[_xnmw]

Am I the only one disappointed by this new wave of AI hype? Seriously, autogenerated avatars? When are our best minds going to work towards actually improving the lives of people? Not monkey JPEG scams, not chat bot bureaucracies, not self-driving cars that fail in bad weather and kill you, but something that actually alleviates humanity's biggest problems. Energy, homelessness, pollution and the environment, affordable housing crises in the West, content moderation, the loneliness epidemic - there's so much that needs to be done if we can just step out of the current hype cycle and focus on human problems, not just looking for ways to use cool tech.

[cshimmin]

I'm pretty sure "our best minds" aren't the ones building the ape avatars. They are working on the fundamental advancements of AI itself. Once those tools are built, it doesn't take nearly as much "best brains" to tweak them for specific applications.

In other words, you can just think of all these things (cash grabs and otherwise) as an effect of the rapid advancements in AI, in this case manifesting as a growth area of economic activity. As another poster said, others are working on medical applications, climate models, etc. It's not a zero-sum game on the application side.

[graphe]

How is AI going to solve the problems of energy, homelessness, pollution, the environment, affordable housing crises in the West, content moderation, and the loneliness epidemic?

Think of what you’re asking from it. You don’t ask coke to solve corona or google to solve world hunger. None of those issues are bottlenecked by AI. If you want to solve those issues, you shouldn’t expect AI researchers to fix them, you can be that change.

[mschuster91]

They are asking not for an AI to solve these problems, but to take the brains of those people who develop AIs and put them to use for other, more productive fields. Which is something I tend to agree with and would add advertising, finance/quant funds and cryptocurrencies into the mix - humanity doesn't need either of these for survival.

However, the core problem is that we have solutions for all these problems with technology that exists today:

- energy can be produced by solar, wind and for baseload geothermal and biogas. We might need to shift certain high-consumption industries such as smelters to seasonal and time-flexible production though, to accomodate a lack of solar power in winter and at night.

- pollution is a solved problem as well. Place filters on the exhaust stacks of industries that absolutely need some kind of burning stuff, transition ICE vehicles to electric vehicles and eventually, switch a lot of the traffic load of individual cars to a mesh of public transit (tramways and light rail), to remove the emissions caused by tires.

- affordable housing is a solved problem as well. Build socialized, community-owned housing like Vienna does, nationalize large landlords, improve infrastructure in rural areas to remove pressure on urban housing, and regulate where large employers can set up shop to avoid concentrations that cannot reasonably be supplied with workers and traffic.

- content moderation is a plain and simple matter of employing enough people

- "loneliness epidemic"... that's the only tough one. We do know what causes loneliness, and a part of that is that young people have to move across the country, often enough across continents, to find gainful employment. Fixing rural infrastructure should help a bit, as should better availability of decent affordable housing - IIRC, a contributing factor both in Japan and Italy was that young people can't afford to move out of their parents' homes or if, then only into essentially sheds, so neither is conductive to invite a potential partner to.

The problem is, politicians today are not driven by what science and history has shown to be successful, they are driven by party ideology and populist bullshit. That leads them to take decisions that make situations objectively worse.

[Gravityloss]

Well it has been used for protein folding already.

Maybe it can be used for electrode chemistry as well.

[EricLeer]

Check out the climate change ai[0] community! There are many people working on the interesting interface between ai and relevant problems.

I think the main thing to take into account that many of these problems and organisations still live in an age of 200X tech, so already implementing current age practices can result in great improvements (although this does not result in flashy press announcments or papers).

[0] https://www.climatechange.ai/

[hackpit]

Will do, thank you.

[snowram]

Machine learning has been used for cancer imaging and geospatial detection for some years now. You can't blame the internet to hype the funs and lucratives parts of IAs first.

[spaceman_2020]

Why not think of it this way: these tools free up our time and make it possible to spend the rest of it on more substantial pursuits.

I volunteer at an animal shelter. If AI tools can free up 10 hours/week from my schedule, that’s 10 extra hours I can potentially volunteer

[antifa]

But that's not what's going to happen. 99% of the time that 10/hours a week is going to be liquidated in the form of 25% less high-paying jobs.

[Abishek_Muthian]

>Energy, homelessness, pollution and the environment, affordable housing crises in the West, content moderation, the loneliness epidemic

I think if an capable AI in the future is given the opportunity to fix this with zero restrictions, Then most likely it is going to uproot entire system of governance along with several ultra-rich and powerful people.

Hence they'll try to never let it happen.

[dismantlethesun]

I’m working on AI of this type: essentially retraining and fine tuning existing systems.

I can assure you, I am not one of the world’s best minds. To me, this feels like gluing APIs together, with a bit less cursing than in my PHP days.

[artur_makly]

thank you for saying what I have felt for the last 20yrs in tech. I will humbly add going to Mars to the list of wasted resources. It’s already gone beyond the funny meme phase.

[wwilim]

Don't you think working to solve homelessness has a slightly threshold of entry than 128x128 image generation?

[joking]

well, an ape ai cdn would be the best way to destroy the monkey jpg scam. Who would pay for them in that case?