It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech.
I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe.
According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month. The article seems a bit hyperbolic. There are certainly concerns around the nature of work and the economy, though. There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.
> you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech.
I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now.
Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying to stand up for your right to a safe public space brands you as evil.
There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.
> Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob.
Are you having these conversations in person? Or are these conversations happening on Twitter/Reddit/HN/whatever?
In my experience, online forums don't really work for political discussion for a bunch of reasons.
If you change to getting your fix of politics from long-form articles and radio-style scripted podcasts by professional journalists, you'll probably find there's a lot more room for nuance.
I can't speak for the other poster but I've had the experience they described in-person, when I was living in Victoria
I rented an apartment downtown Victoria and had pretty frequent run-ins with addicts on the streets. My friends who lived and worked further out away from the downtown core had very strong opinions about it any time I had anything negative to say about the experiences
If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it.
Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?
> We can have actual conversations with our computers,
Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them.
It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.
I think it's not so much the technical scope that makes it "not the AI you read of as a child" but the societal impact. AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails. Cue the quote about AI supposedly about taking over the boring tasks so we can spend more time making art, achieving self-actualization.
The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages.
And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!
Is it not? You can talk to it in plain English and it can do things for you and respond back in a synthesized voice. I was reading an old Asimov short story about a guy who comes across a lost robot and has to trick it into staying put, and it felt weirdly prescient. (The story is “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”)
It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.
IQ tests are restandardised from time to time. We could take the scores from 100 years ago and see that everybody would be gifted.
Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.
Branding. LLM’s (as a term!) are too specific for the ‘conquer the world’ narratives the VCs want to justify the high valuations. Machine Learning sounds too technical.
AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him.
FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?
I really like the idea of AI being the brand of whatever we are hyping so much that will inevitably fail spectacularly and turn the entire society against it for a couple of decades.
The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working towards.
What do you mean? It's exactly what every child has read in the past 80 years: you can talk to the computer and it does intellectual work like math or coding or writing stories.
Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.
Maybe we need some kind of worldwide negative event first. In Star Trek lore, World War 3 starts this year (2026). Like with World War 2, perhaps it’s needed to calibrate the zeitgeist to a spot where a prosperous era can follow /shrug
An optimist can hope AI and robotics brings us into a post-scarcity world and that society responds with utopia rather than just disposing of the 99% of people who become economically irrelevant. History has a pessimistic vibe though.
History has the most optimistic vibe imaginable, what are you talking about?? Look at where we are as a species right now, vs century ago, a millennium ago, ten thousand years ago!
What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?
> The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe.
This is actually a big part of why being pro-AI is met with negativity today.
As someone who's using and building with AI and also experiences the "anti" movement, you've chosen a pretty condescending minority of the reasons why they dislike AI and painted it as the default.
"They never liked AI because they don't like the idea maybe they're not such special snowflakes in the universe"... really?
They didn't "always hate AI". Most people didn't even think of AI outside of niche things like self-driving. Instead their hatred is from LLMs and generative AI which (as far as they're concerned) didn't exist until November 30, 2022.
Actual reasons they readily share for not liking it are things like:
- it was built by abusing copyright (true with nuance)
- it's used to generate massive amounts of low value content that's overwhelming their spaces (very true)
- it's having an environmental impact (true with more nuance)
- it's making the things they want to buy more expensive (true, even things unrelated to AI)
- the loudest voices in the room have spent years telling them this could destroy humanity and/or take all their jobs (completely true)
- it's behind major layoffs (true with nuance around stated reasons vs actual)
- people who are pro-AI have a strong tendency to minimize their reasons for hating it (... obviously true)
I mean even if you like AI, it's clear we're at a place with so many reasons for people to be anti-AI that it's honestly an own goal at this point.
People didn't have opinions about generative AI as it exists today 20 years ago. The idea of a computer being able to turn any topic into a haiku would have been contentious for if it was possible, not if it was good: that sounds great!
But now we got it and it came with way more baggage than any of them ever imagined. They didn't think it'd learn to write haikus by ripping through every written word. And they didn't think it'd be used to write lots of spam instead of haikus once it could. And they didn't think the same capability would generalize to typing in an artist's name and spitting out infinitely remixed copies of their work.
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I think moving forward in a less negative direction starts with being real about why people hate AI, and it's a lot less "it makes me feel less special" than it is "it's actively reducing my quality of life" for people outside of the bubble.
I wasn't trying to be condescending. I was stating my experience talking to people 10-20 years ago, before AI was thought about at all by people outside of tech. It always boiled down to a dualist vs monist ontology argument. I agree there are valid reasons to dislike current generative AI tech though. I agree with a lot of this.
I should say I do think that deeper ontological thing is why people tend to think the tech will always be a novelty or will stagnate soon, etc.
Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn't care when you could get ahead, don't pretend like you care now. It's childishly performative. This is an evolution of the same automation and communication tech that has been growing for as long as most people have been alive. Just now it might actually affect the technologically literate class. You did this. Own it.
> It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
That's an awfully wide swath you are cutting there. I can't think of a single tech person that I've worked closely with in the last 20 years that I would describe as "riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale". The majority of tech workers do not work for FAANG, or anything close to it.
And you're cutting an awfully wide swath in the opposite direction; most tech gains value by exploiting or displacing people. Economies of scale don't just exist at the absolute top of the economy. The computer cut out entire classes of people from jobs they had specialized in by decreasing the education or effort required to successfully complete tasks, at the cost of massively increased infrastructure costs.
I'm all for pushing back against what AI might do, but doing it in this massively dishonest way just opens the door to obvious counters.
Sure. I think that I’d you were expressing concerns about all the leopards running around and having discussions about whether we need to do something about the leopard population, it’s perfectly reasonable to be upset when a leopard eats your face.
It’s just that the median tech worker was more often to talk about moving fast and breaking things and making glib statements about buggy whips. If you were the sort of person to just shrug and say that a few leopards were the price of advancement then you’re probably not going to get a lot of sympathy.
It's not a matter of being "allowed" per se. What the parent is saying that people need to do a better job being internally consistent in their beliefs and moral stances. If you are one such person, great! But my impression is that most people aren't.
Economies of scale is how society lowers the cost of meeting the demand for things people want. Uber, Airbnb, and Meta have negative externalities that have gone “unpriced” in the market because our policy makers are incompetent. But at large, they’ve net benefitted society, many more times over than they’ve hurt anyone whose job was displaced from the cycle of innovation and those individuals have found new jobs, or adapted to compete (taxis making a comeback, except they’re not fucking scumbags anymore because they don’t have a monopoly).
If you believe technology and innovation is characterized as “using economies of scale to exploit the average person” you’d necessarily come to some pretty weird positions throughout history.
Take the natural ice trade for example. Were refrigerators an evil means of exploiting and displacing the 100,000 workers who powered the natural ice trade? Or was it a better solution to the public health hazards, brutal dangerous working conditions, and high price paid by society to the Ice Monopoly?
Partially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. Ditto the overlapping issue of global intellectual property appropriation. (Much of what LLMs do is refactor what people posted on the web for free.)
> Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
Let's not rewrite history, ok? VCs funded and killed professions, and now it's our head on the chopping block. You can always argue that "I just followed orders", and it would be true, but let's not create an impression that everyone working in tech is force of evil working against common people.
Who's "they", the vast majority devs work for non tech companies doing very boring shit. We're not all hellbent on making the most $$$ while burning the world down like the silicon valley degenerates
The boring shit is still about eliminating labor that would have had to be done without computers. Automation is a core value of computing, back to automated switchboards and census tabulation.
I'm specifically saying "I'm entitled to displace people with automation built on previous work, but automation that affects me shouldn't be allowed" is a particularly hypocritical take.
