Here in the USA, you have to be afraid for your job these days. Layoffs are rampant everywhere due to outsourcing, and now we have AI on the horizon promising to make things more efficient, but we really know what it is actually going to be used for. They want automate out everything. People packaging up goods for shipping, white collar jobs like analytics, business intelligence, customer service, chat support. Any sort of job that takes a low or moderate amount of effort or intellectual ability is threatened by AI. But once AI takes all these jobs away and shrinks the amount of labor required, what are all these people going to do for work? It’s not like you can train someone who’s a business intelligence engineer easily to go do something else like HVAC, or be a nurse. So you have the entire tech industry basically folding in on itself trying to win the rat race and get the few remaining jobs left over…
But it should be pretty obvious that you can’t run an entire society with no jobs. Because then people can’t buy groceries, groceries don’t sell so grocery stores start hurting and then they can’t afford to employ cashiers and stockers, and the entire thing starts crumbling. This is the future of AI, basically. The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don’t have jobs and no income, not able to survive…
Like, how long until we realize how detrimental AI is to society? 10 years? 15?
The whole planet is threatened by AI. If you look at the amount of energy needed not only to power the infrastructure, but the energy needed to create the infrastructure, and compare it to the work produced, and the energy needed for humans to produce equivalent work, it’s totally fucked and dumb as hell
Edit: to elaborate, there was this commercial for a Google Pixel I saw, people in group chat talking about a football game, person says “create an image of football gloves made out of butter”. .08kWh later that image gets posted in chat for a chuckle. Dude, just say “gloves made of butter? smdh” Lady laying in bed talking to a glorified chatbot, just hop on Lemmy or reconnect with an old friend and save .16kWh. These are the most common use cases for AI, basically finessing a prompt a dozen times to make a Shrek and Garlfield comic that winds up in some Facebook group with 9 likes. Multiply those figures a couple million times tho and it’s like holy shit. We somehow went from extremely low-bandwidth words to high bandwidth Youtube and Tiktok to the messiest bullshit humans have ever invented, to do things we could easily do with characters on a keyboard
Energy demands are only going to increase as we replace gas with electric alternatives. The problem you’re pointing to is an issue with the current infrastructure.
Infrastructure in this case refers to the data centers and LLMs. It takes hundreds of megawatt hours to train a single current-gen LLM and who knows how many gigawatts of energy are being consumed by the sum of LLMs at any given point but it likely dwarfs the sum of all energy spent training LLMs.
But then there’s the energy involved in producing those cards, shipping those cards, the data centers themselves.
It wouldn’t be preposterous to suggest that the sum of energy spent at any given time on generative AI is enough to power New York City. Might even be well more than
No, in this case I’m referring to the electric grid and what powers it.
Yeah and the problem I’m pointing to has nothing to with electrical infrastructure and instead the sheer amount of energy wasted on bullshit.
You could have fantastic electrical infrastructure but if people are consuming literal gigawatt hours and boiling municipal water dry making Garfield and Shrek comics, that’s the problem. Where does this energy come from? How is the copious amount of heat dealth with? Those are the corollaries
It’s seriously the biggest waste of energy in human existence and it’s staring at you right in the face. Gotta be blind to miss it
It’s seriously the biggest waste of energy in human existence
Let’s not forget cryptocurrency mining
You’re missing or ignoring my point. If the energy is provided by carbon neutral sources, then the amount used is irrelevant. That should be our goal. And I don’t know where you’re getting the notion that water resources are " boiled dry" or that gpu heat has any meaningful impact on the climate, but those aren’t actual issues.
And for the record, I’m not defending LLMs or generative images here. That bubble would be better off bursting, but the energy use isn’t why. Hell, it may be the only good aspect of the whole thing. With MS booting up old nuclear reactors, maybe it will revitalize interest so can make some use of that technology.
Energy is zero sum. If you’re throwing away carbon neutral energy you could instead use that energy to displace consumption of energy that would otherwise be produced by coal or whatnot.
Furthermore, many of these data centers use evaporative cooling as opposed to a sealed system and water indeed goes right out and into the atmosphere. There are limitless articles discussing this and the footprint
Edit: I should add that the whole zero sum aspect of energy is why things that ‘scrub carbon’ are a pipe dream. That stuff often requires so much energy to produce that, even if it were made from solar or whatever, there’s always a more positive impact simply by taking that energy and using it to reduce energy production that emits all the carbon in the first place. Consumption is still the crux of the problem at this point and to look at anything that requires gobs of energy and uses clean energy as some insular thing that is separate from things that use dirty energy is not a good way to look at things
Society can exist without jobs, not everything has to be capital, in fact reaching a post scarcity world is needed for communism.
AI hype is also overblown as fuck, I remember watching the CGP grey video Humans Need not Apply, like what, 8 years ago? Haven’t really achieved some epic breakthrough did we?
For me from a software engineers perspective, “AI” is nothing but a productivity tool, it reduces the amount of mundane work I have to do, but then so does the IDE I use.
as humans we have been automatic tasks for a long time, just think about your washing machine, you have any idea how hard it would be to have clean clothes without them? Do you think we would be better off if we needed cleaning services that clean our clothes for us using human labour just so people have jobs? Or is it better to use that effort elsewhere?
“AI” returns mathematically plausible results from its tokenized training data. That is the ONLY thing it does. It doesn’t consider, it doesn’t fact check itself. “AI” in its current state is a party trick.
