this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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Technology is a cultural creation, not a magic box outside of its circumstances. "The problem isn't the technology, it's the creators, users, and perpetuators" is tautological.
And, importantly, the purpose of a system is what it does.
But not al users of AI are malignant or causing environment damage.
Saying the contrary would be a bad generalization.
I have LLM models running on a n100 chip that have less consumption that the lemmy servers we are writing on right now.
So you're using a different specific and niche technology (which directly benefits and exists because of) the technology that is the subject of critique, and acting like the subject technology behaves like yours?
"Google is doing a bad with z"
"z can't be bad, I use y and it doesn't have those problems that are already things that happened. In the past. Unchangeable by future actions."
??
No. I'm just not fear mongering things I do not understand.
Technology is technology. Most famously nuclear technology can be used both for bombs or giving people the basic need that electricity is.
Rockets can be used as weapons or to deliver spacecraft and do science in space.
Biotechnology can be used both to create and to cure diseases.
A technology is just an applied form of human knowledge. Wanting to ban human progress in any way is the true evilness from my point of view.
No one wants to ban technology outright. What we're saying is that the big LLMs are actively harmful to us, humanity. This is not fear mongering. This is just what's happening. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are stealing from humanity at large and setting the planet on fire to do it. For years they told us stealing intellectual property on an individual level was a harmful form of theft. Now they're doing the same kind of theft bit its different now because it benefits them instead of us.
What we are arguing is that this is bad. Its especially extra bad because with the death of big search a piece of critical infrastructure to the internet as we know it is now just simply broken. The open source wonks you celebrate are working on fixing this. But just because someone criticizes big tech does not mean they criticize all tech. The truth is the FAANG companies plus OpenAI and Microsoft are killing our planet for it to only benefit their biggest shareholders
I did not believe in Intelectual Property before. I'm not going to start believing now.
The same I think that corporations having a hold on media is bad for humandkind I think that small artists should not have a "not usable by AI"hold on what they post. Sharing knowledge is good for humanity. Limitate who can have access or how they can use that knowledge or culture is bad.
The dead of internet have nothing to do with AI and all to do with leaving internet in hands of a couple big corporations.
As for emissions.. are insignificant relative to other sources of CO2 emissions. Do you happen to eat meat, travel abroad for tourism, watch sports, take you car to work, buy products made overseas? Those are much bigger sources of CO2.
You dont think polluting the world is going to have a net negative effect for humanity?
What exactly is there to gain with AI anyways? What's the great benefit to us as a species? So far its just been used to trivialize multiple artistic disciplines, basic service industries, and programming.
Things have a cost, many people are doing the cost-benefit analysis and seeing there is none for them. Seems most of the incentive to develop this software is if you would like to stop paying people who do the jobs listed above.
What do we get out of burning the planet to the ground? And even if you find an AI thats barely burning it, what's the point in the first place?
The whole point is that much like industrial automation it reduces the number of hours people need to work. If this leads to people starving then that's a problem with the economic system, not with AI technology. You're blaming the wrong field here. In fact everyone here blaming AI/ML and not the capitalists is being a Luddite.
It's also entirely possible it will start replacing managers and capitalists as well. It's been theorized by some anti-capitalists and economic reformists that ML/AI and computer algorithms could one day replace current economic systems and institutions.
This sadly is probably true of large companies producing big, inefficient ML models as they can afford the server capacity to do so. It's not true of people tweaking smaller ML models at home, or professors in universities using them for data analysis or to aid their teaching. Much like some programmers are getting fired because of ML, others are using it to increase their productivity or to help them learn more about programming. I've seen scientists who otherwise would struggle with data analysis related programming use ChatGPT to help them write code to analyse data.
As the other guy said there are lots of other things using way more energy and fossil fuels than ML. Machine learning is used in sciences to analyse things like the impacts of climate change. It's useful enough in data science alone to outweigh the negative impacts. You would know about this if you ever took a modern data science module. Furthermore being that data centres primarily use electricity it's relatively easy to move them to green sources of energy compared to say farming, or transport. In fact some data centres already use green energy primarily. Data centres will always exist regardless of AI and ML anyway, it's just a matter of scale.