The implications of AI aren't as novel as tech circles would like to believe. The same trends in employment and automation have been happening across industries for decades in slightly different forms. This is just the first time it might actually affect the people doing the work, instead of being conveniently separated from their inner circle.
> Suggesting that nobody is entitled to opinions on one category sounds kinda silly.
How else would they feel morally superior to degenerate techies who finally got what they deserve? Didn't you get the memo? It's all Joe the Java developer who's the impetus of injustice in the world.
People are never ever ever allowed to realize maybe sometimes bad things are bad once the chickens come home to roost. An antisocial belief they held fifteen years ago needs to define them forever, because people are just machines for receiving guilt and wrath, they can’t learn anything from suffering personally, or if they can here’s why it’s bad anyway.
Also engineers building stuff to spec are exactly the same thing as venture capitalists
To be fair, it doesn't sound like anyone is literally judging this person for his moral stance -- it sounds like he is judging others for not sharing his morals. They're not making him an outcast; he is literally casting others out of his life because they don't meet his purity standards.
I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream society in the next decade or so, find each other, and found human-first communities where shared human norms dominate. If AI companies wanted to get ahead of the bad press? They'd help found some of these communities. No strings attached.
Well, but the data centers needed for AI are on a much different scale than what "big tech profitmaxxing" used to need. I also agree with the author and you. Morally, I also cannot support the toll it takes on the environment, workers, and society in general. However, what's the option? Either be part of it or get laid off. Build an AI startup or be employeed in one and get that money or well I really cannot imagine a third path that's both financially viable and keeps you relevant in the next decade.
That the frontier models and subs are all big tech is probably what bothers me most about “AI” right now, but I’m bullish on advancements in the capabilities of local models. I suspect and hope that, in time, the field will level and we will have very capable local, offline models and the landscape will be much as it is now with subscription compute in the cloud for enterprise and self host / local first for indies / hackers etc.
> it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance
If you don't think your moral stance is the correct one - then why aren't you changing your moral stance? Why do you have one at all?
It's ok to have strong opinions on morality, and it's cool to live by them, and good to talk about them. I don't happen to completely agree with the author, but I can respect a belief in one's own considered opinion, and the right to express it. No one is being harmed by the author's article.
For example, I have a "strong" moral opinion, which makes many people angry to hear: I don't vote for politicians who arm and enable genocide.
In America, that makes me weird, or worse. I still believe I'm right, and I still talk about it. I firmly believe that cutting out anyone who collaborates on genocide and vetoes ceasefires is the only morally correct move, and happy to talk about why I think that's not just justified and rational but also simply your bare minimum duty as a human being.
That doesn't mean I can't acknowledge that other people feel differently, or that I can't understand where they're coming from with some level of empathy. But it also doesn't mean I have to hang around them. I generally choose not to - genocide enablers squick me out.
The author even explicitly acknowledged that other people have different moral views:
> I will not change my morals or ethics to suit someone else, nor do I expect other people to change theirs.
Along with self awareness and reasonable doubt:
> Does that make me unreasonable? Maybe?
On top of which, the whole diatribe is presented as a "random musing", rather than a demand for you to think differently.
Is this a case of people saying one thing and doing another?? Everyone's experience is different, but to me it seems most people love AI?! I see reports in the news about people not being able to do anything anymore without asking AI first, people dating AI boy/girlfriends, students using AI to do homework, teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students, people writing emails via AI, improving their own writing with AI... and so many more! I personally use it a lot for coding (though I still try to do some manual work so I don't just forget everything), translations, quick queries about things, in the computer (specially CLI commands, AI is just incredibly good at it - no matter the CLI, seemingly) and in the physical world (e.g. what's the name of that thing you turn on a tap to open it - English is not my first language), it even helped me a lot figure out legislation in two different countries, where finding and understanding the law was next to impossible by myself (and it gave me links to everything so I could check by myself).
If you and 5 others go to McDonald's for 3 meals a day, it will always appear busy to you even if it had no traffic outside those moments you were there with the 5 others. Similarly the news can report on outliers using AI while most people you know IRL may not use it. In other words, it is accurate, the groups are not the same, and statistics often don't feel like they reflect reality.
Humans are complex. I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume there are a lot of people who both rely on and don't like the idea of AI. People can need a car to get around and also be worried about the effects of car emissions. People can dislike cigarettes and be smokers.
Most people I've spoken to in private hate AI in tech too, they just keep quiet out of fear for their job (voice any objection to AI? next on the chopping block), so you only hear the pro AI voices.
I don't work in tech (school teacher), so the main way I interact with tech people is online.
IME, everyone I meet offline has some low-level caution about AI taking their job, but uses AI and is amazed by their capabilities and is glad for this tool.
Most ppl I meet online are strong anti-AI advocates.
This article is representative of what's wrong in internet culture. It's fine to take a moral stance, but it's not reasonable to expect others to agree with and align with your personal morals.
I've been vegetarian for over 30 years, on moral (environmental) grounds. It does put me in the minority. But I don't expect others to change their behavior.
If you want to avoid AI, avoid AI. If you feel strongly enough that you want to avoid entire companies or corners of the internet, great. These are just the side effects of having a strong opinion.
I think many of us actually have a moral stance on AI, it's just that it's somewhat similar to our moral stance on cars, power tools, heavy machinery, the loom, etc.
The post links to a pretty silly article with checkboxes about "accepting" certain "facts" about AI, which the author says they resonated with:
> I accept the models were trained on stolen data.
"Stolen" is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.
> I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers.
Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming.
> I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models.
No, they are totally overblown, and if you actually cared about any of these environmental issues, you would realize that data centers are not even in the top 100 things to be concerned about: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
> I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company.
No, I am outsourcing boring grunt work and using my skills in more meaningful and exciting ways.
> I accept these companies don’t have a viable business model.
Yes, I accept that, and if they fail I'll use another company's models. This technology isn't going away - why as a consumer do you care if one of the providers goes out of business?
> I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the world.
I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 20-30 years ago.
> I accept that I am granting more power to the United States.
I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 80 years ago.
> I accept that all this effort could have been spent elsewhere.
It's not clear to me yet that the effort was poorly spent - who knows where AI will go, and what great things might potentially come from it?
This is like a vegan refusing to be around, let alone eat with, meateaters.
As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others. Yes, it sucks. Yes, your impact will be smaller. But it’s a lot easier to maintain than to break off contact with a friend who dares ask ChatGPT a question.
> As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others.
If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult. Like imagine if someone said, i believe murder is wrong but i dont want to force that on others. Or, i dont really like slavery but that's just me and others should be slave owners if they feel that is right.
Obviously there is a spectrum of moral ills, and not all are created equal, but if you truly believe something is abhorent, you can't be a good person and tolerate it in others
There is no such thing as good person or evil person anywhere else other than in human society.
It’s just a brain fart to make you cooperate and evolutionary survive. You don’t need to listen to this primitive instinct. You can just choose consciously what you think is the best.
Do not share or propagate or promote this view however. Our society only works thanks to most people being slaves to these tremors.
Sometimes I get an impression that it isn’t even a freedom of choice, some must perceive themselves as "good people" as a highest imperative. Whatever that means for current century.
This is becoming a mainstream position for a number of reasons but I think the unifying concern across many demographics is the concern about the effects on power it will have. Nobody wants an omnipresent big brother in anybody's hands, and people are waking up to the fact that the infrastructure is already there without any real safeguards, all that's really needed is cheap intelligence to handle all the data.
I'd say this is a huge reason to actually push for more AI, especially open models. I agree that there are serious environmental, etc concerns BUT there will be an even larger problem in the future when this tech becomes incorporated into pretty much everything if there are only a couple providers with a -poly on the really good models. This thing is here to stay and will only get qualitatively better, and the way to prevent/offset the "omnipresent big brother" is to ensure that everyone has reasonable access to models with decent capability and know how to properly evaluate and use them.
