I absolutely take Luddite as a compliment, the historical Luddites were cool as hell. And with the benefit of hindsight, we now know their predictions were basically correct about increasing automation leading to lower quality products and more alienated lifestyles.
Also, I know enough about finance to know that if these computers cost more money to keep on than they bring in (which they do) they won’t be around long-term.
This story keeps getting parroted and it’s completely untrue. Luddites gained no extra rights due to their actions they gained rights decades later through actual policy activism.
Sure not all the critique is accurate, but in its current form, it causes huge issues with water and noise pollution in places the data centers are built, and are sucking unbelievable amounts of power, while essentially DDOSing tons of sites to scrape data, and often using copyrighted material that they have no license for. It is also reducing people’s ability to think critically because people turn to it immediately.
I’m not an idiot who will say it’s not useful, but we need to slow down by about 20x with what we’re doing with it now, and save it mainly for medical usage until we have a solution to those massive problems.
Honestly I don’t disagree with your take. We should slow down and be diligent with our roll out and policies but sadly that’s not what the mainstream discussion is all about - it’s all so binary.
The water and noise problem functionally has zero to do with llms as a tool. That is entirely and solely a byproduct over over expansion of corporate intrests.
That’s like saying the lumber mill is the reason logging is harmful to the environment.
It’s nonsensical and requests objective ignorance of the context and nuance of the problem
There’s nothing that actually requires the data center problem to exist for llms to also exist. There are alternative.
Yes which is why I’m not against ai as a whole, just in its current form it needs massive regulations. I would still not be happy about how it’s ruined huge portions of the internet, but I would probably put up with that for the value it provides.
We already have a perfectly good policy framework for datacenters: just charge them the negative externality costs. The problem is that they want datacenters now and repay external costs like electricity, water etc later because it takes 1 year to build a datacenter but 5 years to route power and water.
We already solve for this with economic credits but people just don’t trust these systems because of corruption and poor governance. The credits never trickle down to people who pay for externalities.
You’re making too much sense, Dr. Better stop before they turn their irrational hatred on you. You’re making it difficult for the slow-thinking Neo-Luddites to blindly hate this technology, and they have to hate something so they’ll turn their blind hatred on you!
The problem with majority of “LLM critics” is that they are brain dead luddites that argue with ragebait emotion rather than rationality.
Unsurprisingly LLMs are just computers that can be useful, can be wasteful, can be life saving and can be society destroyed - it’s a tool.
What lives have been saved by LLMs?
I absolutely take Luddite as a compliment, the historical Luddites were cool as hell. And with the benefit of hindsight, we now know their predictions were basically correct about increasing automation leading to lower quality products and more alienated lifestyles.
Also, I know enough about finance to know that if these computers cost more money to keep on than they bring in (which they do) they won’t be around long-term.
This story keeps getting parroted and it’s completely untrue. Luddites gained no extra rights due to their actions they gained rights decades later through actual policy activism.
But they want it to be cool to be metaphorical ostriches with their proverbial heads stuck in the figurative ground!
Sure not all the critique is accurate, but in its current form, it causes huge issues with water and noise pollution in places the data centers are built, and are sucking unbelievable amounts of power, while essentially DDOSing tons of sites to scrape data, and often using copyrighted material that they have no license for. It is also reducing people’s ability to think critically because people turn to it immediately.
I’m not an idiot who will say it’s not useful, but we need to slow down by about 20x with what we’re doing with it now, and save it mainly for medical usage until we have a solution to those massive problems.
Honestly I don’t disagree with your take. We should slow down and be diligent with our roll out and policies but sadly that’s not what the mainstream discussion is all about - it’s all so binary.
The water and noise problem functionally has zero to do with llms as a tool. That is entirely and solely a byproduct over over expansion of corporate intrests.
That’s like saying the lumber mill is the reason logging is harmful to the environment.
It’s nonsensical and requests objective ignorance of the context and nuance of the problem
There’s nothing that actually requires the data center problem to exist for llms to also exist. There are alternative.
Yes which is why I’m not against ai as a whole, just in its current form it needs massive regulations. I would still not be happy about how it’s ruined huge portions of the internet, but I would probably put up with that for the value it provides.
We already have a perfectly good policy framework for datacenters: just charge them the negative externality costs. The problem is that they want datacenters now and repay external costs like electricity, water etc later because it takes 1 year to build a datacenter but 5 years to route power and water.
We already solve for this with economic credits but people just don’t trust these systems because of corruption and poor governance. The credits never trickle down to people who pay for externalities.
This is not even a datacenter issue.
You’re making too much sense, Dr. Better stop before they turn their irrational hatred on you. You’re making it difficult for the slow-thinking Neo-Luddites to blindly hate this technology, and they have to hate something so they’ll turn their blind hatred on you!