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I mean, it is objectively bad for life. Throwing away millions to billions of gallons of water all so you can get some dubious coding advice.
Throwing away water? Does it escape into space. I completely understand the energy arguments but water?
It gets heated and then it’s unusable because the point of it is to cool things off. Some of it you can cool down and use again, by evaporation, but then you lose the amount that evaporated. When it goes back into the atmosphere it becomes polluted and you have to spend more energy cleaning it before it can be used by humans. Entropy always increases, the question is how fast you want it to increase.
Entropy always increases in closed systems. Because of the Sun, the Earth is not a closed system. If Earth were a pure entropy game, there would be no life. Also the atmosphere can’t hold infinite amount of water - that’s why it rains sometimes. So “using” fresh water is only a problem in regions where it doesn’t rain much and/or where the water has to be prepared/cleaned im the first place (which would probably make it too expensive to cool data centers in the first place) - if the water was from a natural fresh water source than just heating it is actually not a water issue - but it will contribute to global warming, but then again the argument shouldn’t be about water but about that data centers contribute to global warming.
So the amount of water is pretty much constant. And because of the huge amount of energy the Earth gets from the sun, there is plenty of opportunities for clean energy that can (and is be used) to reverse entropy. All living things reverse entropy all the time. So the issue is not using the water but the unclean energy sources that lead to global warming.
Just because water is cheap doesn’t mean it’s plentiful. We under-price water, as evidenced by the massive profiteering off of public water. These prices are inelastic and don’t respond to supply perfectly.
Also life can absolutely exist in a game of entropy. You’re pulling semantics with the closed system thing. If you want, then make the closed system be the whole solar system. It doesn’t affect my argument.
Using fresh water causes energy to be spent, that’s the whole point. Yes you can recover drinkable water from anything if you spend enough energy to do it, including the ocean, but we can’t do that as a primary means of getting water. Eventually it is a snake eating its own head with the amount of energy spent to obtain more energy.
Life can’t exist in a high entropy environment. Of course you can declare the entire solar system a closed system but because of the sun our solar system will be in an extremely low entropy state on average for a couple of billion years. Once the sun “dies” and the temperature averages out in our solar system there will be no life.
And yes it’s (almost) always an energy argument that’s why the water argument is not a good one. But not everything is an energy argument. Take He and H2 for example if you let that into the air it will eventually escape our atmosphere because of solar winds and is truly wasted/lost - but that’s not true for water. You can’t really waste water in a sense that we will have less water im the future (unless you split it into hydrogen and oxygen and let the hydrogen escape).
No one said anything about a high entropy environment. Entropy is a tool for thinking about this stuff, and it extends beyond thermodynamics as entropy is an information theory concept too. The more fragmented things become, the harder they are to work with. When you use energy (or water) for an industrial use it creates fragmentation and makes that water harder to use (especially for a different use case, drinking). You can’t just pump it back into the aquifer. This is a directional thing, not about high or low in absolute numbers.
The problem isn’t AI. The problem is Capitalism.
The problem is always Capitalism.
AI, Climate Change, rising fascism, all our problems are because of capitalism.
Can’t delete this old-ass comment because the fediverse is so free it forces me not to delete it.
Anyway, don’t care, still think the root of the problem are humans, and we will ruin whatever system is in place.
Even if lemmy users want to blindly believe switching from capitalism will be the fix to every single problem.While you aren’t wrong about human nature. I’d say you’re wrong about systems. How would the same thing happen under an anarchist system? Or under an actual communist (not Marxist-Leninist) system? Which account for human nature and focus to use it against itself.
I’ll answer. Because some people see these systems as “good” regardless of political affiliation and want them furthered and see any cost as worth it. If an anarchist / communist sees these systems in a positive light, then they will absolutely try and use them at scale. These people absolutely exist and you could find many examples of them on Lemmy. Try DB0.
And the point of anarchist or actual communist systems is that such scale would be miniscule. Not massive national or unanswerable state scales.
