5 ms·
AI is fine. The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the co
by vrganj 8mo ago
AI is fine. The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse.
AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.
- oulipo2 8mo ago[flagged]
- emp17344 8mo agoNo, it’s… fine. Useful in a limited capacity. Not the machine god, but not machine Satan either. The reality is kind of boring.
- vablings 8mo agoThis summarizes mostly how I feel about it. It's a tool like any other tool we have advanced since the beginning of human civilization Machine tools replaced blacksmiths CNC machines replaced manual machines. Robots replaced CNC machine tenders CAD replaced draftsman (and also pushed that job onto engineers (grr)) P&P robots replaced human production lines. The steam train replaced the horse and cart This is a tale as old as time itself
- kerblang 8mo agoThose were deterministic rather than stochastic
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- bigstrat2003 8mo agoExactly. People love to compare LLMs to power tools for carpenters and smiths. But if my miter saw had a 20% chance to produce cuts at a 45 degree angle when I have it set for 90, I would throw it out so fast I would leave Looney Tunes style tracks. A tool which only sometimes does its job is worse than no tool at all.
- vablings 7mo agoTo be rather pedantic your miter saw probably doesn't cut exactly 90 degrees. Especially if you reset it. LLMS are low accuracy for sure but so are humans. I am not saying AI is going to replace us all in a whole entirety my broader point is that these tools will be another tool that changes the market share of jobs.
- kerblang 7mo agoThe low accuracy of human guesstimation is why we use deterministic tools, not so-called tools that imitate our ability (or worse). Tools are not replacements for people! Tools are enhancements. AI is an attempt to replace people with something unhuman.
- datsci_est_2015 8mo agoWhat do LLMs replace, pray tell? More like moving from a screwdriver to a drill, rather than replacing the carpenter all together. Also note that there are inventions that may “replace” some part of a process, but actually induce a greater demand for labor in that process. Take the cotton gin, for example, which exploded the number of slaves required to pick cotton.
- cindyllm 8mo ago[dead]
- bitwize 8mo agoThis isn't even our first AI hype cycle. That happened in the late 70s-80s. Every lab and agency needed Lisp machines to teach computers how to identify Russian missiles—or targets. The "GOFAI" techniques did not live up to the expectations of them, but they settled into niches where they were tremendously useful, and life went on. The same will happen with today's matmul-as-a-service AI.
- steve_adams_86 8mo agoI don't see the threat from AI as capitalist at all, but more so feudalist. I mean, if things go in the direction of the worst-case scenario. It seems like the power potential transcends the problems of capitalism entirely. But for now it's strictly hypothetical. Nothing I'm doing with AI matters enough to really make any statements about a broader scale in my field, let alone in entire economies.
- heavyset_go 8mo agoCapitalism is just feudalism that works for the merchant class
- plagiarist 8mo agoCapitalism is feudalism but with raw generational wealth instead of generational wealth with divine right characteristics.
- steve_adams_86 8mo agoI see some overlap, but I think it's more complex than that. If we conflate the two so easily they lose meaning. Certainly, some people have that experience under capitalism. I think there are systemic failures which lead to life experiences that are probably not all that different from some peoples' experiences in feudal society, both at the top and bottom of the hierarchy. The more I think about it though, I'm not sure feudalism is the right analogy. Serfs had a purpose and were depended upon. In a society where AGI is in the hands of a few, it seems reasonable to believe that there wouldn't be a need for serfs at all. Labour would become utterly irrelevant. You'd have no lord to be bound to. You'd be unnecessary. I imagine the transition there would be some brutal form of capitalism, but the destination would not be fuedalism. I don't think we have a historical analog for that hypoethical destination.
- runarberg 7mo agoI see your point, in fact I am against the term Neo-colonialism for this exact reason. Neo-colonialism is bad, but next to the horrors of actual colonialism, it is a walk in the park. And naming economic policies which artificially increases the dependency of a foreign country in your economy, after a policy of mass extraction, neglect, violence, and even genocide really removes the horrors from the latter. However it has been over 500 years since feudalism. People today are still very much living with the consequences of colonialism, some people are in fact still living under colonial rule (notably in Western Sahara and Palestine). The consequences of feudalism have long passed. I think it is fine actually to conflate the horrors of capitalism with the horrors of feudalism. 500 years ought to be long enough.
- vrganj 8mo agoIf we wanna go full-on Marxist analysis it is an attempt of the capitalist class to finally rid themselves of their dependence on labor and their pesky demands like sick leave and fair wages. Through that analysis, one can also explain why the managerial caste is so obsessed with it - it is nothing less than an ideological device. One can also see this in the actual deification happening in some VC cycles and their belief in AGI as some sort of capitalist savior figure. I see the point and don't disagree with it, but I find that framing is not the most compelling to the audience here...
