Yes, sure, but that worry can be extended to all jobs lost to AI and after that all jobs lost to any kind of technical advancements.
So far the answer of the current economic system has been to invent new products/services and redirect the workforce there. It's been working so far, but isn't without issues - ever-increasing consumption is bad for the environment; the jobs are getting more and more pointless; people wonder why automation doesn't result in shorter working hours for everyone.
From my perspective, this is a slightly naive opinion. I believe we're not fighting against GMOs because "mutations are bad". When activists point that out, it's because it's the easiest way to reach the general population and convince them to get behind the cause.
The real reason, however, are the political and economical implications of GMOs. Sure, they say they'll use them to fight famine. But in reality, they'll just try to extract as much profit as they can, regardless of the interests of the people growing the plants and eating the food. We've seen farmers get sued (see Bowman v Monsanto) and other evil stuff like that.
Bowman v Monsanto deserved to be sued and lose in court. By citing that case you prove you have not dug into the details and don't understand what you are talking about.
I don't understand why you are fighting against GMO. Not all GMO is done by corporations. Golden rice for example was not done by a big corporation.
If Volkswagen's competitors ran around saying that cars aren't dangerous and there's no need to regulate them, and their critics insisted that you're a mark if you accept the premise that cars are a useful transportation method at all, I don't suppose I'd have a choice but to take it seriously. If you know of a similar analysis from a less conflicted group I'd love to read it!
It's a supply-demand gap, but since the reasons for it are very apparent, it's completely reasonable to describe it as "consumers paying for [the existence of] datacenters".
I don't see how? It's much more reasonable to state "all electrical consumers are paying a proportionate amount to operate the grid based on their usage rates". This is typically spelled out by the rate commissions and designed to make sure one power consumer is not "subsidizing" the other.
In the case of your quoted article - taking it at face value - this means "everyone" is paying .02/khw more on their bill. A datacenter is going to be paying thousands of times more than your average household as they should.
I don't see a problem with this at all. Cheap electricity is required to have any sort of industrial base in any country. Paying a proportionate amount of what it costs the grid to serve you seems about as fair of a model as I can come up with.
If you need to subsidize some households, then having subsidized rates for usage under the average household consumption level for the area might make sense?
I don't really blame the last watt added to the grid for incremental uptick in costs. It was coming either way due to our severe lack of investment in dispatchable power generation and transmission capacity - datacenters simply brought the timeline forward a few years.
There are plenty of actual problematic things going into these datacenter deals. Them exposing how fragile our grid is due to severe lack of investment for 50 years is about the least interesting one to me. I'd start with local (and state) tax credits/abatements myself.
You can design a racist propaganda poster, put someone's face onto a porn pic or manipulate evidence with photoshop. Apart from super specific things like trying to print money, the tool doesn't stop you from doing things most people would consider distasteful, creepy or even illegal.
So why are we doing this now? Has anything changed fundamentally? Why can't we let software do everything and then blame the user for doing bad things?
I think what changed is that we at least can attempt to limit 'bad' things with technical measures. It was legitimately technically impossible 10 years ago to prevent Photoshop from designing propaganda posters. Of course today's 'LLM safety' features aren't watertight either, but with the combination of 'input is natural language' plus LLM-based safety measures, there are more options today to restrict what the software can do than in the past.
The example you gave about preventing money counterfeiting with technical measures also supports this, since this was an easier thing to detect technically, and so it was done.
Whether that's a good thing or bad thing everyone has to decide for themselves, but objectively I think this is the reason.
Apple has the technology to bias people towards cats instead of dogs but I find it very unlikely they will bother to do that. The missing ingredient is how it helps their bottom line, which, instead of technical feasibility, is the root reason they do things. For whatever reasons some people REALLY love Apple's default restrictions, most don't really give a damn one way or the other, and the smallest group seem to have problems with it. It's not that Apple can do this so they are, it's users want this and now it can be done.