I don't know if more models will offer a meaningful counter to those in power, who will have not only more resources, but also the military, law enforcement and effectively the law itself.
Probably the most we can hope to do at this point is to dismantle the surveillance architecture. "Starve the beast" so to speak.
There's nothing wrong with having a moral stance on something. It only becomes a problem when the stance is disproportionate and detached from empirical reality.
Its always detached at some level. Morality always comes down to a choice of what you think is wrong vs right. You can't reason from the way the world is to the way the world ought to be, without picking some values.
What most AI companies won't tell you is that creating a massive amount of new code will result in an overwhelming amount of technical debt for companies worldwide, sooner or later. Many organisations now believe that they can develop their own apps form scratch using AI, but if they don't pay for tokens capable of handling their ever-growing infrastructure code, their infrastructure will rot. The tendency to reinvent the wheel has always been a problem in the software industry, and AI will only accelerate this trend.
Nevertheless, I'm optimistic that an LLM will be developed sooner or later that is fully aware of the open-source ecosystem and can create software in the correct way: This would involve using pre-existing code and reviewed modules that are plugged together and optimised to create as little new code as possible while reusing as much open-source code as possible.
Why should I feel bad for using AI when the people telling me not to use it all use phones and computers which are the result of exploitation somewhere in Africa to mine for the resources needed to make them.
Congratulations, you just discovered moral relativism why even bother if __bad thing__ exists? Why shouldn’t I sell opiates when doctors can prescribe oxycontin and fentanyl? Throwawaytwice won’t care about hurting me and mine with their choices, why not preemptively strike throwawaytwice? Where’s the bottom?
Probably should feel as bad about it as you do for owning and using your phone. The world is unfair and will stay that way, but now with AI it'll probably just get worse. And if you only look out for yourself - fine, that might work, but all of it has consequences. If you use AI for coding you will most certainly have noticed already that your actual skills might have declined - at least that's the observation I made personally and from talking to fellow engineers.
It seems unlikely at this point, given the real or perceived utility of using modern AI models, that people are going to stop using the technology. Also, given the huge amount of capital that's gone into the industry at this point, it would likely have a pretty negative effect on the global economy if they did. If you feel like it's causing a lot of harm and you're more passionately morally opposed to it than most, perhaps the thing to do is to focus on devising methods to lessen the harm. I think that would be very valuable to society.
I think the issue with these kind of stances is that they are basically status quo bias; why don't you object to the computer itself, and thus refuse to write programs? After all: they were invented by the UK military in the pursuit of military goals (and much of their subsequent development was funded by the US military - see https://types.pl/@graydon/110648447694201698 - and the fact that ARPAnet, GPS, etc were all military creations). Computer systems are mostly used by large corporations and the military to achieve their goals more effectively.
Usually the objection is that "oh well, the computer can be used for many great things", which isn't particularly satisfying because, um, we can use AI for "good" (better?) things as well (e.g. trying to find novel cures, unlocking the mysteries of protein folding, etc etc).
Then the objection becomes something like "well the computer is here and we have to live with it", which is also now true of AI. Do I like the "it's inevitable" argument; no, but it's clearly very true that we do have the transformer, that won't go away - where we DO have control (or should seek to change) is the organisational structures that we as a society decide to create, and how we safeguard the dignity of the individual in changing times.
Being able to discern what is and isn't in our control helps tremendously in doing what is right and constructive.
The fact that some people opt out of engaging with AI, I think is healthy for society as a whole. If that's within their control and they exercise their control to do what they think is right, then I commend them.
That said, I do think there is a greater natural force at play, something involving entropy and increasing complexity and energy profit maximization. It seems to cut through all levels of abstraction from organic chemistry to civilizations and probably beyond. I assume this is outside of humanity's control, and therefore outside of any individuals control.
So what is inside our control? Our own perceptions and actions.
My perception is that the advance of computation and by extension proliferation of probabilistic programs (AI) is inevitable. It's on a continuum that is a force of nature.
What I might have some control over is choosing to harness that potential to increase future prosperity for more people and the greater environment, and to avoid contributing to outcomes that harm people and the environment.
Lots of bad things are happening and will happen that are outside my control.
I do genuinely believe that the capabilities are inherently neutral. Civilization can choose to harness them in a variety of ways, for a variety of purposes.
If the majority of people choose options that are game theory win-win, then the future will be better... If the majority of people choose win-lose, then the future will probably be worse.
> [...] People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.
I believe people do understand the toll caring about something deeply takes -- but caring about all these things at once, many which you personally can't control, feels more like atlas syndrome or compassion fatigue by the author.
I also find the author a bit all-or-nothing in general. Losing friends because they use AI? Why does the dichotomy have to be so black and white? Can people have moral quandaries about AI while still using it, or does the moral stance always have to be absolute?
Eh, I get the author's point, but I also feel like it's very much community dependent. Some places accept AI sure, but there's also a lot of sites that have a zero tolerance attitude towards it as well.
If you talk about using AI on Twitter, Threads, Mastodon or Bluesky, you will often get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using AI on many subreddits or Discord servers you will get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using it on many forums (especially software engineering and modding ones), you will start a flame war at best.
Even sites which would logically be more corporate friendly (like say, LinkedIn) have a lot of people who hate AI and all those that use it.
So I'm not sure that disliking AI necessarily makes you an outcast here. Yeah, you're not going to get along with its advocates, and there are quite a few companies and organisations that support it.
But there are also a lot of places that despise it's very existence, and where being a critic of AI is the normal, 'mainstream' view.
The issue is that all the big tech leaders have been making claims early on that (IMHO) are completely unfounded in any sort of data or reality. Claims like AI is going to replace all software engineers or AI is going to eliminate all white collar jobs, or everyone should be "token maxxing" etc. All this rhetoric does capture headlines but is provably false (see the latest retractions and backpedaling).
What this sort of rhetoric does it sows fear, uncertainty and doubt in the average person that may or may not really understand the technology and so the general consensus is that AI = bad.
Like all things the truth is somewhere in the middle and it takes work to find it and the headline grabbing rhetoric is unhelpful at best and harmful at worst.
There are clearly coherent "moral" arguments to be made against mainsteam AI, in areas such as resource consumption, capitalist power, and so on. Some are correct; others, while in my opinion unpersuasive, are at least coherent.
But the article places more stress on arguments of the sort "It's evil to use AI because it doesn't work very well", and those don't seem very logical to me. Oh, SOME arguments of that kind make sense, e.g. in the area of autonomous weapons, but the author didn't focus on extreme cases such as those.
I mean if you had the same reaction when personal computers were made, you would also be an outcast. They also put whole industries out of business and caused huge pollution and etc. There is no real difference. But you have a right to withdraw from the world and be a luddite.
Its funny that the article uses Wikipedia as an example, given it is a tool that always needs a caveat: "anyone can edit it, always use the source, never trust it directly."
There are many instances where I have seen Wikipedia have bias, or be misinformation.
AI just needs the caveat that it is not really intelligent, but a very good predictive text machine, which you should always ask to provide citations.
Kinda weird that the authors response to a 'friend' using Siri to query how long a medication lasts was not wanting to hang with them anymore rather than educating them on how AI can hallucinate information.
Having a moral stance is good, but isolating yourself rather than fighting for it and then complaining about being an outcast is utterly puzzling.
This is going to be an unpopular reply I imagine but this person is not well and their behavior should not be imitated. This is a classic example of omnicause anxiety, like people who refuse to have children because of all these things happening in the world as if the world hasn't always been a mess. Frankly, ridiculous.
It's part of this nihilistic undercurrent, especially among Millennials and younger generations. "I'm not having kids, have you seen the world?" "I'm not saving for retirement, Social Security won't exist and the oceans will swallow the continent by the time I reach retirement age." "I refuse to use AI tools that could help me create new things and reach my goals, because the influencers told me AI is going to poison the water". Quite sad actually.
