You ought to apply your own standards to your own comments.
The OP is an article that:
1. Raises a number of broad social and ethical concerns about AI.
2. Provides links to back up some of these claims.
Yes, it also vents some frustration and includes personal anecdote, but there's nothing wrong with that. If you think something is a net negative for society, you should be frustrated. That doesn't make an argument "unreasonable" or "not well thought out". In fact, your entire response to the article is just anecdote and broad claims with no evidence or citations to back them up.
If the article author has "a lot of hate resulting from dysfunctional responses to life circumstances" you must have a lot of naivety and kindness as a dysfunctional response to life's circumstances.
If we do not critique things we perceive to be negative developments in society, things won't get better, and we'll let bad decisions slide. A somewhat emotive critique is not "hate". The author at least backed up their points with a few links, which is much more than we can say for your comments.
What you perceive as naïveté is a kind of world-weariness that goes deeper than you can possibly imagine. It turns out that kindness is not in fact naïve. It is the only reasonable response to the human condition, which is far more desperate than you know.
Emotive critiques can easily be hate. Hate is an emotion, so hate-filled critiques like this one are quite emotive.
The historical record of people improving society by critiquing things they perceive to be negative developments in it is not really that great. Yes, that's how we got, for example, the abolition of slavery — but the anti-abolitionists justified their own positions by critiquing the genocide in Haïti, which was itself justified by people critiquing things they perceived to be negative developments in it. For every Civil Rights Movement we have a Great Leap Forward; for every Sherman Antitrust Act we have a Prohibition.
You may not be able to avoid activism, but never forget that other activists spent their lives digging the ditches you're filling up, and others will spend their lives digging them again.
The way out of this is to spend as much of your energy as possible creating positive-sum things rather than in zero-sum struggle.
> One thing I've learned in life is to accept that I'm in many ways an outlier, which means that even if the research is done, it frequently doesn't apply to me anyway.
This is a complete logical fallacy. It is quite literally mathematically impossible for you to not be "typical" for at least some aspects of your life. If you weren't, you'd probably be dead, or immortal.
Sure, I expect that if you gave me the LD99 of some poison, I will die. But there are still many things (and my point is this is one of them) where all it takes to be an outlier is to decide to be one.
I am pretty sure that likewise in the 1950s many smokers did indeed decided to be the outlier who smokes occasionally, and for the right reasons, and using the “correct” method/brand of cigarettes. And that every one of them decided that they were not gonna get addicted to nicotine. I am also sure that every single one of them did indeed get addicted to nicotine, and many of them died from cancer.
The majority of smokers did get addicted to nicotine, but significant percentages did not. However, it is true that even many "non-daily" smokers died from cancer as a result of their smoking.
I know that research on tobacco is full of bad science and bad actors, and experts in different fields (such as social psychology) continued to publish bad science on the topic well into the 2000s. This includes your 2002 German paper (which I can’t read because of a paywall).
Your second source says nothing about addiction in the chapter you posted, however they do talk about addiction in chapter 6, and they claim that most people agree that smoking is addictive, but heavy smoking is more addictive.
I am specifically talking about this cognitive bias of believing that the mean behavior does not apply to you. Very few people believe this about cigarettes anymore because the evidence is simply overwhelming and public health experts along with anti-smoking activists were able to (despite incredible odds) shift the common rhetoric closer to what is true.
There is a similar phenomena going on with ads. Most people believe they are unaffected by ads, but in reality they absolutely are. And the advertising industry has vested interest in the general public believing this illusion (otherwise they risk being regulated).
We are seeing the exact same phenomena with AI usage as we did with smoking in the 1950s. All the evidence is pointing towards these products being bad for you and being addictive. Yet most users of AI believe they are not addicted, and that they have found a way to use AI in a way which is less harmful for them. This is bias, these users are wrong, so are you, and so is OP. This is addictive to you, and it is bad for you.
I know research is lacking, but eventually we will have the evidence to show the case as clearly as we do today with tobacco.
On the other hand there's the consensus bias where you believe that everyone else is like you, when in fact they are not (which is why I said this is something I've had to learn to accept).
