[bawolff]

> Have we managed this with industrial and agricultural greenhouse gasses, despite the less-emissive alternatives to beef, to coke-reduction in iron refinaries, etc.? We emit despite the downside, we build AIs (and DCs to host them) despite the creators loudly discussing the downsides in exactly the way fossil fuel suppliers and beef farmers deny them.

Maybe not for carbon emissions, but we have for countless other things. The ozone layer isn't being depleted anymore, acid rain is no longer a concern, above ground nuclear tests are no longer giving children cancer, etc.

Its of course hard to say how AI would fit in all this, but it seems more similar to the category of things we have stopped when problems arise than it does to greenhouse gas to me.

> Can we unwind the internet, despite it enabling a panopticon in every pocket?

I think we could fairly easily if we wanted to. The issue is that most people don't view it as a problem but see it as a reasonable trade-off. And whose to say they are wrong?

> * I know some object to this anthropomorphisation, I don't care

I would think that you should care if this is a topic you care about as any solution to the problem (other than throwing the whole thing out) will require accurate understanding how AI is motivated and biases in our understanding could doom the entire enterprise.

[ben_w]

> I think we could fairly easily if we wanted to. The issue is that most people don't view it as a problem but see it as a reasonable trade-off.

It currently underpins all global finance, all global logistics, all global telecommunications, and large quantities of remotely operated industrial equipment including the power grids themselves.

All of the people thinking of it as a reasonable trade-off have made it indispensable.

> I would think that you should care if this is a topic you care about as any solution to the problem (other than throwing the whole thing out) will require accurate understanding how AI is motivated and biases in our understanding could doom the entire enterprise.

To know and to think. We use the word "fly" to describe planes and helicopters even though they don't flap. We don't use the word "swim" to describe what submarines or boats do to get through water.

For long term issues, on-the-job learning and improvements and so on, they're their own thing; conversely, for instantaneous output, the failure modes of LLMs are the failure modes of the humans they learned from.

LLMs are a propeller. I don't care if the metaphorical medium is water, where we say use of a propellar means you're not "swimming", or air where all that is sufficient and neccessary to be described as "flying" is to remain in the air in exactly the same way that bricks don't.