What's wrong about a beautiful banner done beautifully with AI? What's wrong with a new app done in 5 mins by a coding agent? What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter?
A couple of days ago I started having watery eyes and suddenly 'pink eye' was a term in DeepSeek with all the answers, viral, bacterial and fungal which I didn't know. According to symptoms it was a bacterial type so Tobramycin was the answer, the dose, the care. Two days later and cured even though I have to continue treatment for at least six days as directed by AI. It's not a miracle, just science at your fingertips, human knowledge put to good and bad use, pick your side.
Your eyes were irritated and you took an antibacterial eyedrop which is basically the only product on the market for such a condition… I’m really not sure Google would’ve failed you 10 years ago or even just asking your pharmacist 20 years ago
First ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment"
GUYS
PLEASE
The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing?
There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it
Parts of it (e.g. water consumption per query) are overblown.
But the degree of data center buildout and resource use, if exponential growth just continues a little longer, is going to end up being a big number. AI datacenters are already stretching electrical power grids and increasing peaker power plant use.
Data centers right now are about 5% of electricity use in the US. AI could easily double that share.
I was thinking about this the other day. Surely, a datacenter, even one optimized for machine learning workloads could switch gears and do other kinds of computations.
Even if the bubble were to pop, i feel like the worst that could happen is that we would have a bunch of inactive datacenters that could be switched on to meet demands of the growing internet. Kind of like how nuclear plants operate.
Well, stuff tends not to get completely wasted, but:
- AI datacenters are gold-rush rush jobs with interesting things like their own gas turbine generators etc.
- It's not clear that serving the internet needs us to double the amount of datacenter footprint. If anything, a lot of workloads are getting more power and space efficient.
- Most expensive thing is that we're filling them full of GPUs and with RAM tied up to the GPUs. That's infrastructure that we've paid the resource costs for and it's difficult to repurpose to something else.
I do think AI is going to grow a lot, so I'm not sure how much of the buildout will need repurposing. But I do think doubling our datacenter footprint and doing it in environmentally yucky ways will probably have some lasting effects and consume a lot of resources.
These are more like HPC supercomputers than garden variety datacenters. That's why there's so much concern re: water use for the electricity being supplied. (That's easy to address in principle, of course: wind and solar power use up negligible amounts of water compared to other sources.)
Most of the water concern is evaporative cooling of the datacenter itself. But IMO not too much of a concern. The energy use and the resource use to make the chips, etc, is bigger.
There was a chart on Twitter comparing the water usage of AI datacenters to that of the California almond farms and the golf courses all over the country. AI’s water usage is tiny compared to those.
Care to elaborate? Just taking the impact of data centers on locals is enough to validate his point. (Noise pollution, heat pollution and emissions from on-site gas turbines)
Yeah, it's weird, nobody's saying "we should make all the data centres use closed loop cooling even if it's more expensive for them!", but a lot of voices are yelling "AI uses water!", referring to the same thing.
I mean, email and Hacker News and Netflix use water, too.
Something that I've started looking into and I think could become an interesting metric is resource usage comparison of # of average-request prompts against minutes of audio/video streaming. Then we can start to say things like "you know, watching a 10-minute YouTube video uses roughly the same amount of resources as 60 prompts" and hopefully have a more down-to-earth conversation surrounding our ecological impact and how we assign value.
> the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths
The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state. Sure, it’s noisier and increasingly full of AI-generated slop, but are we already at the “everything was better in the old days” stage?
As for the destruction of career paths, technological change has been doing that for centuries. Digitization alone transformed or eliminated countless professions. I’d be curious what the authors’ moral stance is on those disruptions. Is the concern specifically about AI, or about technological progress more generally?
I put this blog under the old grumpy man file for now.
I mean it's almost like having a moral stance on the assembly line, or calculators. If they truly do provide massive technological benefits, and it turns out the externalities aren't as bad as some are projecting, it's hard to argue AI is not another extremely useful tool in your tool belt.
Now, if AI leads to global ruin/... obviously some people will be able to say "See! I knew this would happen!", but again, at this point it feels AI is no worse morally than the existing allocation of upside/downside that big-techgopolies have had for at least the last decade.
Calculators give you the right answer. AI gives you any answer. I work within a bureaucracy and instead of optimising processes and getting rid of useless documents, AI is being used to generate more useless text. It is the industrialisation of bureaucracy and it is a turbo powered waste of resources.
> don't want to hang out with him any more because he'll have his phone with him and it's automatic for him now.
This post sounds like selfishness/self-preservation masquerading as concern for humanity and the environment. You can be anti-AI all you want. You're wasting your breath and energy.
I don't know if the quality of my life has gone up because I have these tools that help me build things in exchange for less job prospects.
All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same.
Call me bitter. These are the same people who have been decrying and arguing with me that AI would never get where it is now. Stop your kicking and screaming already. It's not helping anyone.
> All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same.
That's how Russia got into current situation, btw.
I have had a little success by arguing that "we can live without AI, but we can't live without X" and then I've managed to get some priorities in order. The AI craze is insane and it does have some support inside IT but it's the pressure from outside that's hard to resist.
Holy cow this is whiny
And essentially saying no one else has morals… yikes.
Other people do understand AI sucks and are even anti ai while still using it… personally I have been anti tech forever (When it comes to privacy, bot misinformation, psychological health, all of it) but yeah dude I still use it and have a job in it bc it’s paying bills and it supports our family and there are some good things about it it’s not all bad.
In terms of actually trying to create a revolution in tech (unionizing, making change, ending it, whatever you think) I would love to see the bad things go but I don’t see it being possible. It’s like saying: I don’t like cars (and I’m better than everyone else bc I walk) bc cars are bad for the environment and people die STOP DRIVING CARS… there’s absolutely no way people are going to stop driving cars.
It’s the best scenario for AI to be like these robots from Star Wars forever. Silly, barely competent, comic relief. So, so much better than any doomer-philosopher blogpost.
LLM will always be clumsy, endearing, silicone regard unable to function without commands. I only worry about the jepa
It is fun watching the thieves squirm in this thread and being upset at others calling them criminals. "But think of the loom," they say. The loom wasn't stolen by a replicator.
One challenging thing about talking against AI is that it's both a centralizing thing, in that everything is supposedly to use AI as glue and linking center, and decentralizing, in that we can see all the leaf nodes become unreliable, then the outer nodes, because people just 'ask AI'. It's a dystopian idea that we should be making the computer itself the process, as opposed to just using the computer to help ourselves make the process.
the argument reminds me of the uncanny sense of being managed. i think there was a belief that having the skills that AI synthesizes was some kind of intellectual equity, when this was more of a convention and a promise than any kind of social contract that preserves the value and meaning of ones past contributions.
imo we've been living out a decade or more of the Doorman Fallacy ( https://www.jaakkoj.com/concepts/doorman-fallacy ) where people are just liquid labour with some minimum constraints to distinguish them from chattel, where the ironic effect is everyone gets treated like they are chattel but for these minimum requirements. Maybe this will move the concerns and opinions class to act to conserve some of our cultural capital base?
mostly i am not sympathetic to the author because we are not of the same tribe, but the essential argument that there's something to conserve that we arent with AI is a worthy concern. we should look less at problems and solutions and more upstream of what we want to preserve and still grow.
I don't feel like an outcast when I'm outside of the bubble of this community and outside of an environment like a workplace where people have to demonstrate enthusiasm for AI because they fear getting penalized for not using it.
That doesn't mean everyone shares my views outside of those contexts, I just don't feel any more an outcast than for having my own view on other issues.