- mattgreenrocks 8mo agoYeah. Oftentimes get crickets here when I talk along those lines. Can't tell if apathy, learned helplessness, or obliviousness. Regardless, devs seem like an extremely docile labor group based on how they react to this and other economic pressures.
- plagiarist 8mo agoWe will all be shocked at the rug pull after it has finished training on all our high-quality feedback for code it has written.
- Human-Cabbage 8mo agoThis is correct at the firm level and breaks down at the aggregate level, which is where it gets interesting. At the firm level, automating away labor costs is obviously rational. But capital in aggregate can't actually rid itself of labor, since labor is where surplus value comes from. A fully automated economy would be insanely productive and generate basically no profit. So the capitalist class pursuing this logic collectively is, without knowing it, pursuing the dissolution of the system that makes them the capitalist class. You don't have to buy any of that to notice the more immediate mechanism though: AI doesn't need to actually replace workers to discipline them. The credible threat of replacement is enough to suppress wages, justify restructuring, and extract more from whoever's left. That's already happening and requires no AGI.
- oulipo2 7mo ago
- brookst 8mo agoAI is more likely to destroy capitalism than it is to increase inequality. Ten years ago, what would it have cost you to build a Jira clone / competitor? Today one person can do it in a week, at least for the core tech. In a year, only the very largest companies will pay for that kind of infrastructure tooling. We’ve just started seeing the democratization of software and the capitalists are terrified.
- plagiarist 8mo agoI just don't know how to explain that you won't be destroying capitalism with AI. You have a subscription.
- brookst 7mo agoI don’t know how to explain that the difference between barter systems, stored value, and truly communal property has nothing to do with capitalism. People pay for things in all economic models. It’s bizarre to think that means everything is capitalism.
- oulipo2 7mo agoIt won't. Because once big companies who own the models and the GPUs will see that you're competing with them, they will lock you down and extort funds from you. That's what modern capitalism is about
- lpcvoid 8mo agoAI is one of the causes that climate change is accelerating, which is another in a long list of reasons to hate it.
- tonmoy 8mo agoIm not sure I follow. AI barely consumes energy compared to other industries and instead of focusing on the heavy hitters first wasting time on the climate impact on AI doesn’t seem useful
- Insanity 8mo agoPretty large amounts of energy go towards training large language models. Running them is also a non-negligible energy cost at scale. But yeah, there's way worse industries out there when it comes to climate change impact.
- datsci_est_2015 8mo ago? Am I misunderstanding the push for nuclear energy and record energy prices in locales with new “data centers”?
- hirako2000 8mo agoBefore large models things were starting to move to micro VM, lean hardware, firecracker cloud platforms running thin containers. Ai buzz and now we are building giga factories. It stands for gigawatt usage, no less target.
- elbasti 8mo agoThis is wrong. AI uses ~4% of the US grid, and projections are that it will grow to 10%+ in the next 6 years. And most of that new capacity will be natural gas. That increase would basically whipe out the reduction in CO2 emissions the USA has had since 2018.
- thethirdone 8mo agoCompare that to ~30% of all energy use for transportation. So approximately 40%*4% = 1.6% vs 30%. I find your correction to be more wrong that the initial statement. > And most of that new capacity will be natural gas. That increase would basically whipe out the reduction in CO2 emissions the USA has had since 2018. Emissions in 2018 were ~5250M metric ton and in 2024 it was 4750M. That is a reduction of 10% total emissions. Without going into calculations of green electricity and such, its still safe to say AI using 10% of the grid would not completely wipe out the reduction. [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide...
- dvt 8mo ago> incredible amounts of ... energy So tired of seeing this trope. Data center energy expenditure is like less than 1% of worldwide energy expenditure[1]. Have you heard of mining? Or agriculture? Or cars/airplanes/ships? It's just factually wrong and alarmist to spread the fake news that AI has any measurable effect on climate change. [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-ai https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-...
- vrganj 8mo agoIt's not just the absolute expenditure. It's the type of expenditure. https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-facility-in-south-memphis-gets-stronger/ https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-...
- dvt 8mo ago[flagged]
- runarberg 8mo agoInteresting that you accuse your parent of political posturing at the end of your post, which indeed contains plenty political posturing.
- triceratops 8mo agoThose links are about air pollution, not carbon emissions. You're engaging in some political posturing of your own.
- dvt 8mo agoWhy are you lying? From literally the first paragraph of the CFR article: > China is the world’s largest source of carbon emissions, and the air quality of many of its major cities fails to meet international health standards.
- paulsutter 8mo agoHow did HN become this kind of website?
