Is the concern that we'd marginalize parents and kids? As a parent of little kids, that's a concern that wasn't even on my radar. I had no idea that that was a major concern of people. Wild. I'm not saying it is a fabricated or unfounded fear, I just don't have that concern at all for myself.
As a parent of little kids, I worry much more about them living fulfilling lives as they grow up in the future. I'm concerned about climate change, wars, and an economic system that will allow them to live self-actualized lives. I have no doubt that the population number plays some factor in that, creating problems that must be solved. But ultimately, humans have created amazing technologies and the Earth is bountiful. We can support whatever number of people is on the horizon (whether that number is larger or smaller), but society must choose to do so and adapt.
My greatest fears are that governments and corporations consolidate their wealth and power to only an elite few, bending society to serve that elite. That is a fear exists regardless of the fertility rate.
The concern is that if the birthrate drops low enough that having kids becomes unusual, it causes societal changes that create a negative feedback loop that will continue pushing the birthrate lower and lower. If the number of elderly far exceeds the number of working people (which is already locked in for South Korea), you then have to figure out how to restructure society around this while maintaining social order.
You can see this in a microcosm at churches - the ones full of families and exploding children will continue to have such; and the ones that are newly wed or nearly dead will chase families with children away even if entirely unintentionally.
If it happens on a societal level it's tremendously powerful.
I personally control my life by spending almost all of my income, after bills, towards expanding the elaborate tower-defense-like automated weaponry on my plot of land. If I must leave my fort, I always drive my T-34 into town (I'm saving up for a Sherman).
A lot less people would be mad, yeah. In my own area, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to galvanize activity and get write-ups in the local news. The focus, generally, was on how it would raise electricity costs for the county and use up variable water resources right as we are facing water shortages here.
A lot of people here are in precarious financial situations, they do not want to see any costs go up. Inflation at the grocery store, high gas prices, high mortgages/rent, and a lousy job market have people on edge. I don't know if the average Joe is worried about AI leading to a dystopian hellscape, but he at least doesn't see AI providing any benefit to making ends meet.
Turned out not be a data center, but just the possibility caused a stir.
Yeah, and it should be. But the USA, at least in this current moment, builds regulations catering to corporations and the rich over people's general needs. So the regulations that are on the table at the national level are ineffective.
It's easier for normal people to influence local regulations, but local regulations just push the problem somewhere else. However disdain for AI is so widespread that this is actually kind of effective.
disdain for dumping industrial sludge into rivers is quite high too. if you don’t demand regulated domestic production it will just get moved to the least regulated place with the best underlying economics, I imagine you know this though…
Yeah, I agree with you! Regulation of that kind of environmental problem works better the more land is covered. National is best, statewide is meaningful (if you are in a geographically large state). Local is better than doing literally nothing, but it does have the nasty side effect of pushing the problem out of people's sight :(
Maybe I'm a big idiot, but I think nuclear disarmament is a good geopolitical strategy. The USA has treaties in place pursuing that end on a global scale.
I understand that the war between Russia and Ukraine, and now Iran and Israel/USA has set back the slow progress that was being made on nuclear disarmament. I don't understand your claim that nuclear disarmament caused a war, though.
I guess the argument is that if Ukraine hadn't willingly handed over the 3rd largest nuclear arsenal in the world after its independence, Russia would have not started a war against them.
That’s so far from obvious. The most concerning possibilities for me — like kids not learning how to struggle or problem solve on their own — won’t be resolved for many years.
If I'm in the room, yes. For me, AI is one, is the best handicap accessibility tool I've ever had. At a minimum, speech recognition is a higher quality, and second, it lets me write code again. I'm working on the third benefit, which is it helps me organize, helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information.
If you look around, you'll find the AI has made some significant improvements to medicine and engineering. These improvements get drowned out by the AI Cheerleaders, but they're there.
> helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information.
I keep seeing this and I'm pretty envious! You must have a different form of ADHD than I do. For me, trying to use AI to build anything is terrible for my attention, it turns everything into a miserable slog because it's so hands off.
AI helps me get into flow state because I can have a rambling conversation with a chatbot and work through ideas and what abouts. eventually it helps me forget to a place where flow is easier to maintain.
I like this argument/reasoning more than any I've encountered so far. Thank you! Enabling the disabled is definitely a positive and this is a strong argument for the "pro AI" column.
