Edit: don't get me wrong, I'm a happy user. But I'd also be a happy consumer of refined sugar in the early 20th century. I'm still not sure if these tools won't destabilize society to the point of collapse. I don't think we understand the complexity of what's going on nearly enough, and am certainly not optimistic about AI being net good for us

Krugman: "I've been writing some about downsides of technological change and I realized afterwards that if I really wanted a really stellar example of a productive important innovation that had terrible effects on society would be the cotton gin."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=25m38s

Richardson: "I always have a hard time articulating this, but the number of large plantations in which enslavers owned in air quotes, you know, more than 25 or more than 50 other human beings was a very very small proportion of the American South, less than 1%. The majority of people who again owned their black neighbors had one or two enslaved people on their farms. They weren't necessarily called plantations. And they would be working alongside those black Americans. And the cotton gin could have made small farms viable and could have ended human enslavement. And instead what they gave us was, you know, the the Trail of Tears in the 1830s that cleans indigenous Americans out of the southwestern land. You get an extraordinary land rush into the American South in the 1830s and the 1840s. And you get the establishment of these gigantic essentially factory farms. And that's a place where, you know, the majority of southerners, obviously the indigenous southerners and the black southerners, wanted no part of this system, but it actually didn't serve the white farmers either. It served a really small, less than 1% group of American enslavers in the American South. And you look at that and you think that wasn't the technologies fault. That was the fault of the people who um who set up the political system that enabled it to work that way."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=28m18s

And that is what the public should focus on.

AI in its current state is neither fantastic nor a sure path to doom. It can be a boon to society for sure.

But a few individuals leading a few companies that burn 100s of billions of $$ to get the rest of society hooked (and maybe, dependent) on a subscription service, that is a problem.

For all I care it would be better if that were government-funded research, and results open source everyting. Tax the people once, society profits forever.

The way it works now looks more like an attempt at wealth transfer from the public to a few executives & VC's pockets, using AI as a vehicle.

Seems the Chinese are showing the way here?

That's a really surprising but immediately sensible example. It tweaked my brain. Thanks!

Where are your browsers? Where are your compilers? Where are your databases? Where are your operating systems?

Can you point me to literally anything useful that works and was created by this world changing technology? All I see is dead project after dead project.

Google self reports 70% ai usage in code, bun was fully ai rewritten to be rust

I don’t think anything I say is likely to change your mind. You might need to get through this valley of depression by yourself in a few years and join the rest of devs using ai

You said “all” as in “all” developers on those projects. You haven’t spoken to all of them to make that claim. You’re just making stuff up. That’s what I was pointing out.

If you are suggesting that we can call the Chromium project a work of LLMs because some developers may or may not be using LLMs on the project it let’s just stop the conversation right here.

This is becoming a classic case of LLM brain rot. I hope you come back to your senses.

Is it something you aim for, or is it just the natural way of communication for people excited by a new technology, patricianly one they feel gives them some kind of insider advantage or hidden knowledge?

The death of Stack Overflow being a visible indiction: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...

The jury's still out on AI, but coding agents have only really worked for about 6 months now. It's not exactly a fair statement to make. Obviously good things take time and thought. And understanding the full implications of technological advancement also takes time and thought.

Here's [1] an example from farther north but this was apparently common in what is modern day Seattle as well.

For a more modern example napkin math says you can go 1.2 miles in a modern Prius for 1 hour of H100 time.

The Prius gets 57mpg and gallon of gasoline is 33.7kWh for 57/33.7=0.597kWh per mile. An nVidia H100 consumes 0.7 kW. 0.7/0.597=1.18 miles in a modern Prius for an hour of H100 time. I'm not sure how much H100 time is consumed per token or kilotoken or whatever so I can't comment on the scale of ecological damage caused by AI and data centers in general. I suspect it's at least several orders of magnitude off from cars but it's definitely not nothing. This also ignores a ton of other factors like water use and vehicle emissions.

[1]: https://mohai.org/collections-and-research/search/item/1983....

I suppose it'd be from a utilitarian perspective?

