrics but others would have a significant trend downward. On a 1,000 year scale I think it'd be harder to find areas where we haven't trended upward significantly (I'm sure there are some, but I'd be surprised if there are many). That still leaves the question though, do we always need to trend upward on a never ending treadmill of change and increased consumption?

GuinansEyebrows 2y ago

We (industrial societies) didn’t know for a long, long time that eventually, more energy usage (especially the type of energy usage we practice) would impact the planet the way that it has. Now we have the choice to put more effort into finding better ways to use the energy we have and develop newer energy tech, but populist politics and entrenched energy interests actively work against that.

_heimdall 2y ago

The underlying problem, as I see it, that underlies these questions is whether we will ever learn what "enough" really means for ourselves. At some point people have to decide for themselves when they have enough and when they can just enjoy life as much as possible rather than chasing the next thing. I'm not proposing that its a clear line, or that the line is the same for everyone, or that the line should be decided by someone else and forced on you. My point is simply that we're screwed as a species if we continue to just want more and more of everything, especially convenience, regardless of the cost.

Ukv 2y ago
May come down to philosophical differences - but I'd prefer humanity to continue progressing, curing diseases, learning about the Universe, improving quality of life, etc. as far as we can, as opposed to deciding at some point (or gradually) that we've had enough. Threshold for new advancements should not be whether we absolutely need it, but whether it does more good than harm - which I think is easily the case for LLMs and other machine learning models.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  > continue progressing Honest question here, hopefully it comes across that way but you never know with text. I've never quite understood "progress" as a goal. The word is directional, it needs a goalpost to move towards and I often feel like its used more to mean "just keep changing stuff." How do you define that goal post, and if we got there would you be happy to stop there? For me that's the challenge. I think I said it elsewhere in this thread, but people rarely know what "enough" means for them. To me that seems like and endless loop of changing stuff and consuming all along the way because we've zoomed in on the approach of always wanting things to be better rather than setting an expectation of what is good enough.
  - Ukv 2y ago
    > The word is directional, it needs a goalpost to move towards [...] How do you define that goal post, and if we got there would you be happy to stop there? I'd claim you can in theory have a direction without an end-point - where even if some measure is at 9^99 there's always still 9^99 + 1. At the very least, you can definitely have a direction without setting an artificial end-point. May be that in reducing malaria cases/infant mortality rates we hit 0 and thus literally cannot go lower, and so hit a goalpost in that sense, but if we're at 500 malaria cases and can reduce it further (without equal/greater degradations in other areas) then I don't see why we should ever be "happy to stop there". > To me that seems like and endless loop of changing stuff Might agree about, say, website redesigns or fast fashion, but I consider humanity's position as a whole (such as standard of living) to be on a significant upwards trend.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      > Might agree about, say, website redesigns or fast fashion, but I consider humanity's position as a whole (such as standard of living) to be on a significant upwards trend. Sure, and I'm not trying to say we haven't made significant impacts with technological advancements. We do still gave to define how we'd even measure humanity's position though, without that we don't have direction and can't know if we're getting closure or further away. Trends require a similar context. On a 30 year scale I'd say we may have moved upwards (though significantly is a stretch). On 100 years we have almost certainly made significamt movement upwards on some metrics but others would have a significant trend downward. On a 1,000 year scale I think it'd be harder to find areas where we haven't trended upward significantly (I'm sure there are some, but I'd be surprised if there are many). That still leaves the question though, do we always need to trend upward on a never ending treadmill of change and increased consumption?