"AI discourse" is a joke

What annoys me about AI discourse are two things that in the end never seem to be considered:

1. Who's gonna pay back the investors their trillions of dollars and with what?

2. Didn't we have to start thinking about reducing energy consumption like at least a decade ago?

> To me, overusing AI, destroying ecosystems, covering up fuck-ups, and hating minorities are all “bad” for the same reason, which I can mostly sum up as a belief that traumatizing others is “bad”. You cannot prove that AI overuse is “bad” to a person who doesn’t think in this framework, like a nihilist that treats others’ lives like a nuisance.

But you haven't defined the framework. You know a bunch of people for which AI is bad for a bunch of handwavey reasons - not from any underlying philosophical axioms. You are doing what you are accusing others of. In my ethical framework the other stated things can be shown to be bad, it is not as clear for AI.

If you want to take a principled approach you need to define _why_ AI is bad. There have been cultures and religions across time that have done this for other emerging technologies, luddites, the amish, etc. They have good ethical arguments for this - and it's possible they are right.

This post feels a bit meandering.

One point which I consider worth making is that LLMs have helped enable a lot of people solve real world problems, even if the solutions are sometimes low quality. The reality is that in many cases the only choice is between a low quality solution and no solution at all. Lots of problems are too small or niche to be able to afford hiring a team of skilled programmers for a high quality solution.

" and hating minorities are all “bad” for the same reason, "

What does this have to do with AI?

Also, why hedge everything you're about to say with a big disclaimer?:

> Disclaimer: I believe that what I’m saying in this post is true to a certain degree, but this sort of logic is often a slippery slope and can miss important details. Take it with a grain of salt, more like a thought-provoking read than a universal claim. Also, it’d be cool if I wasn’t harassed for saying this.

Food for thought!

Our mental models are inadequate to think about these new tools. We bend and stretch our familiar patterns and try to slap them on these new paradigms to feel a little more secure. It’ll settle down once we spend more time with the tech.

The discourse is crawling with over generalization and tautologies because of this. This won’t do us any good.

We need to take a deep breath, observe, theorize, experiment, share our findings and cycle.

Unfortunately she is not contributing much to the discourse either. She just wants it to shift to the topics she cares about.

the idea that we're having a discourse at all is delusion. the sheer volume of capital behind this tech is enough to roll over all the feeble cries of impotent rage.