> *112. Having considered the issues of responsibility and governance of AI, we must now return to our central question: what does it mean to safeguard our humanity? The risk extends beyond the misuse of certain technologies. More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm in which we are immersed, and that is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.*
I do judge people for using AI. Especially engineers.
Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.
We've been through this exact same thing with crypto and particularly NFTs. Remember those? Oh sure, a shortened URL on a blockchain is worth millions. Remember that? This quote on cognitive bias is often brought out:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
So, just like with crypto, there are people inside the bubble who simply believe they're going to get rich off of whatever is happening. So instead of seeing the flaws or the exploitation, they see a system where ultimately they will benefit from it. In crypto, you saw people who missed out on Bitcoin so kept looking for the next Bitcoin in everything that came after. That's why rug pulls worked.
AI is just accelerating a trend where a few thousand people are increasingly owning everything. Automation (including AI) will just be used to further concentrate wealth. We will be minting trillionaires when the majority of the world can barely afford to live.
But there are people inside the bubble who don't see that or don't care because they think they will get rich so none of that will affect them. It's not even that intentional. A lot of people see poverty as a personal moral failure. So it's just that they view themselves as not having that moral failure.
A more realistic view is that not everyone can be Jeff Bezos. You're more likely to win the lottery than you are to end up a billionaire. Also, you're one bad day away from being unable to work. Medical event, accident, whatever. This is why we look after the most vulnerable in society because you could be one of them one day.
Exactly. Each time you criticize the techno-fascist system that props up AI here, people downvote blindly without even trying to understand why authoritarian regimes love surveillance technologies like AI allows
A principal dogma on orange reddit is the neutrality of technology. Most people here are opposed to the nigh inevitable incipient use of AI in mass surveillance but don't think that that has any relationship to their use of AI (for example) as "Google that actually works." Whether they are right, I am not sure.
Not my experience. Maybe it's your presentation that earns downvotes, not your message.
You can be a very principled person resisting and spotlighting norms you strongly disagree with, but how you do it tends to matter a lot. It makes the difference between people opening an ear to listen to you and reflexively pushing you away as an annoyance.
>Each time you criticize the techno-fascist system that props up AI here
Every time I criticize the Vikings on The Ultimate Vikings Enthusiast-and-Reenactment Society web forums, they downvote me too. It's ridiculous. Don't they have any integrity? Do they not believe in freedom of speech? One guy even started to rant about how the subforum's topic was specifically about a torment where the vikings would cut out of a man's tongue with a red hot knife... what does that have to do with my first amendment rights? just unbelievable.
It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech.
I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe.
According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month. The article seems a bit hyperbolic. There are certainly concerns around the nature of work and the economy, though. There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.
> you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech.
I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now.
Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying to stand up for your right to a safe public space brands you as evil.
There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.
> Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob.
Are you having these conversations in person? Or are these conversations happening on Twitter/Reddit/HN/whatever?
In my experience, online forums don't really work for political discussion for a bunch of reasons.
If you change to getting your fix of politics from long-form articles and radio-style scripted podcasts by professional journalists, you'll probably find there's a lot more room for nuance.
> Are you having these conversations in person?
I can't speak for the other poster but I've had the experience they described in-person, when I was living in Victoria
I rented an apartment downtown Victoria and had pretty frequent run-ins with addicts on the streets. My friends who lived and worked further out away from the downtown core had very strong opinions about it any time I had anything negative to say about the experiences
>Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example.
This is such a wild thing to bring up unprompted.
Thanks to people being glued to social media & other rage bait machines on their phones.
Last year Wikipedia reported an 8% drop in humans traffic[1]. That's huge.
[1] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...
Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.
If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?
> We can have actual conversations with our computers,
Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them.
It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.
I think it's not so much the technical scope that makes it "not the AI you read of as a child" but the societal impact. AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails. Cue the quote about AI supposedly about taking over the boring tasks so we can spend more time making art, achieving self-actualization.
The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages.
And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!
Is it not? You can talk to it in plain English and it can do things for you and respond back in a synthesized voice. I was reading an old Asimov short story about a guy who comes across a lost robot and has to trick it into staying put, and it felt weirdly prescient. (The story is “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”)
It's not really "intelligence"
It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.
When I was a kid, “AI” was quake 2 bots, starcraft pathfinding algorithms, and chessbot personalities.
I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.
IQ tests are restandardised from time to time. We could take the scores from 100 years ago and see that everybody would be gifted.
Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.
[0] JR Flynn: The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978.
[1] Legg, S., Hutter, M.: A collection of definitions of intelligence
[2] François Chollet, On the Measure of Intelligence
Branding. LLM’s (as a term!) are too specific for the ‘conquer the world’ narratives the VCs want to justify the high valuations. Machine Learning sounds too technical.
AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him.
FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?
I really like the idea of AI being the brand of whatever we are hyping so much that will inevitably fail spectacularly and turn the entire society against it for a couple of decades.
The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working towards.
What do you mean? It's exactly what every child has read in the past 80 years: you can talk to the computer and it does intellectual work like math or coding or writing stories.
Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.
Maybe we need some kind of worldwide negative event first. In Star Trek lore, World War 3 starts this year (2026). Like with World War 2, perhaps it’s needed to calibrate the zeitgeist to a spot where a prosperous era can follow /shrug
An optimist can hope AI and robotics brings us into a post-scarcity world and that society responds with utopia rather than just disposing of the 99% of people who become economically irrelevant. History has a pessimistic vibe though.
History has the most optimistic vibe imaginable, what are you talking about?? Look at where we are as a species right now, vs century ago, a millennium ago, ten thousand years ago!
What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?
Nuance was banned from the internet circa 1996, sorry
>I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago...
I have been too, but LLMs aint it, just like mobile phones is not subspace communicator...
The nuanced takes of tech haven't been welcome for other tech as well.
> The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe.
This is actually a big part of why being pro-AI is met with negativity today.
As someone who's using and building with AI and also experiences the "anti" movement, you've chosen a pretty condescending minority of the reasons why they dislike AI and painted it as the default.
"They never liked AI because they don't like the idea maybe they're not such special snowflakes in the universe"... really?
They didn't "always hate AI". Most people didn't even think of AI outside of niche things like self-driving. Instead their hatred is from LLMs and generative AI which (as far as they're concerned) didn't exist until November 30, 2022.
Actual reasons they readily share for not liking it are things like:
- it was built by abusing copyright (true with nuance)
- it's used to generate massive amounts of low value content that's overwhelming their spaces (very true)
- it's having an environmental impact (true with more nuance)
- it's making the things they want to buy more expensive (true, even things unrelated to AI)
- the loudest voices in the room have spent years telling them this could destroy humanity and/or take all their jobs (completely true)
- it's behind major layoffs (true with nuance around stated reasons vs actual)
- people who are pro-AI have a strong tendency to minimize their reasons for hating it (... obviously true)
I mean even if you like AI, it's clear we're at a place with so many reasons for people to be anti-AI that it's honestly an own goal at this point.
People didn't have opinions about generative AI as it exists today 20 years ago. The idea of a computer being able to turn any topic into a haiku would have been contentious for if it was possible, not if it was good: that sounds great!
But now we got it and it came with way more baggage than any of them ever imagined. They didn't think it'd learn to write haikus by ripping through every written word. And they didn't think it'd be used to write lots of spam instead of haikus once it could. And they didn't think the same capability would generalize to typing in an artist's name and spitting out infinitely remixed copies of their work.
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I think moving forward in a less negative direction starts with being real about why people hate AI, and it's a lot less "it makes me feel less special" than it is "it's actively reducing my quality of life" for people outside of the bubble.
I wasn't trying to be condescending. I was stating my experience talking to people 10-20 years ago, before AI was thought about at all by people outside of tech. It always boiled down to a dualist vs monist ontology argument. I agree there are valid reasons to dislike current generative AI tech though. I agree with a lot of this.
