| > There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech. Ok so you’re not denying the impact on climate change. Any of the other negative impacts it has on society? Don’t sweep them under the rug and say, “works for me though so that’s worth it, not a big deal.” I think the maths is interesting and the research is fascinating. I like computers, programming, and theoretical computer science more perhaps than the average person. That doesn’t mean I’m happy with data centres relying on illegal methane power plants to generate their base load power requirements. I think it’s unethical… and illegal. It seems like regulators are either unable to keep up or are getting paid to not look. That’s unethical. The financial systems used to deploy these data centres are imploding in debt and should also be regulated. They’re going to poison a bunch of retirement funds and could be a major factor in the crash of US bonds. Unethical. If they can’t run a profitable business even when they are bending and cheating and causing all of this harm I don’t think there’s any reason they shouldn’t be left to crash and burn like anyone else. I don’t have much sympathy for the position of, “yeah that stuff is bad but I like it anyway and don’t want to talk about it.” You might find more common ground with people if you can recognize the harms it does do, acknowledge that they are bad and advocate for change. And you might have to give up the idea that any of this technology is going to lead to the creation of science-fiction super intelligent beings. We know what the combination of attention, transformers, and RNN can do. Pretty nifty stuff… but is it worth bleeding an economy of all its resources so that you can simulate f within psi worth it? I don’t think so. Sometimes the answer is, yeah neat but who cares? I’d rather have energy for keeping my cooling on in the middle of this heat wave. |
I agree that there are some harms, but they are mostly self imposed. If a retirement fund gambles people's money on the wrong company, that is on them.
Most of the power conflicts are downstream of corrupt politicians and ignorant voters strangling their grid and stymieing efforts to improve production and transmission.