Neither am I. When you're defending whatabputism, it's best you at least try to represent the arguments of the person you're arguing with accurately.
False equivalence is a classic. Biotechnology is not a technology, for example, it's billions of technologies informed, designed, and implemented, by humans, technology is a cultural feature.
Technology as this thing free from the ethics of its use is tech bro ancap cope to justify technological pursuits with empty ethical value. You can think "banning human progress in any way" is evil. But that would make you wildly uncritical of your own beliefs.
Feel free to take your arguments back to e/acc, where that level of convenience induced niavety is considered rhetorically valid.
Technology is a product of science. The facts science seeks to uncover are fundamental universal truths that aren't subject to human folly. Only how we use that knowledge is subject to human folly. I don't think open source or open weights models are a bad usage of that knowledge. Some of the things corporations do are bad or exploitative uses of that knowledge.
You should really try and consider what it means for technology to be a cultural feature. Think, genuinely and critically, about what it means when someone tells you that you shouldn't judge the ethics and values of their pursuits, because they are simply discovering "universal truths".
And then, really make sure you ponder what it means when people say the purpose of a system is what it does. Why that might get brought up in discussions about wanton resource spending for venture capitalist hype.
That's not at all what I am doing, or what scientists and engineers do. We are all trained to think about ethics and seek ethical approval because even if knowledge itself is morally neutral the methods to obtain that knowledge can be truly unhinged.
Scientific facts are not a cultural facet. A device built using scientific knowledge is also a product of the culture that built it. Technology stands between objective science and subjective needs and culture. Technology generally serves some form of purpose.
Here is an example: Heavier than air flight is a possibility because of the laws of physics. A Boeing 737 is a specific product of both those laws of physics and of USA culture. It's purpose is to get people and things to places, and to make Boeing the company money.
LLMs can be used for good and ill. People have argued they use too much energy for what they do. I would say that depends on where you get your energy from. Ultimately though it doesn't use as much as people driving cars or mining bitcoin or eating meat. You should be going after those first if you want to persecute people for using energy.
It does not appear to me that you have even humored my request. I'm actually not even confident you read my comment given your response doesn't actually respond to it. I hope you will.
No scientist or engineer as ever said that as far as I can recall. I was explaining that even for scientific fact which is morally neutral how you get there is important, and that scientists and engineers acknowledge this. What you are asking me to do this based on a false premise and a bad understanding of how science works.
It both is and isn't. Things often have consequences alongside their intended function, like how a machine gets warm when in use. It getting warm isn't a deliberate feature, it's a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. We actually try to minimise this as it wastes energy. Even things like fossil fuels aren't intended to ruin the planet, it's a side effect of how they work.
It's a very common talking point now to claim technology exists independent of the culture surrounding it. It is a lie to justify morally vacant research which the, normally venture capitalist, is only concerned about the money to be made. But engineers and scientists necessarily go along with it. It's not not your problem because we are the ones executing cultural wants, we are a part of the broader culture as well.
The purpose of a system is, absolutely, what it does. It doesn't matter how well intentioned your design and ethics were, once the system is doing things, those things are its purpose. Your waste heat example, yes, it was the design intent to eliminate that, but now that's what it does, and the engineers damn well understand that its purpose is to generate waste heat in order to do whatever work it's doing.
This is a systems engineering concept. And it's inescapable.
Huh? Then why is so much money spent on computers to minimize energy usage and heat production? This is perhaps the biggest load of bullshit I think I have heard in a long time. Maybe there is some concept similar to this, but if so you clearly haven't articulated it well.
Anyway I think I am done talking about this with you. You are here to fear-monger over technology you probably don't even use or understand, and I am sick of lemmings doing it.
More likely you're more interested in finding a way to disagree with the concept of posiwid than in doing basic research or listening.
It's funny when y'all use "fear mongering" for people pointing out systemic issues with ai and its hype. Though it's honestly tragic how uninterested you are in considering why AI and its hype is being criticized. Whatever makes the exploitative slave labor trained energy hungry silicon make venture capital money disappear, eh?