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This is a must-read series of articles, and I think Kyle is very much correct. The comparison to the adoption of automobiles is apt, and something I've thought
by lukev 6mo ago
This is a must-read series of articles, and I think Kyle is very much correct.
The comparison to the adoption of automobiles is apt, and something I've thought about before as well. Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society.
That said, I'm more open to using LLMs in constrained scenarios, in cases where they're an appropriate tool for the job and the downsides can be reasonably mitigated. The equivalent position in 1920 would not be telling individuals "don't ever drive a car," but rather extrapolating critically about the negative social and environmental effects (many of which were predictable) and preventing the worst outcomes via policy.
But this requires understanding the actual limits and possibilities of the technology. In my opinion, it's important for technologists who actually see the downsides to stay aware and involved, and even be experts and leaders in the field. I want to be in a position to say "no" to the worst excesses of AI, from a position of credible authority.
- baal80spam 6mo ago> Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.
- lukev 6mo ago[dead]
- throwway120385 6mo agoThey have a net positive effect for every owner, except that they seem to facilitate and encourage ways of living that require automobile ownership as a condition of adulthood in most places. So I'm not entirely sure they're a vast net positive in every value system. In yours, yes, but not in mine.
- mwigdahl 6mo agoIronically, AI facilitates self-driving cars, which promise to _reduce_ the need for private automobile ownership.
- nradov 6mo agoThere is very little connection between ownership and who does the driving. I still want to own my own cars even if a computer does most of the driving. That way it's always available, and more importantly I can keep my own stuff in it.
- mwigdahl 6mo agoAnd you should be able to. But people who don't want that or don't have the means to afford it can have the benefits of automobile transport without the capital expense.
- nradov 6mo agoConsumers can already rent or lease automobiles. This is an operating expense, not a capital expense.
- Gigachad 6mo agoRental cars are expensive because they are covering the risk and increased wear and tear of rental drivers. As well as the downtime of when the car is rented to you but you aren’t driving it. Self driving cars would make this massively cheaper and remove most of the reasons to own a car. It would make about as much sense as owning a train for most people.
- gosub100 6mo agoYep just like how massively cheaper housing is to rent, right?
- 6mo ago
- masfuerte 6mo agoI've always lived in walkable cities. I don't own a car and with pollution, congestion, accident risk, pavement obstruction, etc. other people's cars unequivocally make my life worse. We can argue about whether this is a good trade off, but the claim that cars make everyone's life better is straightforwardly false.
- TaupeRanger 6mo agoTroll post? No, they do not "unequivocally" make your life worse. "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous. The only way you receive food (except from your backyard inner-city garden?) is through people DRIVING. The way you receive packages is by DRIVING. They city infrastructure you enjoy is maintained through skilled laborers and tradespeople DRIVING.
- masfuerte 6mo agoI said cars not driving. Yes, the supermarket needs trucks to deliver the food. It doesn't need cars.
- lamasery 6mo agoAmbulances: good. Trucks: good. Busses, even: good. Cars? Waaaay less clear they're net-beneficial.
- TaupeRanger 6mo agoTraveling to work in a personal car to get to the job that requires you to drive an ambulance: apparently bad? Likewise driving to your trucking job? Also bad? To the grocery store workers? Also bad? To the operations and support employees that provide your internet, your email, every app you use, the water treatment plant, your local government, the restaurants you order from, your insurance company. Yes...getting to work and allowing society to run at levels of efficiency required to support the population is very clearly beneficial.
- armonster 6mo agoTheir negative effects are much more vast, subtle, and cultural. You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people. It has created an expensive barrier of entry for existing in society and added a ton of friction to doing anything and everything, especially with people. That's not even getting into the climate effects. The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.
- nradov 6mo agoThe upsides of automobiles, or personal mobility in general, are enormous. I can go wherever I want, whenever I want along with other people and cargo. I don't have to wait for a schedule set by someone else, or worry about union strikes. I love my cars!
- cgannett 6mo agoYou can go wherever you want whenever you want... until everyone does this and now you are stalled in traffic with no end in sight.
