The article is really interesting and all your comments too.
For now I have a negative bias towards AI as I only see its downsides, but I can see that not everyone thinks like me and it’s great to share knowledge and understanding.
According to some people (who have never programmed and don’t know what AI can do), we will all be able to retire with a lot of money and we’ll all write poetry and become painters or make music and have fun. It’s not realistic and it won’t happen.
The only positive thing that AI can do is detect bad stuff in the human body before a surgery as long as it’s validated by a professional. I could throw everything else in the trash as it’s meant to replace humans forever.
I think the worst part of Huang’s keynote wasn’t that none of this mattered, it’s that I don’t think anyone in Huang’s position is really thinking about any of this at all. I hope they’re not, which at least means it’s possible they can be convinced to change course. The alternative is that they do not care, which is a far darker problem for the world.
well yeah… they just don’t care, after all the climate crisis is somebody else’s problem… and what really matters is that the line goes up next quarter, mankind’s future be damned
All these issues are valid and need solving but I’m kind of tired of people implying we shouldn’t do certain work because of efficiency.
And tech gets all the scrutiny for some reason (it’s transparency?). I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen an article on industrial machine efficiency and how we should just stop producing whatever.
What we really need to do is find ways to improve efficiency on all work while moving towards carbon neutrality. All work is valid.
If I want to compute pi for no reason or drive to the Grand Canyon for lunch, I should be able to do so.
If I want to compute pi for no reason or drive to the Grand Canyon for lunch, I should be able to do so.
Are you able to explain why?
I’m sure I won’t be very eloquent about it but simply, liberty. Freedom of compute is on par with freedom of thought and expression.
Freedom of travel is something else, but I’m sure most people that don’t like being imprisoned can appreciate.
Work (as in energy expenditure) enables these freedoms and I think it’s important not to stifle that whenever possible.
“Hey fucker, your right to swing your fist ends where it collides with someone else’s face”
^ Dont make me tap the sign
This would be fine if there were no externalities.
Computing and leisure travel aren’t human rights, while freedoms of thought and expression are.
I just disagree. Computing is expression and in my opinion freedom of travel should be a human right.
Even if you add “leisure” to it to bolster your argument.
Anyone with experience in corporate operations will tell you the ROI on process changes is dramatically higher than technology. People invent so many stupid and dangerous ways to “improve” their work area. The worst part is that it just takes a little orchestration to understand their needs and use that creativity to everyone’s benefit.
Disagree that all work is valid. That only makes sense in a world with no resource constraints
Efficiency??
This is about the total amount of emissions, not the emissions-per-unit-of-compute (or whatever).
Not sure what you’re getting at. Increased system efficiency lowers total emissions or at least increases work capacity.
Yeah, but no https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
The climate doesn’t give a toss how much value for shareholders is generated, all that matters is the total amount of emissions.
Unless you’re looking to get rid of half of humanity and go back to living like the Amish I don’t think we can put that genie back in the bottle.
What we can do is work on how energy is generated and increase efficiency. And this has nothing to do with shareholders.
lol at tech’s transparency. You have an availability heuristic issue with your thought process. Every other industry has similar critiques. Your media diet is leading you to false conclusions.
We’re literally in a technology community followed by tons of industry outsiders, of which there is a similar one on every other similar aggregation site. I don’t see any of that for things like plastics manufacturers, furniture makers, or miners. So yeah, I’d say transparency for the general public tends to be higher in tech than most other industries.
I like that the writer thought re climate change. I think it’s been 1 of the biggest global issues for a long time. I hope there’ll be increasing use of sustainable energy for not just data centers but the whole tech world in the coming years.
I think a digital waiter doesn’t need a rendered human face. We have food ordering kiosks. Those aren’t ai. I think those suffice. A self-checkout grocer kiosk doesn’t need a face too.
