Anyone else get the feeling that AI is a net loss for humanity? Search already made us lazy, now we don't even have to think about the answer, just regurgitate what the AI said. Don't even read your email, just have AI summarize what an AI probably wrote.
Then there's a strange dismissal of AI's failures. You can blame the AI for a failure, but if you were to arrive at the same conclusion/result, it would be your fault. It's become some sort of ownership offloading. Easier to blame the machine than take responsibility?
Where are the environmentalists? AI uses 10x the energy (and thus 10x carbon emissions) as search. That doesn't include the resources and energy to make the hardware and train the models in the first place. I can't think of any device or tool where people would tolerate a 10x increase in energy usage to complete the same task. People don't care what happens in the Datacenter until its next door to them causing problems.
I find it very useful for generating boilerplate code, unit tests, etc. It's a great tool for doing certain work. I don't need or want it shoved into everything because every Product Manager and Sales team seems to think it's a good idea to drive 'growth factors' or some other BS.
I can't "not use it" when my VP uses an AI to decide who to lay off in the next wave of cuts.
I can't "not use it" when my governor sets up an AI review of statewide regulation to decide what regulation to remove.
"My boss says that I have to use an LLM to program" is way way way below my worries of "society's bosses use LLMs to entrench their power and abuse labor because they are upset about the labor gains made in the post-covid era."
When the boot is on the neck, you don't stop complaining until it has been removed. It's as simple as that.
With that said I think technology overall has become increasingly worse over the years in some ways. God, do I miss a TV without an OS.
And if Apple shoves too much AI into their products I’ll drop Mac OS too.
The environmentalists have been screaming from the rooftops about it for a while. But activists can only do so much, compared to huge multinationals with marketing budgets bigger than some countries GDPs...
Let's face it. Huge portions of the population are performing unnecessary jobs in order to sustain themselves. Most products and services available to us today are unnecessary, unsustainable, destructive (economically and socially), and many represent a huge bubble which will hurt us down the line. LLM have exposed the sort of office jobs which have been automatable for years.
We are killing ourselves mentally and spiritually, as well as the planet we live on, so everybody can drive to offices to respond to emails or to create carbon-copies of the same already existing products and hoping marketing makes the difference.
Can you provide some examples of this to anchor your argument?
I can sometimes come up with a few niche jobs, but not really that many overall.
I can also see a lot of bloat in large orgs, but those companies are typically providing big value somewhere.
I just want to understand which jobs we're talking about in this frequently-made argument.
If you go into a supermarket, there's only a fraction of aisles that are devoted to food worth eating (unprocessed or lightly processed, providing nutritional value). The rest is 100s of types of unnecessary and mostly destructive junk food and alcohol. If you walk into any shopping district or center, only a handful of businesses are ever selling anything with real value and purpose. The rest is superficial and if it were removed from the high street or never existed in the first place, nobody would miss it. The digital market is at least a little less destructive environmentally, but is still crowded with mostly pointless apps and software.
People always bring up supply and demand, but that doesn't negate the argument that these products are unnecessary, unsustainable and destructive. Add to that, they are often predatory and prey (or the marketing preys) on peoples weaknesses and insecurities.
For every one of these companies selling fast fashion clothes that fall apart after a handful of uses, shoes too impractical for daily use or sportswear, expensive hygiene products which hinge mostly on the way they are displayed in the store, and a million variations of CRUD apps for tracking water consumption and a myriad of other things you could just record in a note, whole teams of people are working away in jobs to produce, market and provide these unnecessary things. They're all polluting the environment (either through industrial production, energy use etc.) and peoples minds (for example, Instagram has been highly damaging to young girls self-esteem and similar services are causing unprecedented mental decline in their userbases), and unsustainable, because 9 times out of 10 all of these products and services are flashes in the pan that will be dead or out of trend (increasingly fast these days).
The only justification a lot of this stuff has is that it gives people employment and their livelihoods. Sometimes that element forces people to be okay with abetting something they fundamentally don't like. One of the largest employers in my local city is Sky Bet (a gambling company). Every single person (hundreds of employees) that works there is propping up a "service" which destroys peoples lives.
I see other products trying to do this as well. My intuition tells me this is not going to end well. I could be entirely wrong. I really hope I am wrong. Maybe it's just purely hype and products will not lose what makes them great. Maybe it will just be some burnt development cycles. Or maybe it will really just be making new application connectors, formatting and protocols to be more AI friendly.
[1] - https://www.rsyslog.com/rsyslog-goes-ai-first-a-new-chapter-...
You're using consumer-tier level gear.
So they're assuming consumer-tier level desires.
Try some professional gear.
Alternatives to Logi Options+ include BetterMouse, LinearMouse, and Barrier, which offer similar customization and functionality for Logitech devices.
These options can help reduce resource usage and provide a smoother experience.
Conversely, I spent an hour one day trying to prevent Gmail from puking text onto every new email I begin. It turned out to be a Chrome feature and scrapping Chrome is the only way to stop it. Past that is more time spent working out how to disable Gemini and remove it's elements, so it's unwanted presence isn't triggered into being a problem.
Every month I have to review the list of registry edits I use to keep copilot's unwanted advances out of my users' workspace. Notably, there isn't one for Win11 notepad and MS CP has to be disabled manually thru the UI.
Of these two preferences, major tech respects just one. The other one is continually acted on, leveraged and intruded upon - with tech corps showing no more understanding of consent than Harvey Weinstein did. If AI is on the table, what we want is just an obstacle for UI devs to overcome.
Eventually I'll find a suitable replacement. I found one for paint if it can be trusted.
They were so proud to announce in ~February that they will sum up our comments on the internal survey using Copilot (probably)!
I just want to not have it shoved in my face. It's exhausting.
Like dawg I don’t use Gemini I just use your email and google drive.
Fuck.
The real uses of AI will be far more subtle.
Throughout history, we've found ways to guide powerful technologies toward better outcomes, even when there were strong economic incentives pushing in other directions. Think about how we've developed safety standards for cars, regulations for medicines, or international agreements around nuclear technology. It took time and effort, but people working together made a real difference.
When it comes to AI, we still have meaningful choices. We can support leaders who take these issues seriously, back companies that are genuinely trying to develop AI responsibly, and speak up when we see problems. We can also stay informed and help others understand what's happening - sometimes the most important thing is just having honest conversations about what we want our future to look like.
This says more that search takes almost no energy than it does about the huge environmental toll of AI.
In this day and age when “but the environment!” Is one of your key arguments, you’ve already lost. The environment is cooked and nobody cares. People (in the societal sense) say they care but every action they take says the opposite.
Toasters?
Oh wait. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/10/intelligent-...
We will see either one of two things:
(a) a massive market crash which nearly destroys the software industry and for a time wreaks havoc on the global economy, or (b) a soft crash due to external smoothing effects because never underestimate the power of fake billionaire money; along with a severe bifurcation of tech markets where simultaneously we see slop dominate poor quality mainstream products and then the higher-end luxury products either minimize or outright remove all mention of AI because it's become such a low-brow, tainted brand.
(On that last note, we already have evidence that consumers see that something is now "AI-powered" or whatever and they like it LESS. It will eventually become the kiss of death.)