- jasonmp85 6mo ago[dead]
- kraquepype 6mo agoThose are all enormous benefits to you and you alone. The greatest thing about cars are the things they do for you. In order for someone else to have those benefits, they also need a car. If as a society, if we could feel the same way about public transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, that you do about your own personal vehicle - we'd be better off.
- nradov 6mo ago[flagged]
- MisterTea 6mo ago> I don't agree - they have some negative effects The problem is we are numb to it. 40,000+ people are killed in car accidents every year in just the USA. Wars are started over oil and accepted by the people so they can keep paying less at the pump. Microplastics entering the environment each day along with particulate from brakes, and exhaust. Speaking of exhaust: global warming. Even going electric just shifts the problems as we need to dig up lithium, the new oil. We still have to drill for oil for plastics and metal refining, recycling and fabrication.
- alnwlsn 6mo agoI think it's most obvious in hindsight, probably it was a long time (some decades) before cars were understood to have much of a negative effect at all. Nobody* thought much about air pollution (even adding lead to the gasoline) or climate effects, or what would happen when cities were built enough that they were then dependent on cars, or what happens when gas or cars gets expensive. All they saw was that trips taking a day could now be done in an hour and produced no manure, and that meant suddenly you could reasonably go to many more places. What's not to like? A model T was cheap, and you didn't even need to worry about insurance or having a driver's license. Surely nobody would drive so carelessly as to crash. *well, not technically nobody, but nobody important.
- acdha 6mo agoIf you read the period news, pretty much everything except lead poisoning and climate change was well known by the 1920s. Rich people wanted cars but a ton of places had resistance from everyone else to what they correctly recognized as removing the public spaces they used and shifting externalities to, for example, the people being hit by cars. What’s really interesting is that you can find newspaper columns in the 1920s recognizing what we now call induced demand as even by then it was clear that adding road capacity simply inspired more people to drive.
- bilegeek 6mo agoThat's also part of the problem. People back then had other systems to make those critiques (or their job didn't require the travel it does now), and now they don't. If alternatives don't exist, and most US people today have never experienced them, there's no demand for them, and you realistically can't expect that demand to come without a massive, grinding slog. Lack of alternatives + political unwillingness to provide them + lack of political pressure to provide them + the massive effort that would be needed to build a system from scratch that has already been dismantled, and infrastructure is in the way because it wasn't a factor + corruption, democratic decline, etc. = most problems around cars in the USA.
- 6mo ago
- kraquepype 6mo ago[flagged]
- 1234letshaveatw 6mo agoI never want to live in a society that views individualism as toxic
- nehal3m 6mo agoYou’re equivocating, your parent specifically named an example of toxic individualism, they did not say or imply that individualism is toxic.
- 1234letshaveatw 6mo agoI guess, if you feel that freedom of movement is insignificant
- kraquepype 6mo agoThe thing is, you have LESS freedom of movement in a car dependent society. You lose that freedom of movement if: Your car breaks down Your car gets stolen Your car gets totaled You lose your license You can't afford insurance You get too sick to drive You lose bodily mobility Your mental faculties decline If you can't drive, you have to depend on whatever public options there are around you. Good luck.
- lamasery 6mo agoExactly, that's why fostering an environment where most people can walk out their front door and get to most of what they need day-to-day pretty fast without having to own a car is so important. Freedom of movement. Increased car ownership & use, and increased design of environments to cater to cars, greatly harms that freedom. Ever checked into a hotel somewhere in city-sprawl, looked at your map to find a local shop to pick up some cable you forgot or a toothbrush or to get some dinner, and realized that despite those things being within half a mile you can't realistically walk to them because there's a highway between you and them, so you're stuck unless you pay someone with a car to drive you? Doesn't feel very free.
- spprashant 6mo agoThe positive effects were immediate, and measurable. The negative effects are delayed, and hard to quantify without all the advancement in climate research since then. If everyone in 1920 knew a 100 years from now there would be climate crisis to reckon with, perhaps a few things would have changed along the way. Today we have a much better understanding of the world, so we have the means to think down the line of what the negative effects of LLMs and course correct if needed.