They’re starting to add options to cite references, consult documentation, some of the engines actually check their source code to make sure it’s viable.
Now that they’ve hit stumbling blocks on organically improving, all those things you’re talking about can be done with conventional techniques.
No matter what, it helps me incredibly.
Your last sentence diminishes the value of the first sentence. These LLMs save me a ton of time and massively increase my productivity.
This is the part of the AI conversation that always bugs me. People have just concluded that the hype is real and we’ve reached the point that people fear in movies. They don’t understand that it’s mostly bullshit. Sure, the fancy autocomplete can toss up some boilerplate code and it’s mostly ok. Sure, it saves me time scrolling through StackOverflow search results.
But it’s simply not this all-knowing miracle replacement for everything. I think everyone has been conditioned by entertainment to fear the worst. When that bubble bursts, IT will be the part which wreaks havoc on the economy.
they can’t afford to employ cashiers
They’ve already removed most of the ones in the UK, it seems. Really worrying stuff when you realise how much they crept in during covid.
Not AI TV’s with Bluetooth connection to your phone! Those will be totally fine! Go ahead and say things about Trump and then go to Amazon and search for the grass trimmer you love. Go ahead and talk about the truck you like or the computer ram you need. So you work for Costco? Hmmm tells us more? Are you at the executive level? You wouldn’t be a purchaser maybe 🤔? Or what?
People simultaneously seem scared of AI automating jobs, and of there being too many old people for the young people to look after as they’d be too busy with their jobs. Wouldn’t those cancel each other out?
there being too many old people for the young people to look after as they’d be too busy with their jobs
When your entire society revolves around working for a salary or for getting paid, that’s why you can’t take care of the old people. Now suppose AI automates a lot of stuff and we have time for taking care of older people… How are we supposed to do that without jobs? That’s the problem
I’ll make those robots do that job
You may be in the younger side, or just not remember, but this happens almost every 20 years like clockwork.
In the 80’s it was the PC and computers at large.
In the 00’s it was robotic automation that was going to be the end of manual labor.
Now it’s this.
The sooner people realize that all of things are just about the small number of wealthy people who control resources making more money at the expense of the majority of all other humans, maybe something will get done. It’s been tried before in various movements with little to show for it, but maybe I’m just cynical.
There will need to be a major shift in how economic flow works in order to support an existing or expanding population regardless.
What do you think happened to building full of engineers designing plans and making stress load calculations? What do you think happened to switchboard operators?
Never, because it’s not. This is the future:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/fully-automated-luxury-gay-space-communism
Let’s get there as quickly as possible
For now, I work in AI.
IMO, using AI to remove jobs is the business equivalent of the Darwin Award. No sane executive will look at AI and see job replacement. A dumb executive will look at AI and see more productivity gains. A smart executive will see AI as a way to improve tooling for workers that explicitly want to use AI.
Sadly, as with most tech improvements, we’ll see lots of companies run by stupid people try to do stupid things with it. The best we can hope for is that there are opportunities for people to bail and find better job opportunities when their employer says “let’s fire HR and replace with GPT”, only to get absolutely brutalized by legal fees when their AI HR decides to fire someone for a protected reason, or refuses to fire a thief because they have a disability, or something that requires human intervention that doesn’t exist, or one of the hundreds of ways that it could go hilariously wrong.
It happens all the time. I remember watching solid profitable tech companies pivoting to delivering large apps on the new iPhone app store because “it’s the future”, only to realise that spending two years to develop an office suite for the iPhone 4 was a fucking stupid idea in hindsight. I remember people firing web developers because WYSIWYG editors would mean that you could design and build a website in the same way you create a Word doc. Stupid execs will always do stupid shit, and the world will move on.
Yup.
Some guys I know who worked at a developer contracting house (that I briefly worked for as well) all lost their jobs over the course of a year or so, as the company started rapidly downsizing because “Copilot means we don’t need as many developers anymore, we can fill orders with a skeleton crew.”
I’m excited to see that company fail for their bullshit.
The 12 year old video below explains the root cause of economic misery. Technology is a tool that can be used for good or evil. But the ruling class wants ALL the money. So technology is often used for more efficient oppression.
Meanwhile, we working class folks are too busy working and/or distracted (often fighting with each other) to mount any real resistance.
I think social media provides a good reference to start speculating an answer to your question.
Look at all the beneficial change that realization has brought on too!
Realizing this doesn’t mean anything is going to happen.
how long until it’s not making the right people money anymore? Sometime after that.
Most importantly “AI” doesn’t exist.
But it’s also worth nothing that absolutism is almost never helpful. I don’t think data, statistics, computers, etc. are inherently evil technologies. It’s the usual problem of how capitalism directs research and development towards violent control instead of liberation.
General Artificial Intelligence doesn’t exist - we don’t have HAL9000 or Terminator or Cortana yet.
But up to that point, and almost certainly even past it, the AI effect means the more sophisticated AI things become, the more people think “well </insert ai thing/> isn’t actually intelligent or an AI”.
As Larry Tesler says: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”
Is AI really only detrimental to society? We’re in the initial stages where they promise the world in order to get investors attention. But once the investors realize what it’s actually capable of they’ll have to focus on what it’s actually capable of.
I think sometime next year we’ll have a crash, and all the companies pushing AI will be forced to either focus on quality, or find the next thing to push.
how long until we realise the ones trying to force ai into everything are detrimental to society. Billionaires, big corporations and other tumors like that.
AI isnt the problem as it can be used for beneficial things, its abusers are.
