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”
They’re not really comparable. Crypto and blockchain were good solutions looking for problems to solve. They’re innovative and cool? Sure, but they never had a widescale use. AI has been around for awhile, it just got recently rebranded as artificial intellectual, the same technologies were called algorithms a few years ago… And they basically run the internet and the global economy. Hospitals, schools, corporations, governments, the militaries, etc all use them. Maybe certain uses of AI are dumb, but trying to pretend that the thing as a whole doesn’t have, or rather already has, genuine uses is just dumb
I feel like you’re being incredibly generous with the usage of AI here. I feel as though the post and comment above refer to LLM/image generation AI. Those “types of ‘AI’” certainly don’t run all those things.
The term AI is very vague because intelligence is an inherently subjective concept. If we’re defining AI as something that has consciousness then it doesn’t exist, but if we’re defining it as a task that a computer can do on it’s own, then virtually everything that is automated is run by AI.
Even with generative AI models, they’ve been around for a while too. For example, lot of the news articles you read, especially about the weather or news aren’t written by actual people, they’re AI generated. Another example would be scientific simulations, they use AI to generate a bunch of possible scenarios based on given parameters. Yet another example would be the gaming industry, what do you think generates Minecraft worlds? The point here is that AI has been around for awhile and is already being used everywhere. What we’re seeing with chatGPT and these other new models is that these models are now being released for public access. It’s like democratization of AI, and a lot of good and bad things are bound to come of it. We’re at the infancy stage of this now, but just like with the world wide web before it, these technologies are going to fundamentally change how we do many things from now on.
We can’t fight technology, that’s a losing battle. These AIs are here and they’re here to stay. So strap on and enjoy the ride.