- mynameisbilly 6mo agoWe did know in the 20s. We knew in the 30s. We knew in the 40s. We absolutely knew in the 50s (oil industry funded their own studies on this). We knew before we decided to direct billions into a federal interstate highway system that bulldozed countless communities of color and killed many cities' downtowns and sense of connectedness. I don't see anything positive about being forced to participate in this car-ownership game where 99% of North American cities are designed around car ownership, and if you don't own a car you're screwed. I don't WANT to own a car, I don't want to direct countless thousands of dollars to a car note, car maintenance, gas, etc. I want the freedom to exist without needing to own an absurdly expensive vehicle to get myself around. There's nothing freeing or positive about that unless all you've ever known and all you can imagine is a world in which cities are designed around cars and not people.
- thfuran 6mo agoIt was pretty well established scientifically in 1900 that increasing atmospheric CO2 would result in increasing global temperature, but I don't think it was really in the public awareness for many decades. "Global warming" wasn't coined until the '70s.
- nradov 6mo agoNah. We have no means of predicting the long-term effects of LLMs. Major new technologies have always caused effects that were completely unpredictable during the early phases. Any claim that a much better understanding of the world allows for thinking through the effects is pure hubris.
- intended 6mo agoNo - as a society we cannot say that its a “vast net” positive. The externalities that harm the commons are not accounted for. We (or lobbyists) resist having carbon costs included in the prices we pay at the pump. Edit: More transportation is good; I am not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, just that our accounting for costs makes things look better than they are.
- mason_mpls 6mo agoone trip to Amsterdam will show you how bad our use of cars has been for us
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- rdiddly 6mo agoThe benefits accrue to the owners of the vehicles. The negative effects are externalized onto everybody else.
- archagon 6mo agoI'd say commercial automobiles probably have a net positive effect. (Though their impact on pollution and climate change can't be discounted.) But daily life in walkable and public transitable European cities is so, so much nicer and healthier than in most American cities. I'd trade ubiquitous personal automobiles for that in a heartbeat.
- asdff 6mo agoThere's still plenty of cars in europe. Biggest advantage of europe is even the major cities are only so large in footprint, like even berlin is barely over a dozen miles across. Major US cities could be 40-60 miles across. Greater LA maybe over 100 miles across depending on how you measure, all contiguous development. The northeast corridor is nearly contiguous urban/suburban development over a ~450 mile snake from washington dc to boston. Makes a little 10 mile rail line in berlin capture a much greater share of potential trips within the berlin urban area than a 10 mile rail line pretty much anywhere in the US. LA has a light rail line that is over 50 miles long.
- Miraste 6mo agoIt's not at all clear whether automobiles were a net positive. They are more or less solely responsible for climate change (even emissions not directly from motor vehicles wouldn't be possible without them), which may prove to be the worst mistake in the history of technology.
- tikhonj 6mo agoA large part of the effect that cars have come from massive subsidies and policy choices that push for cars over alternative options. The comparison shouldn't be "cars vs literally nothing" but rather "car-dominated infrastructure vs the same investments in alternatives". (Not to say that it's an either-or; the optimal equilibrium might still involve some mix of car investments, just far less than we have now.)
- seer 6mo agoI think the right term for highways or most other car roads is “car sewer” - you need very specialised equipment to navigate them, they are deadly, smelly, loud and unpleasant. One of the worst environments humanity has produced. Yes they ship people around somewhat fast. Slower than possible with other methods, and the cost is incredible - economic (much more expensive per passenger than almost any alternative), political (they inherently divide people, dehumanise and make people never really share a public space), health - they reduce lifespan by both lowering living quality as well as directly killing a staggering amount of humans per year). And we have learned how to build better places for humans that do not need these coffins on wheels - if you visit any European capital, and most Asian ones - you will see environments built for humans, not cars - soo much nicer. So cars as a technology have definitely not been beneficial to humanity overall, but it has been somewhat useful to some. I think strongtowns were very good advocates of what places in America could like if you look beyond cars. I personally like the “not just bikes” channel though.