Sure, for most distributions, most people will be statistically normal, by definition. On the other hand, I know that e.g. state standard test scores when I was a kid said I was 99th percentile academically (and there was some kind of IQ test for the gifted program? I remember I qualified in all 3 areas they tested me), so I have some evidence to hypothesize that I might be an outlier along other psychometrics too. And I'll go ahead and guess that many people here are also not the median in many ways.
I don't think that this makes me somehow immune to lung cancer from smoking, but I might suspect that when I read about others' use of AI and how it rots their minds, they're perhaps not using it to learn Lean (the process of learning has mostly been the AI spits out crap proofs that seem way more complicated than they ought to be, and then I spend some time trying to find ways to simplify it. We have a back-and-forth about different encodings, or ideas for syntax macros, etc. Then I can compare with e.g. Mathlib's solution) or checking their understanding as they work through some notes. I don't know what most people use it for or what they get addicted to, but I believe it might be different from what I do.
With regards to ads, I live somewhere where outdoor advertising is banned, I block ads on my computer, I don't watch TV or movies or "news," and I don't install whatever apps, so there aren't a whole lot of channels for ads to reach me. I suspect again that this is not the typical experience. That said I do view ads as fraud-adjacent and damaging to markets, so fully support strongly regulating or outright banning paid advertising.
This comes across as an athlete excusing their smoking behavior because their superior physical abilities makes them immune to the bad effects of smoking.
I assure you a 99th percentile in 100 m dash may have believed that smoking did not affect them the same way it does an average person, but they would be wrong. And so are you about your AI usage.
You keep assuming that LLM usage is automatically harmful with literally zero reason to believe that, and several anecdotes from people on how they use it positively.
There's simply no reason to even draw a weak analogy to smoking. You'd do much better to draw an analogy to e.g. methylphenidate or amphetamine, which certainly you can abuse and get addicted to, and might even be harmful for the average person (even carrying the possibility of psychosis!), but which carry cognitive benefits with minimal side effects for others.
I'll give another concrete use: the other day I scanned a storybook with my phone and had codex OCR it and compare with a list I've started of words and sound patterns my kid knows how to read so that it could identify irregular words or new sounds for us to go over before we start the story.
Please, concretely, let me know what the adverse effects were there.
I keep saying it because all the evidence (while still not conclusive) is pointing in that direction, just like they were with tobacco in the 1950s (It took another two decades for the evidence of tobacco to become conclusive; and two decades still for regulators to catch up).
We do know that LLMs can cause psychosis, we do know it can cause people to behave in an unhealthy manner, etc. We are seeing more and more evidence that AI usages in education is at least correlated with bad grades. We are seeing people exhibit addictive behavior around AI. There is plenty of reasons to suspect that as we gather more evidence that they will become conclusive about the addictiveness and the unhealthyness of these products. For me this is obvious.
Evidence doesn't point in that direction though, even if we establish correlations.
Like the education effect is pretty obvious: most people will use it to cheat on their homework and avoid learning. Some people will use it to learn new topics or with more depth, and give them additional targeted probing questions to answer (basically, give them more homework). Average achievement will probably drop. The high achievers will probably do even better.
Boiling it down to "it harms your brain" when people are already telling you how to use it to learn more effectively is just silly. Most people are happy to rot their brains. They'll take any opportunity to do it. If you're an outlier, you're probably aware of that fact on some level, and it doesn't make sense for you to make decisions looking at the median who behave completely differently. You have to look at the mechanisms behind the data and interpret under what situations they could plausibly apply to you.
Like I said, the parallels to the 1950s tobacco usage is glaring. People used to say the exact same about cigarettes, that the way they specifically use cigarettes, the way their body is build, the way they control the habit, etc. etc. all leads to them being unique in some way or another making the habit healthy actually.
The evidence were all pointing towards tobacco being both addictive and unhealthy, but it still took two decades for the evidence to become clear and public health experts to be proven right. Maybe in two decades I will be proven wrong and you will be proven right, but I doubt it. When the evidence are all pointing in one direction, it is usually because they are right.
Precisely. The parent is responding to what is an argument about the social, ethical long term effects of a technology by effectively saying "don't care, I personally benefit so whatever".
Ironically this kind of response just illustrates the article's point but I doubt the parent has enough self-awareness to recognize that.