I should say I do think that deeper ontological thing is why people tend to think the tech will always be a novelty or will stagnate soon, etc.
I appreciate this nuanced take. You've been added to my filter of people who have an opinion that bubbles to the top.
I wish the Dems could have this conversation about their policies and messaging!
Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn't care when you could get ahead, don't pretend like you care now. It's childishly performative. This is an evolution of the same automation and communication tech that has been growing for as long as most people have been alive. Just now it might actually affect the technologically literate class. You did this. Own it.
> It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
That's an awfully wide swath you are cutting there. I can't think of a single tech person that I've worked closely with in the last 20 years that I would describe as "riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale". The majority of tech workers do not work for FAANG, or anything close to it.
And you're cutting an awfully wide swath in the opposite direction; most tech gains value by exploiting or displacing people. Economies of scale don't just exist at the absolute top of the economy. The computer cut out entire classes of people from jobs they had specialized in by decreasing the education or effort required to successfully complete tasks, at the cost of massively increased infrastructure costs.
I'm all for pushing back against what AI might do, but doing it in this massively dishonest way just opens the door to obvious counters.
Name any tech job and I will tell you how it exploits the average people through economies of scale
Some of us have loathed Uber, Airbnb & Meta. Are we allowed to be negative about AI?
Sure. I think that I’d you were expressing concerns about all the leopards running around and having discussions about whether we need to do something about the leopard population, it’s perfectly reasonable to be upset when a leopard eats your face.
It’s just that the median tech worker was more often to talk about moving fast and breaking things and making glib statements about buggy whips. If you were the sort of person to just shrug and say that a few leopards were the price of advancement then you’re probably not going to get a lot of sympathy.
It's not a matter of being "allowed" per se. What the parent is saying that people need to do a better job being internally consistent in their beliefs and moral stances. If you are one such person, great! But my impression is that most people aren't.
Economies of scale is how society lowers the cost of meeting the demand for things people want. Uber, Airbnb, and Meta have negative externalities that have gone “unpriced” in the market because our policy makers are incompetent. But at large, they’ve net benefitted society, many more times over than they’ve hurt anyone whose job was displaced from the cycle of innovation and those individuals have found new jobs, or adapted to compete (taxis making a comeback, except they’re not fucking scumbags anymore because they don’t have a monopoly).
If you believe technology and innovation is characterized as “using economies of scale to exploit the average person” you’d necessarily come to some pretty weird positions throughout history.
Take the natural ice trade for example. Were refrigerators an evil means of exploiting and displacing the 100,000 workers who powered the natural ice trade? Or was it a better solution to the public health hazards, brutal dangerous working conditions, and high price paid by society to the Ice Monopoly?
Partially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. Ditto the overlapping issue of global intellectual property appropriation. (Much of what LLMs do is refactor what people posted on the web for free.)
It is the exact same capital that paid all of our salaries for the last 20 years
It's weird for physicists to complain about nuclear weapons. They did it. Own it.
Just because you don't have the integrity it takes, doesn't mean others are more cool than you, in that regard.
Wanker
Most people don't work for Uber, Meta or AirBnB and these companies have been criticized forever in tech forums.
This time the "innovation" is also based on actual theft.
> Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
Let's not rewrite history, ok? VCs funded and killed professions, and now it's our head on the chopping block. You can always argue that "I just followed orders", and it would be true, but let's not create an impression that everyone working in tech is force of evil working against common people.
This is like saying cancer is perfectly normal.
Is cancer not normal?
40-45% of people will get cancer in their lives.
It's estimated that 25-30% of people, globally, enjoy hip-hop.
Cancer is 50% more common than hip-hop.
Is hip-hop normal?
Who's "they", the vast majority devs work for non tech companies doing very boring shit. We're not all hellbent on making the most $$$ while burning the world down like the silicon valley degenerates
The boring shit is still about eliminating labor that would have had to be done without computers. Automation is a core value of computing, back to automated switchboards and census tabulation.
There are about ten billion relevant and reasonable ways to differentiate and choose priorities in all of that.
Suggesting that nobody is entitled to opinions on one category sounds kinda silly.
I'm specifically saying "I'm entitled to displace people with automation built on previous work, but automation that affects me shouldn't be allowed" is a particularly hypocritical take.
The implications of AI aren't as novel as tech circles would like to believe. The same trends in employment and automation have been happening across industries for decades in slightly different forms. This is just the first time it might actually affect the people doing the work, instead of being conveniently separated from their inner circle.
> Suggesting that nobody is entitled to opinions on one category sounds kinda silly.
How else would they feel morally superior to degenerate techies who finally got what they deserve? Didn't you get the memo? It's all Joe the Java developer who's the impetus of injustice in the world.
People are never ever ever allowed to realize maybe sometimes bad things are bad once the chickens come home to roost. An antisocial belief they held fifteen years ago needs to define them forever, because people are just machines for receiving guilt and wrath, they can’t learn anything from suffering personally, or if they can here’s why it’s bad anyway.
Also engineers building stuff to spec are exactly the same thing as venture capitalists
To be fair, it doesn't sound like anyone is literally judging this person for his moral stance -- it sounds like he is judging others for not sharing his morals. They're not making him an outcast; he is literally casting others out of his life because they don't meet his purity standards.
I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream society in the next decade or so, find each other, and found human-first communities where shared human norms dominate. If AI companies wanted to get ahead of the bad press? They'd help found some of these communities. No strings attached.
This post, like many others, confuses AI with Big Tech (or maybe that's intentional).
I can wholehartedly agree with everything said there, if I mentally replace "AI" with "big tech profitmaxxing using this new tech".
I however, don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: https://blog.senko.net/how-i-want-to-use-ai
Well, but the data centers needed for AI are on a much different scale than what "big tech profitmaxxing" used to need. I also agree with the author and you. Morally, I also cannot support the toll it takes on the environment, workers, and society in general. However, what's the option? Either be part of it or get laid off. Build an AI startup or be employeed in one and get that money or well I really cannot imagine a third path that's both financially viable and keeps you relevant in the next decade.
That the frontier models and subs are all big tech is probably what bothers me most about “AI” right now, but I’m bullish on advancements in the capabilities of local models. I suspect and hope that, in time, the field will level and we will have very capable local, offline models and the landscape will be much as it is now with subscription compute in the cloud for enterprise and self host / local first for indies / hackers etc.
I clicked on the article thinking it would be about having a moral stance, when it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance
Real “I am persecuted for my genius” energy.
> it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance
If you don't think your moral stance is the correct one - then why aren't you changing your moral stance? Why do you have one at all?
It's ok to have strong opinions on morality, and it's cool to live by them, and good to talk about them. I don't happen to completely agree with the author, but I can respect a belief in one's own considered opinion, and the right to express it. No one is being harmed by the author's article.
For example, I have a "strong" moral opinion, which makes many people angry to hear: I don't vote for politicians who arm and enable genocide.
In America, that makes me weird, or worse. I still believe I'm right, and I still talk about it. I firmly believe that cutting out anyone who collaborates on genocide and vetoes ceasefires is the only morally correct move, and happy to talk about why I think that's not just justified and rational but also simply your bare minimum duty as a human being.
That doesn't mean I can't acknowledge that other people feel differently, or that I can't understand where they're coming from with some level of empathy. But it also doesn't mean I have to hang around them. I generally choose not to - genocide enablers squick me out.
The author even explicitly acknowledged that other people have different moral views:
> I will not change my morals or ethics to suit someone else, nor do I expect other people to change theirs.
Along with self awareness and reasonable doubt:
> Does that make me unreasonable? Maybe?
On top of which, the whole diatribe is presented as a "random musing", rather than a demand for you to think differently.
And a lot of it is silly.