And yes, I’m an anarchist. I know DB0 and their instance and generally agree with their stance - because it would allow any one of us to effectively advocate against it if we desired to.
There would be no tech broligarchy forcing things on anyone. They’d likely all be hanged long ago. And no one would miss them as they provide nothing of real value anyway.
DB0 has a rather famous record of banning users who do not agree with AI. See !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com or others for many threads complaining about it.
You have no way of knowing what the scale would be as it’s all a thought experiment, however, so let’s play at that. if you see AI as a nearly universal good and want to encourage people to use it, why not incorporate it into things? Why not foist it into the state OS or whatever?
Buuuuut… keep in mind that in previous Communist regimes (even if you disagree that they were “real” Communists), what the state says will apply. If the state is actively pro-AI, then by default, you are using it. Are you too good to use what your brothers and sisters have said is good and will definitely 100% save labour? Are you wasteful, Comrade? Why do you hate your country?
Yes, I have seen posts on it. Sufficed to say, despite being an anarchist. I don’t have an account there for reasons. And don’t agree with everything they do.
The situation with those bans I might consider heavy handed and perhaps overreaching. But by the same token it’s a bit of a reflection of some of those that are banned. Overzealous and lacking nuance etc.
The funny thing is. They pretty much dislike the tech bros as much as anyone here does. You generally won’t ever find them defending their actions. They want AI etc that they can run from their home. Not snarfing up massive public resources, massively contributing to climate change, or stealing anyone’s livelihood. Hell many of them want to run off the grid from wind and solar. But, as always happens with the left. We can agree with eachother 90%, but will never tolerate or understand because of the 10%.
PS
We do know the scale. Your use of “the state” with reference to anarchism. Implies you’re unfamiliar with it. Anarchism and communism are against “the state” for the reasons you’re also warry of it. It’s too powerful and unanswerable.
Rather, our problem is that we live in a world where the strongest will survive, and the strongest does not mean the smart… So alas we will always be in complete shit until we disappear.
That’s a pathetic, defeatist world view. Yeah, we’re victims of our circumstances, but we can make the world a better place than what we were raised in.
You can try, and you should try. But some handful of generations ago, some assholes were in the right place at the right time and struck it rich. The ones that figured out generational wealth ended up with a disproportionate amount of power. The formula to use money to make more money was handed down, coddled, and protected to keep the rich and powerful in power. Even 100 Luigi’s wouldn’t even make the tiniest dent in the oligarch pyramid as others will just swoop in and consume their part.
Any lifelong pursuit you have to make the world a better place than you were raised in will be wiped out with a scribble of black Sharpie on Ministry of Truth letterhead.
Now see, I like the idea of AI.
What I don’t like are the implications, and the current reality of AI.
I see businesses embracing AI without fully understanding the limits. Stopping the hiring juniors developers, often firing large numbers of seniors because they think AI, a group of cheap post grad vibe programmers and a handful of seasoned seniors will equal the workforce they got rid of when AI, while very good is not ready to sustain this. It is destroying the career progression for the industry and even if/when they realise it was a mistake, it might already have devastated the industry by then.
I see the large tech companies tearing through the web illegally sucking up anything they can access to pull into their ever more costly models with zero regard to the effects on the economy, the cost to the servers they are hitting, or the environment from the huge power draw creating these models requires.
It’s a nice idea, but private business cannot be trusted to do this right, we’re seeing how to do it wrong, live before our eyes.
And the whole AI industry is holding up the stock market, while AI has historically always ran the hype cycle and crashed into an AI winter. Stock markets do crash after billions pumped into a sector suddenly turn out to be not worth as much. Almost none of these AI companies run a profit and don’t have any prospect of becoming profitable. It’s when everybody starts yelling that this time it’s different that things really become dangerous.
It’s a nice idea, but private business cannot be trusted to do this right, we’re seeing how to do it wrong, live before our eyes.
You’re right. It’s the business model driving technological advancement in the 21st century that’s flawed.