Ex: My gut feeling is nitrogen fixing would rank "low" on "terminal ecological impact" against "positive benefits to humanity"; the Vinyl resurgence would be around the middle; private jets for the Epstein class would the highest etc.

The turbojet or maybe some material science that made the turbojet feasible is a technological advancement. It can provide benefits to socity in the form of clean(er than coal) power or affordable transportation. Using that technology to build private jets while maintaining a social class that uses them for harmful purposes is a social problem, not a technological one.

It's a similar argument for the machine gun or nuclear weapons. Arguably if you make a terrifying enough weapon people will refuse to fight wars. So from that perspective inventing the Maxim gun (technological) was moral but using it to fight WWI (social) wasn't.

I for one am doubtful that AI as a whole has meaningfully improved the lives of just about anyone besides the few who have gotten rich. Meanwhile many have already lost their jobs as a result, even if AI is just a convenient scapegoat.

If AI went away tomorrow idk if my life would meaningfully change

They play such a PR game, trying really really hard to be seen as the good guys. It feels as another satirical episode of Silicon Valley. It's very clear they are all money and power motivated while also pretending to do all of this for the good of humanity. I have rarely seen that level of hypocrisy and cultish behavior from leadership and employees there.

I would honestly just prefer if they were honest about being power and money hungry instead of playing that game of AI Safety.

Often the point of propaganda is not to convince, it’s to demoralise.

On the other hand I could also believe that they live in such a bubble they genuinely don’t understand how it comes across. Add in a non-negligible amount of neurodivergence and maybe that’s the simplest explanation

Yes, at least until ~6 months ago that was my reading too. I felt they were part of the EA/less wrong crowd. Earnest, convinced they were smarter than everyone else, paternalistic, massively lacking in real wisdom.

Now, I think maybe they're still struggling with that but they've had a real taste of power and like everyone smart but lacking in wisdom, faced with the real world, all their idealism has become lip service and pandering to their previous in group while their real target (which they probably haven't even admitted to themselves) slips further and further towards gathering more power.

As another example of a tech company where something similar happened, see Google. Although at least they never started out with this condescending "we're here to save you from... us" vibe.

Likewise loss of power is traumatic, picture the barely conscious 90 year old senator getting wheeled into congress to vote or something or other. Few ever give up power willingly even if they’re just a small node in a bigger system and not even really in control

I mean... if you put a bunch of anti-social people in charge of a dehumanizing technology what do you really expect as the outcome?

The stuff with Fable falling back to Opus was a bad business move but seems consistent with their position on safety and was published in the system card. Is Ben Bernanke joining the board a dishonest move?

The value he brings is in his data, knowledge & analyses - which he surely has from the Fed - on the scope and extent of AI's potential rrisks in capital sustainability, market stability and wage/job displacement

Given the data on this[1], this is a confusing choice of hire to ensure AI gains are distributed equitably

[1] https://economicprinciples.org/Why-and-How-Capitalism-Needs-...

There are people here in this thread that act like LLMs are the best invention since sliced bread

> Genie Energy's Strategic advisory board is composed of: Dick Cheney since 2009 (former vice president of the United States),[3] Rupert Murdoch (media mogul and chairman of News Corp), James Woolsey (former CIA director), Larry Summers (former head of the US Treasury), Michael Steinhardt, Jacob Rothschild,[4][5] and Mary Landrieu, former United States Senator from Louisiana.

(I also think his economics research is excellent, and the comments elsewhere about his track record aren't particularly fair.)

For 1/10th the pay, 10x the effort, and 0% of the credit!

Reminds me of Walter Isaacson, the Musk biographer. Supposedly he was hired by an investment bank after he made his fortune, and is a member of the American Philosophical Society [1]. Truly a one of a kind person: a biographer of famous people, an expert on financial markets, and a leading philosopher all at the same time!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Isaacson

I guess it's better than him joining OpenAI, where I could see Altman being more "creative" with the books than Amodei. But I just don't Bernanke pushing back or blowing any whistles when things start smelling funny.