What, we can't use AI even to show it's silly and incomplete? How are people supposed to know the ways it's incomplete if we cannot evaluate it?
First principles?
That would be nice, but the emergent properties of LLMs defy any kind of first-principles reasoning if you ask me.
>This makes me an outcast. In tech, and out of it.
In tech, maybe. Out of tech? No way. A bunch of surveys show that people are mostly negative on AI. For example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...
Is this a case of people saying one thing and doing another?? Everyone's experience is different, but to me it seems most people love AI?! I see reports in the news about people not being able to do anything anymore without asking AI first, people dating AI boy/girlfriends, students using AI to do homework, teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students, people writing emails via AI, improving their own writing with AI... and so many more! I personally use it a lot for coding (though I still try to do some manual work so I don't just forget everything), translations, quick queries about things, in the computer (specially CLI commands, AI is just incredibly good at it - no matter the CLI, seemingly) and in the physical world (e.g. what's the name of that thing you turn on a tap to open it - English is not my first language), it even helped me a lot figure out legislation in two different countries, where finding and understanding the law was next to impossible by myself (and it gave me links to everything so I could check by myself).
Yeah this strikes me as everyone loudly complaining about how they hate McDonald’s and yet every McDonald’s has a drive thru line 24/7.
If you and 5 others go to McDonald's for 3 meals a day, it will always appear busy to you even if it had no traffic outside those moments you were there with the 5 others. Similarly the news can report on outliers using AI while most people you know IRL may not use it. In other words, it is accurate, the groups are not the same, and statistics often don't feel like they reflect reality.
Humans are complex. I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume there are a lot of people who both rely on and don't like the idea of AI. People can need a car to get around and also be worried about the effects of car emissions. People can dislike cigarettes and be smokers.
I've never seen a technology hated as much as AI currently is outside of tech. However, most people aren't moralizing about it, they just hate it.
Turns out you can have strong opinions about things without it being an issue of morality.
Most people I've spoken to in private hate AI in tech too, they just keep quiet out of fear for their job (voice any objection to AI? next on the chopping block), so you only hear the pro AI voices.
I don't work in tech (school teacher), so the main way I interact with tech people is online.
IME, everyone I meet offline has some low-level caution about AI taking their job, but uses AI and is amazed by their capabilities and is glad for this tool.
Most ppl I meet online are strong anti-AI advocates.
This article is representative of what's wrong in internet culture. It's fine to take a moral stance, but it's not reasonable to expect others to agree with and align with your personal morals.
I've been vegetarian for over 30 years, on moral (environmental) grounds. It does put me in the minority. But I don't expect others to change their behavior.
If you want to avoid AI, avoid AI. If you feel strongly enough that you want to avoid entire companies or corners of the internet, great. These are just the side effects of having a strong opinion.
I think many of us actually have a moral stance on AI, it's just that it's somewhat similar to our moral stance on cars, power tools, heavy machinery, the loom, etc.
Thank you for putting this in more generalized terms. I was just thinking replace AI with smart phone and this reads the same.
For sure, and for me that means AI tech is a great moral good like all human productivity improving technology.
Accepted answer
The post links to a pretty silly article with checkboxes about "accepting" certain "facts" about AI, which the author says they resonated with:
> I accept the models were trained on stolen data.
"Stolen" is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.
> I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers.
Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming.
> I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models.
No, they are totally overblown, and if you actually cared about any of these environmental issues, you would realize that data centers are not even in the top 100 things to be concerned about: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
> I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company.
No, I am outsourcing boring grunt work and using my skills in more meaningful and exciting ways.
> I accept these companies don’t have a viable business model.
Yes, I accept that, and if they fail I'll use another company's models. This technology isn't going away - why as a consumer do you care if one of the providers goes out of business?
> I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the world.
I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 20-30 years ago.
> I accept that I am granting more power to the United States.
I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 80 years ago.
> I accept that all this effort could have been spent elsewhere.
It's not clear to me yet that the effort was poorly spent - who knows where AI will go, and what great things might potentially come from it?
This is like a vegan refusing to be around, let alone eat with, meateaters.
As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others. Yes, it sucks. Yes, your impact will be smaller. But it’s a lot easier to maintain than to break off contact with a friend who dares ask ChatGPT a question.
> As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others.
If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult. Like imagine if someone said, i believe murder is wrong but i dont want to force that on others. Or, i dont really like slavery but that's just me and others should be slave owners if they feel that is right.
Obviously there is a spectrum of moral ills, and not all are created equal, but if you truly believe something is abhorent, you can't be a good person and tolerate it in others
There is no such thing as good person or evil person anywhere else other than in human society.
It’s just a brain fart to make you cooperate and evolutionary survive. You don’t need to listen to this primitive instinct. You can just choose consciously what you think is the best.
Do not share or propagate or promote this view however. Our society only works thanks to most people being slaves to these tremors.
Sometimes I get an impression that it isn’t even a freedom of choice, some must perceive themselves as "good people" as a highest imperative. Whatever that means for current century.
I like to view myself as grey person.
Also, anyone who is anti-AI because of environmental reasons but still eats meat is a huge hypocrite.
It's not that simple, some principles are more principled than others.
Would you be friend with Goebbels, knowing he has some different stances than you on some subjects?
This is becoming a mainstream position for a number of reasons but I think the unifying concern across many demographics is the concern about the effects on power it will have. Nobody wants an omnipresent big brother in anybody's hands, and people are waking up to the fact that the infrastructure is already there without any real safeguards, all that's really needed is cheap intelligence to handle all the data.
I'd say this is a huge reason to actually push for more AI, especially open models. I agree that there are serious environmental, etc concerns BUT there will be an even larger problem in the future when this tech becomes incorporated into pretty much everything if there are only a couple providers with a -poly on the really good models. This thing is here to stay and will only get qualitatively better, and the way to prevent/offset the "omnipresent big brother" is to ensure that everyone has reasonable access to models with decent capability and know how to properly evaluate and use them.
I don't know if more models will offer a meaningful counter to those in power, who will have not only more resources, but also the military, law enforcement and effectively the law itself.
Probably the most we can hope to do at this point is to dismantle the surveillance architecture. "Starve the beast" so to speak.
The weepiness and persecution complex is overwhelming.
Found the tech Chad. Stoic, laconic, faux masculine while always bending over to tech bosses.
And of course, ... making the OP an outcast for his opinions. Just like he said.
There's nothing wrong with having a moral stance on something. It only becomes a problem when the stance is disproportionate and detached from empirical reality.
Its always detached at some level. Morality always comes down to a choice of what you think is wrong vs right. You can't reason from the way the world is to the way the world ought to be, without picking some values.
What most AI companies won't tell you is that creating a massive amount of new code will result in an overwhelming amount of technical debt for companies worldwide, sooner or later. Many organisations now believe that they can develop their own apps form scratch using AI, but if they don't pay for tokens capable of handling their ever-growing infrastructure code, their infrastructure will rot. The tendency to reinvent the wheel has always been a problem in the software industry, and AI will only accelerate this trend.
Nevertheless, I'm optimistic that an LLM will be developed sooner or later that is fully aware of the open-source ecosystem and can create software in the correct way: This would involve using pre-existing code and reviewed modules that are plugged together and optimised to create as little new code as possible while reusing as much open-source code as possible.
Why should I feel bad for using AI when the people telling me not to use it all use phones and computers which are the result of exploitation somewhere in Africa to mine for the resources needed to make them.
Congratulations, you just discovered moral relativism why even bother if __bad thing__ exists? Why shouldn’t I sell opiates when doctors can prescribe oxycontin and fentanyl? Throwawaytwice won’t care about hurting me and mine with their choices, why not preemptively strike throwawaytwice? Where’s the bottom?