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Whether intentional or not, this is gaslighting. “Here’s the trendy reaction those wacky lemmings are currently upvoting!”
Getting to the core issue, of course we’re sick of AI, and have a negative opinion of it! It’s being forced into every product, whether it makes sense or not. It’s literally taking developer jobs, then doing worse. It’s burning fossil fuels and VC money and then hallucinating nonsense, but still it’s being jammed down our throats when the vast majority of us see no use-case or benefit from it. But feel free to roll your eyes at those acknowledging the truth…
Yes
For those who know
I need to watch that video. I saw the first post but haven’t caught up yet.
it’s just slacktivism no different than all the other facebook profile picture campaigns.
It Is true thou, ai bad
Its true. We can have a nuanced view. Im just so fucking sick of the paid off media hyping this shit, and normies thinking its the best thing ever when they know NOTHING about it. And the absolute blind trust and corpo worship make me physically ill.
Not all that glitters is gold. 🤷
Yes, any further questions?
Lots of pro AI astroturfing and whataboutisms in these comments… 🤢
“Anyone I disagree with must be a bot or government agent”
Only because most of the people here don’t have the faintest idea what AI is or how it works.
Lots of AI is technologically interesting and has tons of potential, but this kind of chatbot and image/video generation stuff we got now is just dumb.
How people dare not like the automatic bullshit machine pushed down their troat…
Seriously, genrative AI acomplishment are :
- Making mass spam easier
- Burning the planet
- Making people lose their job and not even being a decent solution
- Make all search engine and information sources worse
- Creating an economic bubble that will fuckup the economy even harder
- Easing mass surveillance and weakening privacy everywhere
One could have said many of the same thigs about a lot of new technologies.
The Internet, Nuclear, Rockets, Airplanes etc.
Any new disruptive technology comes with drawbacks and can be used for evil.
But that doesn’t mean it’s all bad, or that it doesn’t have its uses.
Give me one real world use that is worth the downside.
As dev I can already tell you it’s not coding or around code. Project get spamed with low quality nonsensical bug repport, ai generated code rarely work and doesn’t integrate well ( on top on pushing all the work on the reviewer wich is already the hardest part of coding ) and ai written documentation is ridled with errors and is not legible.
And even if ai was remotly good at something it still the equivalent of a microwave trying to replace the entire restaurant kitchen.
I can run a small LLM locally which I can talk to using voice to turn certain lights on and off, set reminders for me, play music etc.
There are MANY examples of LLM’s being useful, it has its drawbacks just like any big technology, but saying it has no uses that aren’t worth it, is ridiculous.
But we could do vocal assistants well before LLMs (look at siri) and without setting everything on fire.
And seriously, I asked for something that’s worth all the down side and you bring up clippy 2.0 ???
Where are the MANY exemples ? why are LLMs/genAI company burning money ? where are the companies making use of of the suposedly many uses ?
I genuily want to understand.
That’s like saying “asbestos has some good uses, so we should just give every household a big pile of it without any training or PPE”
Or “we know leaded gas harms people, but we think it has some good uses so we’re going to let everyone access it for basically free until someone eventually figures out what those uses might be”
It doesn’t matter that it has some good uses and that later we went “oops, maybe let’s only give it to experts to use”. The harm has already been done by eager supporters, intentional or not.
No that is completely not what they are saying. Stop arguing strawmen.
It’s not a strawman, it’s hyperbole.
There are serious known harms and we suspect that there are more.
There are known ethical issues, and there may be more.
There are few known benefits, but we suspect that there are more.Do we just knowingly subject untrained people to harm just to see if there are a few more positive usecases, and to make shareholders a bit more money?
How does their argument differ from that?
I can run a small LLM locally which I can talk to using voice to turn certain lights on and off, set reminders for me, play music etc.
Neat trick, but it’s not worth the headache of set up when you can do all that by getting off your chair and pushing buttons. Hell, you don’t even have to get off your chair! A cellphone can do all that already, and you don’t even need voice commands to do it.
Are you able to give any actual examples of a good use of an LLM?
