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Transcript
Title text: This is how you all fucking sound
[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]
Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]
Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]
Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]
Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.
No, it’s apt. They’re all tools of capitalism promoted by oligarchs and bootlickers.
No, really, its a technology.
A more apt comparison would be more like internal combustion engines, wood burning stoves, or magnetic tape hard drives. That is to say, it probably has some niche place where its still a practical use or may be advantageous (backup/emergency generators for hospitals, in remote wooded locations without modern infrastructure, for cheap long term data back ups, for my examples, respectively), but that place is not the common place.
An individual stove, engine or hard drive has a negligible effect on climate change. AI requires huge amounts of material, space, energy and water to run. So a closer comparison would be if a civilization threw all their building materials, firestarter and food into a big pit and lit it.
Right now, yes. You can thank greedy capitalists for that. There’s no fundamental reason why it must be an environmental disaster. Look at the human brain. It’s way beyond any AI today and uses 10 watts. That’s peanuts to any AI. Drop the power consumption of AI by a couple orders of magnitude and nobody cares. Impossible you say? We done crazier power drops in conventional computing. Take a Pentium 3 500Mhz computer. Ran about 200 watts. It’s about the same compute performance as a Raspberry Pi Pico at 2 watts. Or take a 486 vs an Arm Cortex M3. The 486 is 2-10 watts, depending on variant. The M3 is a couple of mW for equivalent performance. Point is, we’ve slashed power consumption wildly in the past and I see no reason to think AI should be any different. We just let greedy capitalists push the technology out way too widely before it was ready. Which means we waste alot of energy and resources to build stuff that will likely soon be very obsolete.
It really isn’t, they’re completely different things. This is comparing the invention of the transistor to slavery and child labour. It’s fucking idiotic is what it is. If they made valid comparisons they’d be making a point, instead thayre making a fool of themselves and the message.
You are aware that AI, as it is currently used, is a mass plagiarism machine, yes? That threatens to put people in many different sectors out of work? And accelerates climate change to do so?
Why haven’t we heard about AI doing literally anything good, like curing cancer, solving famous unsolved problems, reducing waste in logistics and distribution, etc?
Each character in the OP comic is an arrogant chud trying to reassure themselves that their precious methods of control aren’t fragile.
Solving famous unsolved problem: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an-80-year-old-erdos-problem-and-mathematicians-are-amazed/
Drug discovery (AI can’t do anything about the time needed for clinical trials): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03434-4
Assisting the blind: https://www.acb.org/i-am-blind-self-driving-cars-waymo-give-people-me-independence
Re: solving famous unsolved problem
You’re lumping in other uses of AI with LLMs (chatGPT etc), which is how @pfried@reddthat.com contradicted you.
It’s specifically the LLMs, which were trained with AI but are more like context-specific hyperplausible random text generators, and yes, are mass plagiarism projects currently being used as an excuse to fire a bunch of creative folk in multiple industries.
Other non-LLM AI uses tend to be more specifically problem-solving and narrowly useful.
Why is plagiarism bad? Aren’t you a bit of a bootlicker here for enforcing anti sharing constructs now? Nobody owns information, period.
I’m sure you are just mouth-agape salivating at the thought of getting to watch all the Mickey Mouse you’ve ever wanted to for free, but even a socialist society would shame plagiarism.
The idea that a society that has cast off its capitalistic chains to embrace freedom, compassion, and mutual aid would not be one that properly celebrates its people for their valuable hard work is… fucking insane.
You think artists, writers, musicians etc should all get replaced by data centers? The bootlickers are the ones groveling at the oligarchs’ feet
What doss that have to do with what I said? Plagiarism doesn’t exist, it’s a social construct that we made up entirely to protect information “theft” but since information cannot be stolen the entire premise is not sound.
So are photocopiers.
You’re really not getting it. You are saying the comparison of the printing press, the photocopier and then the scanner are equal to slavery and child labour.
Somethings pretty fucked up in your head if you’re making that correlation.
Also, ML has done a lot of good things too, even LLMs have their function and benefit, be it at a cost that may not be worth paying with our current energy generation and cooling solutions. You just don’t want to see it, you are deliberately looking away in your blind hatred for the system. Which I get, fuck the system and it’s owners. But God damn, comparing it to the torture that is slavery?
LLMs are a tool, they have no inherent morality to them (I’m not talking about companies stealing shit to train their LLMs, you can do it without theft).
Slavery is not a technology or a tool, besides a “tool of capitalism” or whatever the fuck you want to call it, seeing as it’s been around since we learned to lift a rock to another human. Humanities evil behaviour is not a technology.
You don’t understand the comparison. Genuinely, I don’t think you are smart enough to even talk to about this.
All tools have morality.
A slave is a tool.
I don’t mean in the capitalist sense, I mean, literally, in the leveraging them to build a pyramid sense.
Treating people like tools is why it is immoral.
Ah, the classic argument, claiming that you have the superior intelligence. Yes God, whatever you say.
Sometimes it is true. I mean, what else am I supposed to say to creationists and homeopaths?