I think “client help” is where ai can at least aid. Imagine a firm who’s been operating for decades and encountered so many kinds of client complaints. It can feed all those data to a large language model. With that model responding to most of the client complaints, the firm can reduce the number of their client support people. The model will pass complaints that are very complex or that it doesn’t know how to address to the client support people.
Idk whether the government or the public should stop ai from taking human jobs or let it. I’m torn. Optimistically, workers can find new jobs. But we should imagine that at least 1 human will be laid off and can’t find a new job. He’ll be jobless for months. He’ll have an epic headache as he can’t pay next month’s bills.
Boiling the oceans for deepfake porn, scamcoins and worse web search.
Believe it or not, peak humanity.
It’s all downhill from hereI think we passed the peak a few years ago. But yeah, peak from here on out.
You still need a massive fleet of these to train those multi-billion parameter models.
On the invocation side, if you have a cloud SaaS service like ChatGPT, hosted Anthropic, or AWS Bedrock, these could answer questions quickly. But they cost a lot to operate at scale. I have a feeling the bean-counters are going to slow down the crazy overspending.
We’re heading into a world where edge computing is more cost and energy efficient to operate. It’s also more privacy-friendly. I’m more enthused about a running these models on our phones and in-home devices. There, the race will be for TOPS vs power savings.
Innovation is a scam, it breeds endless bullshit we keep buying and talking about like 10 year olds with the latest gimmick.
Look, we replaced this button with A TOUCHSCREEN!
Look! This artficial face has PORES NOW!
LOOK! This coffee machine costs 2000$ now and uses PROPRIATARY SUPEREXPENSIVE CAPSULES!!
We need progress, which is harder to do because it takes paradigm shift on an Individual and social level. It’s much less gadgety.You’re not wrong. We’ve reached a point, technologically, where there is little-to-no true innovation left… and what I mean by that is that everything is now built on incredible amounts of work by others who came before. “Standing on the shoulders of giants”, as it were. And yet we have a corrupt “patent” system that is exclusively used to steal the work of those giants while at the same time depriving all of humanity of true progress. And why? So that a handful of very rich people can get even more rich.
Exactly, innovations no longer help to satisfy real basic needs, they are used to create new, artificial needs. Always new toys that make us believe we are making progress.
I remember hearing this argument before…about the Internet. Glad that fad went away.
As it has always been, these technologies are being used to push us forward by teams of underpaid unnamed researchers with no interest in profit. Meanwhile you focus on the scammers and capitalists and unload your wallets to them, all while complaining about the lack of progress as measured by the products you see in advertisements.
Luckily, when you get that cancer diagnosis or your child is born with some rare disease, that progress will attend to your needs despite your ignorance if it.
Exactly. OP is mad at alienation, not at progress. In a different, less stupid world these labor saving devices would actually be great, leading to a better quality of life for everyone, and getting a really awesome coffee maker. But the people making the decisions aren’t the consumers or the researchers.
Fun fact the first Mr coffee cost 300 dollars in 1971, which would be more than 2000 dollars today
We need progress, which is harder to do because it takes a paradigm shift on an Individual and social level.
Sometimes it just takes a marginal improvement to the quality of the engineering. But these “what if manual labor but fascade of robots!” gimmicks aren’t improvements in engineering. They’re an effort to cut corners on quality in pursuit of a higher profit margin.
Even setting aside you believe these aren’t just a line up of mechanical turks controlled from a sweetshop in the Philippines, their work product isn’t anything approaching good. Its just cheap.
Innovatin is good if it results in clean water, meds, housing, safe food and goods and services.
It’s bad if it means: the most profit for useless shit that people only buy because advertisment made them believe they need it.
Capitalism is a tool. Please let’s grow a pair and stop letting it decide how it will be used. It’s like pulling the trigger on an ak47 without holding it tight. Do we expect the weapon to know where to shot?
Capitalism is a tool that wants to maximize its profits. Unfortunately it discovered that changing the politics and laws is an easy way to do that, even if it’s bad for the people.
Capitalism is per definition not bound to ethics or moral. We need to set rules, even if big corporations made us to believe we shouldn’t.