I think another argument for AI is that it can help pull out patterns and information that are normally hidden from human cognition because we can't encompass that information and keep it in mind.
I think one place we should apply this is to the financial system. Use it to detect fraud, tax manipulation games and Other b**** pulled by the 1%ers.
With luck, it might even help us find methods of reducing their influence and power.
Two points on that:
1. This would require hardware to be affordable by mere mortals. That hardware is not financially beyond our reach yet, but AI is making the cost of buying good computer parts very expensive. The big corporations are working against the goal of local LLMs in a major way just by soaking up most of the hardware on the market. And I don't even think that's intentional - they're just too hungry to consider otherwise. They can pay high prices where normal people cannot.
2.Local LLMs would have to be designed to be very convenient to use. As it stands, the big players are making their online models very convenient instead, and that let's them charge a subscription. It's a proven business model that our society has gotten used to (even if we grumble a bit). Even if the hardware were cheap, local LLMs are mostly for businesses, with a few hobbyists running it in their basement because they can.
It's extremely hard for me to imagine local LLMs being a threat to the powerful in any way.
Asbestos is the miracle material it is advertised as. It really is great insulation, and really is absolutely fireproof. Thousands of industrial uses are readily apparent.
Despite this, because of its other effects, the cost to clean up and stop using asbestos is greater than the sum total of any benefit from all mined asbestos worldwide.
Even a miracle technology can still be a net disaster.
I don't understand that this argument. Why does the net improvement of the technologies listed imply that AI will also have a net improvement? Are you just arguing that there's no such thing as technology that is harmful on net?
We could have had this same argument about social media 15 years ago before hard evidence showed it's not quite the net benefit to society it was touted as.
You presume there is hard evidence that AI is good for society. In reality, the inverse is true.
Now you understand why anti-vaxxers ignore evidence. Because it doesn't fit with your worldview and you're too narrow-minded and selfish to consider that your viewpoint might actually be wrong and bad for others.
You should report that to animal control. In most cities, dogs are not allowed to be running loose off leash and "at large." If they are bothering people, it's clearly an infraction.
I would humor this stance if we were also actively building a new economic arrangement that was not capitalism.
Automating away the drudgery or dangerous parts of life seems inherently good. But I would argue that AI has not been awesome at that, really. There are certainly cases where it has lessened tiresome work, but there are just as many cases where AI is worsening the pleasant parts of life. And I don't know anyone who has experienced shorter work weeks because AI is doing stuff for them.
Under capitalism, AI is converting labor power of ordinary people to "property" owned by the owning class. It is making the rich richer. It doesn't really improve my state of being.
I would call into the question the notion that an "unbiased" news source is even possible. What is that?
Even in a hypothetical, entirely objective coverage an event, the news publication must decide whether to give such coverage time and space as compared to other stories. That time/space is balanced against corporate advertising and the corporate interests that own the publication (or the government grants, or the subscribers, or whatever the funding is). Choosing to cover or not cover something is bias, before the news article even exists.
That would be neat, but I really don't see it happening.
In software-land, it's my sense that, if anything, AI is working against open source. AI is creating busy work for open source maintainers with a large volume of low quality PRs, and scrapers are burdening those who maintain their own small-scale, public facing infrastructure.
Meanwhile, AI is ingesting their publicly available data to improve itself, with the implicit (if not explicit) goal of making those projects irrelevant (why read the docs, participate in a forum or chat, or submit a PR when you can ask your AI thing to just write the code you want instead?).
Furthermore, if a software developer is of the opinion that AI is "bad" in some way and they want to resist it, I think it would make the most sense to keep their code private. Open source is feeding AI.
As a parent of little kids, I worry much more about them living fulfilling lives as they grow up in the future. I'm concerned about climate change, wars, and an economic system that will allow them to live self-actualized lives. I have no doubt that the population number plays some factor in that, creating problems that must be solved. But ultimately, humans have created amazing technologies and the Earth is bountiful. We can support whatever number of people is on the horizon (whether that number is larger or smaller), but society must choose to do so and adapt.
My greatest fears are that governments and corporations consolidate their wealth and power to only an elite few, bending society to serve that elite. That is a fear exists regardless of the fertility rate.
I think Charlie Chaplin's speech at the end of The Great Dictator is relevant and inspirational: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20&t=2s
Thank you for sharing your article. It's from a view so unlike my own, and it's been eye opening.
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