I don't think this criticism is very well thought out. There's ample evidence at this point that we are sliding precipitously toward environmental catastrophe and, no, the massive data center build out to support people generating slop illustrations and build toy theorem provers is not helping.
We're not just sliding towards environmental catastrophe — we're deep into it! Ocean acidification is killing corals, we just had the hottest month in recorded history, mass refugee movements from climate disasters are fueling xenophobia and warfare in many parts of the world, and the rate of species extinction keeps increasing, as it has for decades. Extinct species are irreparable environmental damage; they're gone forever.
However, this is not because of massive data center buildouts. Goldman Sachs's projection in https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-cente... is that by the end of next year US data center power demand will have increased from 31GW to 66GW, roughly 17GW per year. The EIA says https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 that the US uses about 95 quadrillion Btu per year (Americans will do anything to avoid using metric units). That's 3200 gigawatts. So the US's data centers are currently using 1% of the US's energy and adding ½% per year, so that in 02027 that number increases to 2%. 99% of the US's energy use is due to non-data-center causes.
And direct energy use is a way in which data centers have an especially large environmental impact. Their other potential impacts, such as cement production, sewage, parking lots, commuters driving to them, and freshwater consumption, are much less than that 1%.
Energy use, by the way, doesn't damage the environment. Burning fossil fuels does. All of China's net new energy production is coming from renewable energy — they're shutting down coal plants faster than they're building new ones, and they're decommissioning gasoline-powered vehicles faster than they're selling new ones. A friend of mine from the US told me that one of the most surprising things about visiting Shenzhen was how silent the downtown was, because almost all the cars are electric there — a much higher rate than for China overall, but even for the whole country, it's over 50% of new cars.
AI might turn out to be a wonderful thing or a terrible thing, but at least for the next decade or two, that won't be because of datacenter buildouts, which are an utterly insignificant fraction of its effect.
> So the US's data centers are currently using 1% of the US's energy and adding ½% per year, so that in 02027 that number increases to 2%.
1% of an entire nation's energy production for a single, non-essential use-case is a lot. For comparison, circa 2016, US farming, which we generally need to live, takes up 1.9% of energy production (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/87964). Hopefully this makes it more obvious that consuming 2% of all energy production, even though the raw magnitude is small, is a lot for a single, non-essential service currently controlled by a handful of companies.
> Energy use, by the way, doesn't damage the environment. Burning fossil fuels does.
I'm aware. The current reality we occupy in the US involves mostly burning fossil fuels to power these tools, and some plants deliberately skirt rulings around environmental safety. Management of resources and the economy is about trade-offs. Yes, in principle a certain activity may not depend on a bad trade, but if your only option right now is a bad tradeoff, it's "in theory" independence from this doesn't mean you should go ahead and do it.
> However, this is not because of massive data center buildouts.
It's because of a number of factors, obviously, but the data center buildouts do not help stem the bleeding, they (currently) exacerbate it. This idea of "well, it contributes to <bad thing> but less than <other bad things> therefore we should do it" is myopic and hopefully it's obvious to you why such a line of reasoning is not going to lead to any mitigation of any kind of crisis.
It's about trade-offs. If the overall ROI is worth the absurd costs, then, yes, it's all worth it. But "hey I (N=1) personally like this tool and get value out of it" does not justify global costs that contribute further to, as you said yourself, irreparable damage.
> AI might turn out to be a wonderful thing or a terrible thing, but at least for the next decade or two, that won't be because of datacenter buildouts, which are an utterly insignificant fraction of its effect.
If the 2% energy consumption ends up being the final tipping point for total climate collapse, you might feel differently about this statement.
As far as sources go, reading further shows wind and solar still expanding. I don't think we can generalize anything from energy consumption of data centers.
Yes, that kind of indeterminate conclusion I can accept. What I cannot accept are people like the parent who want to ignore the very possibility of an issue or the role of this buildout in contributing entirely or who want to claim others are telling "lies" when this is patently not the case.
The amount of sophistry and absolute dogshit argumentation this forum invites now thanks to general boosterism is pathetic.
Whenever I see comments like this it just reminds me how ignorant people are of neurobiology.
The brain is insanely complicated. The premise that we could realize equivalent or better intelligence than eons of evolutionary development is like claiming you can build an airplane just as good as a modern jet using cardboard and duct tape. It is the apex of hubris.