- iwontberude 8mo agoI went to a conference and people were suggesting nationalizing AI companies so it's basically everywhere.
- tartoran 8mo agoSame way we turned internet into a public utility? Wait, did we do that?
- JoshTriplett 8mo agoBecause AI is attacking, plagiarizing, competing with, and destroying the most common industry of people here on HN, so suddenly it mattered more to people who were previously unaffected. Some people have been concerned with this kind of politics all along. Some people are realizing they should be now, because of AI. And that's okay; both groups can still work together.
- emp17344 8mo agoThe parent comment is a pretty measured take. What’s your problem with it?
- Sohcahtoa82 8mo ago> AI is fine. The hype is annoying. I'm finding the detractors worse than the hype, because it seems like a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions since then. They'll say things like "why would I want to consume X amount of energy and Y amount of water just to get a wrong answer?" In other words, the people who think generative AI is an absolutely worthless and useless product are more annoying than the ones that think it's going to solve all the world's problems. They have no idea how much AI has improved since it reached center stage 3 years ago. Hallucinations are exceptionally rare now, since they now rely on searching for answers rather than what was in its training data. We got Claude Desktop at work and it's been a godsend. It works so much better to find information from Confluence and present it to me in a digestible format than having to search by hand and combing through a dozen irrelevant results to find the one bit of information I need. [0] For the purpose of this comment, this subset is meant to be detraction based on the quality of the product, not the other criticisms like copyright/content theft concerns, water/energy usage, whether or not Sam Altman is a good person, etc.
- jackie293746 8mo agoClaude Opus 4.6 regularly makes up shit and hallucinates. I'm not a detractor by any means but "exceptionally rare" is fantasyland.
- thrawa8387336 8mo agoCan vouch for this, plus, when it does work, stuff can take forever. Then, if I let it unsupervised, higher risk of doing the wrong thing. If I supervise it, then I become agent nanny.
- surgical_fire 8mo agoI have been experiencing it too. I honestly am finding Codex considerably better, as much as I despise OpenAI.
- beej71 8mo agoI don't think it's worthless. It can greatly speed up coding. And learning foreign languages. And many other things. But I do think humanity is worse off because of it. So I'm a detractor in that way. :)
- 01100011 8mo agoIt's a hail mary dash towards AGI. If we get computers to think for us, we can solve a lot of our most pressing issues. If not, well we've accelerated a lot of our worst problems(global warming, big tech, wealth inequality, surveillance state, post-truth culture, etc).
- yladiz 8mo agoThis sounds just like the idea that quantum computing will solve a lot of computational issues, which we know isn’t true. Why would AGI be any different?
- JoshTriplett 8mo ago> It's a hail mary dash towards AGI. If we get computers to think for us, we can solve a lot of our most pressing issues. All but one of them simultaneously, in fact. The one being left out: wanting to keep existing.
- xvector 8mo agoWhat are you talking about? AGI is practically a prerequisite for transhumanism, and, well, not dying. If you want to "keep existing" AGI happening is probably your only hope.
- slopinthebag 8mo agoI highly doubt OP was talking about immortality
- JoshTriplett 8mo agoAligned AGI, yes. Unaligned AGI is a fast way to die. If you want to keep existing, slow down, make sure AGI is aligned first, and go into cryo if necessary. If you don't want to keep existing, that doesn't mean you get to risk the rest of us.
- idle_zealot 8mo ago> If we get computers to think for us, we can solve a lot of our most pressing issues How, exactly, does more and better tech help with the fundamentally sociological issues of power distribution, wealth inequality, surveillance, etc? Are you operating on the assumption that a machine superintelligence will ignore the selfish orders of whoever makes it and immediately work to establish post-scarcity luxury space communism?
- nisten 8mo agoIn 2-3 decades 30% of the world population will be over 60 years old (~3 BILLION seniors).We don't have an economic model for it, nor does gen-z want to all be Personal Support Workers while paying rent. Nvidia only makes 6million data center GPUs a year. Huawei makes 900k. We need 10 to 100x more to be able to automate enough just to hold civilization together. Amazon built datacenters with near 0 water use but it used 35% more electricity overall. So tha problem can be solved however we need to change out of the whole scarcity mentality if we're going to actually make the planet nice.
- sarchertech 8mo ago> 30% Thats not accurate. The estimate is about 2 billion in 25 years. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ageing-and-health?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ageing-and-... We also have models for how that works at a country level because we have countries that have far exceeded that. And the vast majority of 60 year olds are still self sufficient and economically productive. Average global retirement age is around 65 and in most countries it’s creeping towards 70. And percent of world population over 70 looks much more manageable over the time span we can realistically model.