Like it or not, that is an actual example.
I can lay in my bed and turn off the lights without touching my phone, or turn on certain muisic without touching my phone.
I could ask if I remembered to lock the front door etc.
But okay, I’ll play your game, let’s pretend that doesn’t count.
I can use my local AI to draft documents or emails speeding up the process a lot.
Or I can used it to translate.
If you want to live your life like that, go for that’s your choice. But I don’t think those applications are worth the cost of running an LLM. To be honest I find it frivolous.
I’m not against LLMs as a concept, but the way they get shoved into everything without thought and without an “AI” free option is absurd. There are good reasons why people have a knee-jerk anti-AI reaction, even if they can’t articulate it themselves.
It’s not expensive for me to run a local LLM, I just use the hardware I’m already using for gaming. Electricity is cheap and most people with a gaming PC probably use more electricity gaming than they would running their own LLM and asking it some questions.
I’m also against shoving AI in evening, and not making it Opt-In. I’m also worried about privacy and concentration of power etc.
But just outright saying LLMs are bad is rediculous.
And saying there is no good reason to use them is rediculous. Can we stop doing that.
Of those, only the internet was turned loose on an unsuspecting public, and they had decades of the faucet slowly being opened, to prepare.
Can you imagine if after WW2, Werner Von Braun came to the USA and then just like… Gave every man woman and child a rocket, with no training? Good and evil wouldn’t even come into, it’d be chaos and destruction.
Imagine if every household got a nuclear reactor to power it, but none of the people in the household got any training in how to care for it.
It’s not a matter of good and evil, it’s a matter of harm.
The Internet kind of was turned lose on an unsuspecting public. Social media has and still is causing a lot of harm.
Did you really compare every household having a nuclear reactor with people having access to AI?
How’s is that even remotely a fair comparison.
To me the Internet being released on people and AI being released on people is more of a fair comparison.
Both can do lots of harm and good, both will probably cost a lot of people their jobs etc.
Yes. AI can be used for spam, job cuts, and creepy surveillance, no argument there, but pretending it’s nothing more than a corporate scam machine is just lazy cynicism. This same “automatic BS” is helping discover life-saving drugs, diagnosing cancers earlier than some doctors, giving deaf people real-time conversations through instant transcription, translating entire languages on the fly, mapping wildfire and flood zones so first responders know exactly where to go, accelerating scientific breakthroughs from climate modeling to space exploration, and cutting out the kind of tedious grunt work that wastes millions of human hours a day. The problem isn’t that AI exists, it’s that a lot of powerful people use it selfishly and irresponsibly. Blaming the tech instead of demanding better governance is like blaming the printing press for bad propaganda.
Arent those different types of AI?
I dont think anyone hating AI is referring to the code that makes enemies move, or sort things into categories
LLMs aren’t artificial intelligence in any way.
They’re extremely complex and very smart prediction engines.
The term artificial intelligence has been co-opted in hijacked for marketing purposes a long time ago.
The kind of AI that in general people expect to see is a fully autonomous self-aware machine.
If anyone has used any llm for any extended period of time they will know immediately that they’re not that smart even chatgpt arguably the smartest of them all is still highly incapable.
What we do have to come to terms with is that these llms do have an application they have function and they are useful and they can be used in a deleterious way just like any technology at all.
If a program that can predict prices for video games based on reviews and how many people bought it can be called AI long before 2021, LLMs can too
This same “automatic BS” is helping discover life-saving drugs, diagnosing cancers earlier than some doctors
Not the same kind of AI. At all. Generative AI vendors love this motte-and-bailey.
That’s not a motte-and-bailey.
We should ban computers since they are making mass surveillance easier. /s
we should allow lead in paint its easier to use /s
You are deliberatly missing my point which is : gen AI as an enormous amount of downside and no real world use.
The reason most web forum posters hate AI is because AI is ruining web forums by polluting it with inauthentic garbage. Don’t be treating it like it’s some sort of irrational bandwagon.