Perhaps a much more bleak take, depending on one's views :).
What's hard to understand here? Those tools require skill and time to develop. AI makes things like those racist posters and revenge porn completely effortless and instant.
I can agree with parts of this article, but I believe it's missing a large part of the puzzle.
The author implicitly assumes that the constraints of our society are fixed and that it's therefore possible to determine which political systems are objectively better or worse. We should be doing that research (like astronomers trying to determine how the universe works) instead of religiously supporting ideological positions.
I fundamentally disagree with that assumption. I think we behave the way we do in large part due to the ideological principles we were raised with. This can be confirmed by observing various closed-off societies sometimes operating on principles that seem completely bonkers to most of us.
If you teach people capitalism/socialism, you build a capitalistic/socialistic system. It's impossible to live inside that system and objectively determine whether it's good or bad, let alone better or worse than other systems.
So in that context, I believe following an ideology is _not_ the opposite of thinking for yourself, as the author puts it. It is a conscious decision based on morality. You decide what your values are and you find a political option that aligns with them.
To be clear, that's still a very imperfect decision to make, many things can go wrong from that point on and I believe this is where the author is correct in many ways. We should reason about it constantly to make sure we're actually doing what we want to be doing and not just blindly repeating things.
> It's impossible to live inside that system and objectively determine whether it's good or bad, let alone better or worse than other systems.
I mean, if someone says "Let's pollute the rivers!" and another person says "Let's not pollute the rivers!", that's a pretty clear cut objectively good and bad position. Or "Let's put people in prison if they jaywalk.", etc.
That's not to say there are no positions that have a clear cut good or bad outcome that can be measured beforehand. For example, putting a tax on sugary drinks. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but you have no way of being sure beforehand, because you can't A/B test reality and the complexity of the system is such that you can't accurately predict human behavior at a large scale.
But the existence of positions that don't have a clear answer that can be determined ahead of time doesn't mean there's no objective way to determine whether it's good or bad, just that we don't have the tooling to do so at this point in time.
Polluting vs. not polluting sounds super straightforward, but then you look outside and we often pollute rivers, so it's clearly not that simple.
Personally, I'm fully with you on not polluting. But that immediately puts us in an ideological position - we value preserving the environment and staying healthy.
A neo-liberal might come along and say we're wasting economic potential. Keeping the river clean means not building a factory near it. If the products from that factory and the jobs it provides offset the negative effects, they'll argue we _should_ pollute the river.
Same with taxing sugary drinks - uncertain results aren't the issue. The issue is we have different opinions on how much a government should be able to regulate certain aspects of life in the pursuit of improving public health.
Even if you have reliable statistical data from countries that implemented such a policy, some people will argue their freedom to drink whatever they want is what's important here and your bean-counting of medical expenses is completely missing the point.
This only works for tasks where the details of execution are not important. Driving fits that category well, but many other tasks we're throwing at AI don't.
Why are we comparing LLMs to media? I think media has much more freedom in a creative sense, its end goal is often very open-ended, especially when it's used for artistic purposes.
When it comes to AI, we're trying to replace existing technology with it. We want it to drive a car, write an email, fix a bug etc. That premise is what gives it economic value, since we have a bunch of cars/emails/bugs that need driving/writing/fixing.
Sure, it's interesting to think about other things it could potentially achieve when we think out of the box and find use cases that fit it more, but the "old things" we need to do won't magically go away. So I think we should be careful about such overgeneralizations, especially when they're covertly used to hype the technology and maintain investments.
Media in this case is a plural of medium — something that both contains information and describes its interface.
I think the idea is a bit different than what you describe. New media contains in itself the essence of old media, but it does not necessarily supersede it. For example, we have theater and film.
This “rule” of media doesn’t help us predict how or whether AI will evolve, so it is difficult to relate it to hyping. It is an exclusionary heuristic for future predictions — it helps us exclude unlikely ones. But doesn’t help us come up with any.
