• 11 Posts
  • 587 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 11th, 2023

help-circle


  • The purpose of a system is, absolutely, what it does. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned your design and ethics were, once the system is doing things, those things are its purpose. Your waste heat example, yes, it was the design intent to eliminate that, but now that’s what it does, and the engineers damn well understand that its purpose is to generate waste heat in order to do whatever work it’s doing.

    Huh? Then why is so much money spent on computers to minimize energy usage and heat production? This is perhaps the biggest load of bullshit I think I have heard in a long time. Maybe there is some concept similar to this, but if so you clearly haven’t articulated it well.

    Anyway I think I am done talking about this with you. You are here to fear-monger over technology you probably don’t even use or understand, and I am sick of lemmings doing it.


  • Think, genuinely and critically, about what it means when someone tells you that you shouldn’t judge the ethics and values of their pursuits, because they are simply discovering “universal truths”.

    No scientist or engineer as ever said that as far as I can recall. I was explaining that even for scientific fact which is morally neutral how you get there is important, and that scientists and engineers acknowledge this. What you are asking me to do this based on a false premise and a bad understanding of how science works.

    And then, really make sure you ponder what it means when people say the purpose of a system is what it does.

    It both is and isn’t. Things often have consequences alongside their intended function, like how a machine gets warm when in use. It getting warm isn’t a deliberate feature, it’s a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. We actually try to minimise this as it wastes energy. Even things like fossil fuels aren’t intended to ruin the planet, it’s a side effect of how they work.


  • What exactly is there to gain with AI anyways? What’s the great benefit to us as a species? So far its just been used to trivialize multiple artistic disciplines, basic service industries, and programming.

    The whole point is that much like industrial automation it reduces the number of hours people need to work. If this leads to people starving then that’s a problem with the economic system, not with AI technology. You’re blaming the wrong field here. In fact everyone here blaming AI/ML and not the capitalists is being a Luddite.

    It’s also entirely possible it will start replacing managers and capitalists as well. It’s been theorized by some anti-capitalists and economic reformists that ML/AI and computer algorithms could one day replace current economic systems and institutions.

    Things have a cost, many people are doing the cost-benefit analysis and seeing there is none for them. Seems most of the incentive to develop this software is if you would like to stop paying people who do the jobs listed above.

    This sadly is probably true of large companies producing big, inefficient ML models as they can afford the server capacity to do so. It’s not true of people tweaking smaller ML models at home, or professors in universities using them for data analysis or to aid their teaching. Much like some programmers are getting fired because of ML, others are using it to increase their productivity or to help them learn more about programming. I’ve seen scientists who otherwise would struggle with data analysis related programming use ChatGPT to help them write code to analyse data.

    What do we get out of burning the planet to the ground? And even if you find an AI thats barely burning it, what’s the point in the first place?

    As the other guy said there are lots of other things using way more energy and fossil fuels than ML. Machine learning is used in sciences to analyse things like the impacts of climate change. It’s useful enough in data science alone to outweigh the negative impacts. You would know about this if you ever took a modern data science module. Furthermore being that data centres primarily use electricity it’s relatively easy to move them to green sources of energy compared to say farming, or transport. In fact some data centres already use green energy primarily. Data centres will always exist regardless of AI and ML anyway, it’s just a matter of scale.


  • That’s not at all what I am doing, or what scientists and engineers do. We are all trained to think about ethics and seek ethical approval because even if knowledge itself is morally neutral the methods to obtain that knowledge can be truly unhinged.

    Scientific facts are not a cultural facet. A device built using scientific knowledge is also a product of the culture that built it. Technology stands between objective science and subjective needs and culture. Technology generally serves some form of purpose.

    Here is an example: Heavier than air flight is a possibility because of the laws of physics. A Boeing 737 is a specific product of both those laws of physics and of USA culture. It’s purpose is to get people and things to places, and to make Boeing the company money.

    LLMs can be used for good and ill. People have argued they use too much energy for what they do. I would say that depends on where you get your energy from. Ultimately though it doesn’t use as much as people driving cars or mining bitcoin or eating meat. You should be going after those first if you want to persecute people for using energy.


  • areyouevenreal@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlWho needs Skynet
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    Technology is a product of science. The facts science seeks to uncover are fundamental universal truths that aren’t subject to human folly. Only how we use that knowledge is subject to human folly. I don’t think open source or open weights models are a bad usage of that knowledge. Some of the things corporations do are bad or exploitative uses of that knowledge.


  • Where are Nazis in government in the US or EU? Even Donald Trump isn’t a card carrying Nazi, even though he isn’t a good person or politician. He also isn’t in office, and that’s the closest to an actual Nazi I can think of in either place.

    Anyway, someone made space for you and then you decided to call them a doltish sod. After calling yourself awesome no less. The truth is you’re not “awesome” if you are going to behave like this. There is something wrong with you.





  • areyouevenreal@lemm.eetoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comSelf-Regulation
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    7 days ago

    They were forced to sell under threat of eminent domain. That’s why they tried to sell it for $1 along with a list of conditions on what it could be used for to highlight the danger. The Government then rejected this offer. Rather than trying to blame some random company just because you think all companies are evil, maybe go and read the history instead.