Good overview of the current sitch wrt AI doomers and others.
Predictably the comments section has some suck in it! The first comment hits the ground running with some classic tescreal talking points. So classic that it’s not worth writing original sneers for.
This is good! Though, he neglects to mention the group of people (including myself) who have yet to be sold on ai’s usefulness at all (all critics of practical AI harms are lumped under ‘reformers’ implying they still see it as valuable but just currently misguided.)
Like, ok, so what if China develops it first? Now they can… generate more convincing spam, write software slightly faster with more bugs, and starve all their artists to death? … Oh no, we’d better hurry up and compete with that!
Energy consumption alone makes it non-viable. The only way they can do it is with cheap electricity, preferably from somewhere far away so the users can’t see the power plants being expanded or even built to supply these AI companies. I live in Ireland and the amount of data centres here is already starting to affect our fucking electricity supply. Whose electricity are they going to steal to generate their jpegs? “Sorry, people of Kazakhstan, I know you want to run your dialysis machines and turn the lights on at night so your kids can do their homework, but we have some very rich people who need to churn out pornographic caricatures of women they don’t like …”
@datarama @200fifty
I am kind of scared of the electronic god angle, not because it will be one, but because I think it might be a hideously small step to obeying what an autocomplete bot tells you to do, in some bizzare roko’s basilisk corrilary, because you hope it will turn into a god.
In other words, I have some real concern for when these crazy things start spitting out instructions that don’t turn into Looking Glass surrealism by the third step, and people insisting we follow it blindly.