- estimator7292 6mo agoWhat benefit do cars provide that public transit doesn't? How are thousands of individual cars better than light rail? Cars aren't a positive in society. Transportation is the benefit, and cars are the worst possible way to transport people. A functioning public transit system is better in every possible way apart from egotistical arguments like "I don't like seeing poor people on the bus".
- gosub100 6mo agoI don't like urine puddles on the bus or train seats. How egotistical of me being repulsed by human waste.
- ButlerianJihad 6mo agoI've used public transit for the better part of 50 years, including inner-city buses and light rail trains in several cities. And I've literally never, ever seen nor felt nor smelled an actual "puddle of urine" on a seat. Yeah, sometimes the seats were kinda iffy or damp; perhaps someone spilled a drink there. There were often people eating, or even drinking a beer on board a bus. So I often see pistachio shells or a discarded bottle/can behind a seat. But human waste is unheard-of. But any actual urine "spills" would've gotten cleaned up right quick. They simply don't tolerate that stuff. Look at any bus operator and they are tough as nails if someone tries shenanigans. In fact, the craziest times I've had were in ride shares and taxis. I was all dressed up for a funeral one morning, summoned a taxi, and the driver who tried to pick me up was obviously drunk. Another time, I had a medical transport that was summoned, sat at some gas station for 15+ minutes, and when he arrived at my place and I got in the back seat, it was wet and had clearly been through a hasty cleanup, and I could smell urine permeating the vehicle, and it was absolutely nuts, but I said nothing, because it probably wasn't the driver's fault. Probably.
- Gigachad 6mo agoThey have some positive effect in some situations but the overall effect has destroyed cities and made people fat and isolated. Kind of like how fat and salt are good for you until you over consume. The world has massively overconsumed cars.
- globular-toast 6mo agoNot for everyone. If everyone tried to use a personal car at the same time it wouldn't work. It's also worth bearing in mind that when people talk about "the automobile", what they're really talking about is the roads. Automobiles are useless without roads, and there's only so much space. A lot of this comes down to having too much of a good thing. We are really bad at detecting when we've gone past the point of too much, and we're even worse at undoing it once we have.
- ForHackernews 6mo agoAll blocked in the UK, sadly.
- throwanem 6mo agoHe's gay, and being gay online contravenes the UK Online Safety Act. Complain to your legislators.
- flir 6mo agoThat's funny, 'cos being anti-gay contravenes the UK Online Safety Act too.
- throwanem 6mo agoYes. I made no claim your legislators are competent. (Congratulations on the summary dismissal of the hereditary peers!)
- wackget 6mo agoFor anyone who isn't aware, just ignore the above user and their obviously absurdly reductive take.
- throwanem 6mo agoI realize you don't have access to it, but all I'm actually doing is summarizing Mr. Kingsbury's own explanation for the geoblock your incompetent legislators made necessary. As his fellow American citizen, I have to say I found his argument compelling. Your opinion of it moves me rather less. If you choose to regard that as "self-censorship," then frankly I can see even more clearly what drove him to the decision than I could before. I'll have to bookmark his instructions for how to configure such a block in nginx, in case I decide to publish anything online again in future. In any case I don't really see where you're likely to have anything useful further to say to me, and I would like you please to stop trying. I don't come to this website just to be harassed by the ignorant, after all. (Before you risk real legal trouble, you should know that I am myself homosexual and thus, as I understand it, actually protected, at least against some forms of maltreatment by UK subjects, under some of your rather bloodthirsty laws against defamation, harassment, et cetera. You should be careful what you say, perhaps. It would be a shame to see you arrested or ASBO'd or something of that unpleasant sort, merely over an earnest - if overenthusiastic and ill-considered - effort to speak your honest mind.)
