And with fusion, we already have a working prototype (the Sun). And if we could just scale our tech up enough, maybe we’d have usable fusion.
(Sometimes that sort of criticism is spot on. If someone says they've got a brilliant new design for a perpetual motion machine, go ahead and tell them it'll never work. But in the general case it's overconfident.)
That is too reductive and simply not true. Contemporary critiques of AI include that they waste precious resources (such as water and energy) and accelerate bad environmental and societal outcomes (such as climate change, the spread of misinformation, loss of expertise), among others. Critiques go far beyond “hur dur, LLM can’t code good”, and those problems are both serious and urgent. Keep sweeping critiques under the rug because “they’ll be solved in the next five years” (eternally away) and it may be too late. Critiques have to take into account the now and the very real repercussions already happening.
But I'm really worried that the benefits are very localized, and that the externalized costs are vast, and the damage and potential damage isn't being addressed. I think that they could be one of the greatest ever drivers of inequality as a privileged few profit at the expense of the many.
Any debates seem neglect this as they veer off into AGI Skynet fantasy land damage rather than grounded real world damage. This seems to be deliberate distraction.
"Every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon.
Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false.
Lemma: contemporary implementations have almost always already been improved upon, but are unevenly distributed."