The root problem is capitalism though, if it wasn’t AI it would be some other idiotic scheme like cryptocurrency that would be wasting energy instead. The problem is with the system as opposed to technology.
Right, but the technology has the system’s philosophy baked into it. All inventions encourage a certain way of seeing the world. It’s not a coincidence that agriculture yields land ownership, mass production yields wage labor, or in this case fuzzy plagiarism machines yield a transhuman death cult.
Sure, technology is a product of the culture and it in turn influences how the culture develops, there’s a dialectical relationship there.
So why take the heat off of AI, as if profiting from mass plagiarism is different when it has an API instead of flesh and bone?
There are some pretty smart/knowledgeable people in the left camp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ziuPUeewK0
Miles is chill in my book. I appreciate what he is tackling, and hope he continues.
It seems that there are much worse issues with AI systems that are happening right now. I think those issues should be taking precedent over the alignment problem.
Some of the issues are bad enough right now that AI development and use should be banned for a limited time frame (at least 5 years) while we figure out more ethical ways of doing it. The fact that we aren’t doing that is a massive failure of our already constantly-fucking-up governments.
So the problem isn’t the technology. The problem is unethical big corporations.
Disagree. The technology will never yield AGI as all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.
All it can do now and ever will do is destroy the environment by using oodles of energy, just so some fucker can generate a boring big titty goth pinup with weird hands and weirder feet. Feeding it exponentially more energy will do what? Reduce the amount of fingers and the foot weirdness? Great. That is so worth squandering our dwindling resources to.
Idk. I find it a great coding help. IMO AI tech have legitimate good uses.
Image generation have algo great uses without falling into porn. It ables to people who don’t know how to paint to do some art.
Wow, great, the AI is here to defend itself. Working about as well as you’d think.
Disagree. The technology will never yield AGI as all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.
We definitely don’t need AGI for AI technologies to be useful. AI, particularly reinforcement learning, is great for teaching robots to do complex tasks for example. LLMs have shocking ability relative to other approaches (if limited compared to humans) to generalize to “nearby but different, enough” tasks. And once they’re trained (and possibly quantized), they (LLMs and reinforcement learning policies) don’t require that much more power to implement compared to traditional algorithms. So IMO, the question should be “is it worthwhile to spend the energy to train X thing?” Unfortunately, the capitalists have been the ones answering that question because they can do so at our expense.
For a person without access to big computing resources (me lol), there’s also the fact that transfer learning is possible for both LLMs and reinforcement learning. Easiest way to explain transfer learning is this: imagine that I want to learn Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Computer Science. What should I learn first so that each subject is easy for me to pick up? My answer would be Math. So in AI speak, if we spend a ton of energy to train an AI to do math and then fine-tune agents to do Physics, Engineering, etc., we can avoid training all the agents from scratch. Fine-tuning can typically be done on “normal” computers with FOSS tools.
all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.
IMO that can be an incredibly useful approach for solving problems whose dynamics are too complex to reasonably model, with the understanding that the obtained solution is a crude approximation to the underlying dynamics.
IMO I’m waiting for the bubble to burst so that AI can be just another tool in my engineering toolkit instead of the capitalists’ newest plaything.
Sorry about the essay, but I really think that AI tools have a huge potential to make life better for us all, but obviously a much greater potential for capitalists to destroy us all so long as we don’t understand these tools and use them against the powerful.
Since I don’t feel like arguing, I will grant you that you are correct in what you say AI can do. I am not really but whatever, say it can:
How will these reasonable AI tools emerge out of this under capitalism? And how is it not all still just theft with extra steps that is imoral to use?
Considering most new technology these days is merely a distilation of the ethos of the big corporations, how do you distinguish?
This conveniently ignores the progress being made with smaller and smaller models in the open source community.
As with literally every technical progress, tech itself is no problem, capitalism usage of it is.
The problem is the concentration of power, Sam “regulate me daddy” Altman’s plan is to get the government to create a web of regulation that makes it so only the big tech giants have access to the uncensored models.
Of course, as usual with capitalism and basically everything, we had hope to recieve a tool making expressing themselves easy for workers lacking time and training to do art, and we will superexpensive proprietary software and monopolies quite possibly gatekeep by law. Again just as in software some hope is in open source.
It’s wild how we went from…
Critics: “Crypto is an energy hog and its main use case is a convoluted pyramid scheme”
Boosters: “Bro trust me bro, there are legit use cases and energy consumption has already been reduced in several prototype implementations”
…to…
Critics: “AI is an energy hog and its main use case is a convoluted labor exploitation scheme”
Boosters: “Bro trust me bro, there are legit use cases and energy consumption has already been reduced in several prototype implementations”