- Glemllksdf 6mo agoI think he is to pesimistic, a tool is a tool and if AI progresses without hitting a ceilling, i will see a potential future of a society which might explore space. Musks SpaceX Keynote was ridiculous, don't get me wrong, but we will be able to see AI progress in the next 5 years which will give us some kind of gut feeling were the journey can go. Also AI solves another problem: Compute. It was clear that we want some kind of compute but its like with 4k; We have 4k for ages now but it is not the default resolution on all displays sold. We stoped pushing the boundaries because invest is not here. People do not bother too much with it. With AI and the richest companies and people want to see what happens, pushes the envolope a lot faster, pushes us to find solutions. This AI Compute based on ML/Neuroal Networks can also be used for physics simulation, protein folding, and everything else. Stoping technology is not an option and not a solution. Education is. We need to educate people.
- ted_dunning 6mo agoActually, this AI Compute is not very useful for physics, protein folding or many other high performance computing. The problem is that the connectivity required for much of AI is very different than that required for classic HPC (more emphasis on bandwidth, less on super low latency small payload remote memory operations) and the numeric emphasis is very different (lots of mixed resolution and lots of ridiculously small numeric resolutions like fp8 vs almost all fp64 with some fp32). The result is that essentially no AI computers reach the high end of the TOP500. The converse is also true, classic frontier scale super computers don't make the most cost effective AI training platforms because they spend a lot of the budget on making HPC programs fast.
- Glemllksdf 6mo agoAlphafold (protein folding) was trained on Googles TPUs which are not GPUs true but very close. Flow simulation also happens on GPUs and not CPUs though. El Capitan is the top 1 on top 500 and the flops ratio between CPU and GPU is nearly 1 to 100.
- jimbokun 6mo agoMore and more urban centers are banning cars in their cores. Especially older cities built before the automobile existed. An analog might be the push for banning phones in schools. Setting apart times and spaces where serendipitous human interactions are encouraged by the lack of distractions.
- aaron695 6mo ago[dead]
- madeofpalk 6mo ago> Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act > Now might be a good time to call your representatives. Well, not that must-read I guess
- eddythompson80 6mo agoYes, in general government censored speech is inherently not important by the fact the government censored it. Like if it were important it wouldn’t have been censored. Obviously.
- wackget 6mo agoExcept this is self-censorship. The author chose to make it unavailable.
- catcowcostume 6mo agoYou say it as if the author made it not available, rather than your own government. If anything, it proves the author's point.
- wackget 6mo agoThe author did make it unavailable. Nobody forced him to. He's kneecapping his own content and intentionally excluding UK users unnecessarily. Some random developer blog is absolutely not the target of the Online Safety Act. The OSA applies to "services with a significant number of UK users or where UK users are a target market". Anyone arguing that point is doing so in bad faith, probably to prove some agenda.
- aphyr 6mo agoI've put considerable time into this, including speaking with Ofcom directly. The guidance Ofcom issued for small site operators last year was that they did intend to target "one-man bands", and that there would be no guidance on specific numbers that constituted the "significant number" of UK visitors which triggers Part 3 and 5 provider restrictions.
- hibikir 6mo agoWhen we look at automobiles, we also see that there were many ways to adapt to them. It's true that there's many parts of the anglosphere where, without one, you are a second class citizen at best: The lived environment was built so that you could not live without them... but that's not the only choice. I spend part of the year in Spain all the time, and I might not get into a car once a month. Not because I am any kind of enthusiast, but because in the town I live when I am there, it's doesn't really help. The different however is network effects. When we make a place better for cars, I make it worse for pedestrians. Your adoption of the car, and its pressure on my lived environment, has effects on me. Same as, say, people joining facebook or twitter. But do LLMs create network effects that are directly harmful, or is it just a matter of making it harder to compete, just like a mechanical watchmaker has less business now that it's so easy to have a reliable clock? Because the first case is a problem, but the second one... that's competition. It's civilization. And then it's not really a matter of cars vs pedestrians.
- tpdly 6mo agoI think it does have some network effects. When people are sending you 800 line markdown "planning documents" and "specs", drowning you in slop, it induces demand for LLMs to re-deflate that content into something manageable.