Tech is neither good nor bad, but control of tech is a major issue.
The existing capitalist control of tech is bad.
Agreed! And that’s where the problem lies. It’s not tech so much as our existing power structures.
nice now combine this with shit for brains coin bros and we can all boil together
My blood runs cold! My dignity has just been sold. nVidia is the centerfold.
Is nobody concerned about this:
Behind the wall, an army of robots, also powered by new Nvidia robotics processors, will assemble your food, no humans needed. We’ve already seen the introduction of these kinds of ‘labor-saving’ technologies in the form of self-checkout counters, food ordering kiosks, and other similar human-replacements in service industries, so there’s no reason to think that this trend won’t continue with AI.
not being seen as the paradise? It’s like the enterprise crew is concerned about replicators because people will lose their jobs.
This is madness, to be honest, this is what humankind ultimately should evolve into. No stupid labour for anyone. But the truth is: capitalism will take care of that, it will make sure, that not everyone is free but that a small percentage is more free and the rest is fucked.There lies the problem not in being able to make human labour obsolete.
The issue with “Human jobs will be replaced” is that society still requires humans to have a paying job to survive.
I would love a world where nobody had to do dumb labour anymore, and everyone’s needs are still met.
Solid agree, but it’s so hard to persuade the brainwashed (let alone their capitalist masters) that the purpose of economic growth should be to generate sufficient leisure time to permit self-actualising activities for those who seek them.
Yup. Realistic result of things becoming automated is that we have several decades of social strife grappling with the fact there’s too many people for the amount of human labor actually needed, until there’s enough possibly violent unrest for the powers that be to realize "oh, maybe we shouldn’t require people to have jobs that don’t exist "
The wealthy ruling class have siphoned off nearly all of the productivity gains since the 70s. AI won’t stop that machine. If half of us die of starvation and half the remaining half die from fighting each other for cake, they don’t care.
The notion that everyone must earn their own living is going to be a problem soon.
I’ve been watching people try to deliver the end-to-end Food Making conveyor belt for my entire life. What I’ve consistently seen delivered are novelties, more prone to creating a giant mess in your mechanical kitchen than producing anything both efficient and edible. The closest I’ve seen are those microwaved dinners, and they’re hardly what I’d call an exciting meal.
But they are cheap to churn out. That’s what is ultimately upsetting about this overall trend. Not that we’ll be eliminating a chronic demand on human labor, but that we’ll be excising any amount of artistry or quality from the menu in order to sell people assembly line TV dinners at 100x markups in pursuit of another percentage point of GDP growth.
As more and more of the agricultural sector falls under the domain of business interests fixated on profits ahead of product, we’re going to see the volume and quality of food squeezed down into what a robot can shove through a tube.
Im starting to wonder if the Butlerian Jihad isn’t a good idea after all.
Holy crap, I thought I hated AI and I was uncertain. Now I’m sure I hate AI
A lot of the “elites” (OpenAI board, Thiel, Andreessen, etc) are on the effective-accelerationism grift now. The idea is to disregard all negative effects of pursuing technological “progress,” because techno-capitalism will solve all problems. They support burning fossil fuels as fast as possible because that will enable “progress,” which will solve climate change (through geoengineering, presumably). I’ve seen some accelerationists write that it would be ok if AI destroys humanity, because it would be the next evolution of “intelligence.” I dunno if they’ve fallen for their own grift or not, but it’s obviously a very convenient belief for them.
Effective-accelerationism was first coined by Nick Land, who appears to be some kind of fascist.
For thousands of years the ruling class has tolerated the rest of us because they needed us for labor and protection. We’re approaching the first time in human history where this may no longer be the case. If any of us are invited to the AI utopia, I suspect it will only be to worship those who control it. I’m not sure what utility we’ll have to offer beyond that. I doubt they’ll keep us around just to collect UBI checks.
Well, this is fucking bleak. Everybody, I urge you to read this article.