A paper plane does have some important similarities to a full-sized aircraft, though. I don't think 'biological brains are really complex' makes it obvious that an LLM is conscious or not.
It's the peak of hubris to assume that human brains are the only way to attain intelligence. At the very least there probably are or have been other forms of intelligence with a different biological structure on other planets, and it may be possible to build a similar artificial structure in future with sufficient complexity to allow intelligence to emerge.
Our current machines are IMO nowhere near general intelligence and consciousness. However I don't think that means we can discount substrates other than neurones for intelligence in future. There is no evidence that you could not in theory build an intelligence using a different substrate than human brains.
>like claiming you can build an airplane just as good as a modern jet using cardboard and duct tape.
Like, at least make an analogy that makes sense.
"You can't build a billion dollar airplane by spending 100 billion dollars in tokens"
Because that's more of what we're doing here with AI. And when you say it my way suddenly the idea shifts from "of course that's not possible" to "well, that's a lot of tokens, maybe an evolutionary algorithm could".
Neurobiology has to be complex because we have to keep meat alive, breeding, and evolving in the environment it lives in. This said absolutely nothing about the minimum viable requirements for intelligence or consciousness (or if being conscious is even necessary for a higher intelligence agent).
Everyone is (predictably) getting distracted by the consciousness claims.
The more important, and more damning charge in my opinion is the circular reasoning involved in training on Claude's constitution. This would in fact make it impossible for us to determine if Claude achieves consciousness as an emergent property, or if it really is just playing pretend thanks to Anthropic's weird cult like assumptions.
Part of it is their seed sowing marketing speak of calling stateless statistical IO functions running on data centers "intelligent" gets the naive to ascribe agency where it doesn't exist.
Another part is a completely defanged administration she it comes to effectively regulating anything.
Should probably have a (2018) or (2024) (latest revision) on the title, especially given the current buzz surrounding AI and security/existential threats.
Unfortunately that will never happen because the people who stand to benefit most from AI already have cost-efficient (see grossly underpaid) humans to do this for them.
They need AI to replace the expensive not cost-effective humans.
not sure if you check lately but these are high paying jobs now, coffee baristas start at $18.00/hr and AI is cheaper in the long run (no insurance, sick days, pto…) - unless cost is $0.00 AI will replace it
Raw magnitudes are meaningless when discussing economics. Wages are still being outpaced by costs. There is no sense in which a barista is working a "high paying" job. At current rates it could well be the case that running AI to upkeep a functioning coffee shop ends up being significantly more expensive, even with no insurance, PTO, etc. Keep in mind most companies aren't exactly giving their workers generous policies in these regards in the first place.
Not to mention, it relies on a ton of completely undefined concepts.
No one can actually tell you what ASI is or entails because it isn't a legitimate, operational concept. It is a fairy tale.
We can't even define "alignment". As people have finally started pointing out, humanity has never had a collective agreement on what values it should uphold or what ultimate goods are. Your alignment is not my alignment.
AI is not even autonomous. Every system we have today has to be initiated by a human actor. "AI" wouldn't create catastrophic bio weapons, it would help humans create them. The humans are the source of the intent.
Everyone has just completely given in to empty language and marketing nonsense. Honestly it seems like been the people at the labs are drinking their own kool aid and are themselves deeply confused about what they are even building at this point. It is a stateless statistics function running on a bunch of data centers. We aren't even close to an embodied, conscious synthetic being. It doesn't even have state, which is like prerequisite number one, nor is it plastic.
The OP is an article that:
1. Raises a number of broad social and ethical concerns about AI. 2. Provides links to back up some of these claims.
Yes, it also vents some frustration and includes personal anecdote, but there's nothing wrong with that. If you think something is a net negative for society, you should be frustrated. That doesn't make an argument "unreasonable" or "not well thought out". In fact, your entire response to the article is just anecdote and broad claims with no evidence or citations to back them up.
If the article author has "a lot of hate resulting from dysfunctional responses to life circumstances" you must have a lot of naivety and kindness as a dysfunctional response to life's circumstances.
If we do not critique things we perceive to be negative developments in society, things won't get better, and we'll let bad decisions slide. A somewhat emotive critique is not "hate". The author at least backed up their points with a few links, which is much more than we can say for your comments.
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