I personally am hopeful that AI will evolve into something else that has more essence to it than mere function. But that’s just hope, which is rather less promising than hype.
Not a gmail invention perhaps, but also not per RFC. That some use it to mean something special is not in the RFC. Actually, a significant number of SMTP servers don't even implement the required parts of the related RFCs, let alone fancy things like plus handling.
You're right. Originally the + sign in an email address was an indicator to the Andrew Message System's delivery agent to process the email in an extensible way. The syntax was +<keyword>+<args>. As an example. you could use
"user+dir-insert+misc" to route the message to the "misc" directory in the user's mailbox structure. An unknown keyword would just get ignored and the mail delivered as usual, giving the behavior as used today.
As stated by others, + addressing is not gmail specific. One thing that gmail does however is allowing you to add (or remove) arbitrary dots in your mail-address, and these are stripped out / all end up in the same mailbox.
They don't want to "go green", they want to maximize profits, as any other corporation. They just need to have a good enough reputation to make sure environmentally-conscious people don't boycott their products. Anything more than that would have a negative effect on their bottom line, so you can be sure they're not going to do it.
Small companies like Framework and Fairphone proved that you can make very repairable and reusable laptops and phones without sacrificing much in the way of form factor (since this used to be the biggest excuse). I think it's safe to say big manufacturers won't follow suit unless forced by legislation.
> They just need to have a good enough reputation to make sure environmentally-conscious people don't boycott their products.
And what do you think happens when people spread messages like mine?
Change the tides and they follow. It isn't futile because as you said, they need enough reputation. They don't want the negative effect on their bottom line. So maybe instead of "correcting" me, push it too. They seem to benefit more from your comment than we do, despite you seeming to agree with the sentiment.
Lol you talk the talk but don't walk the walk. You said it yourself, you might tell people they aren't green but you still mostly use their products. This is what most folks do. They say their all for the green movement, but they don't actually live up to it and try and brush the action side off to someone else. It's like nimbyism but for tech.
What's more important? Your perceived personal privacy benefits or the future of the planet? At the moment your living for you and not for the future.
I get how you might think that from the comment but I think you’re too quick to judge. I’ve salvaged many computers and it’s how “I got into the game” per say. Learning Linux because all I had was a machine others threw in the trash. I do a lot of free repair for friends and friends of friends. I lend my tools and teach others my skills. I still repurpose many machines. And what can’t be saved becomes parts. My old phones still live lives. And while Apple machines are getting harder to repurpose that doesn’t mean they aren’t ewaste, but yes, it takes more time. But they also still tend to last longer, though that’s changing (though I’ve already seen methods to upgrade the M series machines). I assure you, by backyard has taken a hit for my values.
Is it unfortunate that I have to balance more than one thing? Yes. The fuck do you think I’m complaining about. And yes, I want to reduce the amount of tracking a mega corp does on me and then uses to try to manipulate me into buying more junk that I don’t want. To use that data to manipulate me to vote for people I do not want, who push policies against my interests.
But do not think my efforts on that end are fruitless. The trades aren’t for nothing. There is real ground you can make there. But it is a complicated space.
Here’s the cold hard truth. When it comes to stuff like this, you’ll be able to accuse everyone of being a hypocrite. The environment is such that there’s no optimal choice. You’ll always find a reason someone is not a true Scotsman, but maybe that’s because a true Scotland doesn’t exist. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to make it.
So shut up and lend a hand if you care. Help us become truer. If not, I don’t see how you aren’t just perpetuating the state of things now. If you only see black and white, if you can’t see the difference between being malicious and being tarnished, then I fail to see how you are not malicious yourself. Surely you too are not without fault, have never had to make choices.
So far the answer of the current economic system has been to invent new products/services and redirect the workforce there. It's been working so far, but isn't without issues - ever-increasing consumption is bad for the environment; the jobs are getting more and more pointless; people wonder why automation doesn't result in shorter working hours for everyone.