Probably should feel as bad about it as you do for owning and using your phone. The world is unfair and will stay that way, but now with AI it'll probably just get worse. And if you only look out for yourself - fine, that might work, but all of it has consequences. If you use AI for coding you will most certainly have noticed already that your actual skills might have declined - at least that's the observation I made personally and from talking to fellow engineers.
You shouldn't. You should feel bad when they'll kick you out on the street, because Claude "does better job than lower value human capital".
It started well, and then he is suddenly sick because fellow member of the drama group made a poster using AI without consulting him (her?)
Anyways, people looking for drama will find one
It seems unlikely at this point, given the real or perceived utility of using modern AI models, that people are going to stop using the technology. Also, given the huge amount of capital that's gone into the industry at this point, it would likely have a pretty negative effect on the global economy if they did. If you feel like it's causing a lot of harm and you're more passionately morally opposed to it than most, perhaps the thing to do is to focus on devising methods to lessen the harm. I think that would be very valuable to society.
I think the issue with these kind of stances is that they are basically status quo bias; why don't you object to the computer itself, and thus refuse to write programs? After all: they were invented by the UK military in the pursuit of military goals (and much of their subsequent development was funded by the US military - see https://types.pl/@graydon/110648447694201698 - and the fact that ARPAnet, GPS, etc were all military creations). Computer systems are mostly used by large corporations and the military to achieve their goals more effectively.
Usually the objection is that "oh well, the computer can be used for many great things", which isn't particularly satisfying because, um, we can use AI for "good" (better?) things as well (e.g. trying to find novel cures, unlocking the mysteries of protein folding, etc etc).
Then the objection becomes something like "well the computer is here and we have to live with it", which is also now true of AI. Do I like the "it's inevitable" argument; no, but it's clearly very true that we do have the transformer, that won't go away - where we DO have control (or should seek to change) is the organisational structures that we as a society decide to create, and how we safeguard the dignity of the individual in changing times.
Being able to discern what is and isn't in our control helps tremendously in doing what is right and constructive.
The fact that some people opt out of engaging with AI, I think is healthy for society as a whole. If that's within their control and they exercise their control to do what they think is right, then I commend them.
That said, I do think there is a greater natural force at play, something involving entropy and increasing complexity and energy profit maximization. It seems to cut through all levels of abstraction from organic chemistry to civilizations and probably beyond. I assume this is outside of humanity's control, and therefore outside of any individuals control.
So what is inside our control? Our own perceptions and actions.
My perception is that the advance of computation and by extension proliferation of probabilistic programs (AI) is inevitable. It's on a continuum that is a force of nature.
What I might have some control over is choosing to harness that potential to increase future prosperity for more people and the greater environment, and to avoid contributing to outcomes that harm people and the environment.
Lots of bad things are happening and will happen that are outside my control.
I do genuinely believe that the capabilities are inherently neutral. Civilization can choose to harness them in a variety of ways, for a variety of purposes.
If the majority of people choose options that are game theory win-win, then the future will be better... If the majority of people choose win-lose, then the future will probably be worse.
The risk isn't AI, it's how we choose to use it.
> [...] People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.
I believe people do understand the toll caring about something deeply takes -- but caring about all these things at once, many which you personally can't control, feels more like atlas syndrome or compassion fatigue by the author.
I also find the author a bit all-or-nothing in general. Losing friends because they use AI? Why does the dichotomy have to be so black and white? Can people have moral quandaries about AI while still using it, or does the moral stance always have to be absolute?
Eh, I get the author's point, but I also feel like it's very much community dependent. Some places accept AI sure, but there's also a lot of sites that have a zero tolerance attitude towards it as well.
If you talk about using AI on Twitter, Threads, Mastodon or Bluesky, you will often get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using AI on many subreddits or Discord servers you will get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using it on many forums (especially software engineering and modding ones), you will start a flame war at best.
Even sites which would logically be more corporate friendly (like say, LinkedIn) have a lot of people who hate AI and all those that use it.
So I'm not sure that disliking AI necessarily makes you an outcast here. Yeah, you're not going to get along with its advocates, and there are quite a few companies and organisations that support it.
But there are also a lot of places that despise it's very existence, and where being a critic of AI is the normal, 'mainstream' view.
The issue is that all the big tech leaders have been making claims early on that (IMHO) are completely unfounded in any sort of data or reality. Claims like AI is going to replace all software engineers or AI is going to eliminate all white collar jobs, or everyone should be "token maxxing" etc. All this rhetoric does capture headlines but is provably false (see the latest retractions and backpedaling).
What this sort of rhetoric does it sows fear, uncertainty and doubt in the average person that may or may not really understand the technology and so the general consensus is that AI = bad.
Like all things the truth is somewhere in the middle and it takes work to find it and the headline grabbing rhetoric is unhelpful at best and harmful at worst.
There are clearly coherent "moral" arguments to be made against mainsteam AI, in areas such as resource consumption, capitalist power, and so on. Some are correct; others, while in my opinion unpersuasive, are at least coherent.
But the article places more stress on arguments of the sort "It's evil to use AI because it doesn't work very well", and those don't seem very logical to me. Oh, SOME arguments of that kind make sense, e.g. in the area of autonomous weapons, but the author didn't focus on extreme cases such as those.
I mean if you had the same reaction when personal computers were made, you would also be an outcast. They also put whole industries out of business and caused huge pollution and etc. There is no real difference. But you have a right to withdraw from the world and be a luddite.
Its funny that the article uses Wikipedia as an example, given it is a tool that always needs a caveat: "anyone can edit it, always use the source, never trust it directly."
There are many instances where I have seen Wikipedia have bias, or be misinformation.
AI just needs the caveat that it is not really intelligent, but a very good predictive text machine, which you should always ask to provide citations.
"Really not intelligent," yet capable of taking gold at international math and programming competitions. <img src=surejan.jpg>
Kinda weird that the authors response to a 'friend' using Siri to query how long a medication lasts was not wanting to hang with them anymore rather than educating them on how AI can hallucinate information.
Having a moral stance is good, but isolating yourself rather than fighting for it and then complaining about being an outcast is utterly puzzling.
This is going to be an unpopular reply I imagine but this person is not well and their behavior should not be imitated. This is a classic example of omnicause anxiety, like people who refuse to have children because of all these things happening in the world as if the world hasn't always been a mess. Frankly, ridiculous.
It's part of this nihilistic undercurrent, especially among Millennials and younger generations. "I'm not having kids, have you seen the world?" "I'm not saving for retirement, Social Security won't exist and the oceans will swallow the continent by the time I reach retirement age." "I refuse to use AI tools that could help me create new things and reach my goals, because the influencers told me AI is going to poison the water". Quite sad actually.
Its a problem of the privileged in both cases — a first world problem. People with real problems do not think like that.
What's wrong about a beautiful banner done beautifully with AI? What's wrong with a new app done in 5 mins by a coding agent? What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter?
A couple of days ago I started having watery eyes and suddenly 'pink eye' was a term in DeepSeek with all the answers, viral, bacterial and fungal which I didn't know. According to symptoms it was a bacterial type so Tobramycin was the answer, the dose, the care. Two days later and cured even though I have to continue treatment for at least six days as directed by AI. It's not a miracle, just science at your fingertips, human knowledge put to good and bad use, pick your side.
I totally welcome our new AI overlords.
Almost got me there, if it wasn't for
> What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter?
Very subtle.
Your eyes were irritated and you took an antibacterial eyedrop which is basically the only product on the market for such a condition… I’m really not sure Google would’ve failed you 10 years ago or even just asking your pharmacist 20 years ago
Tobramycin is not prescription-free. Cool story, bro.
First ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment"
GUYS
PLEASE
The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing?
There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it
Parts of it (e.g. water consumption per query) are overblown.
But the degree of data center buildout and resource use, if exponential growth just continues a little longer, is going to end up being a big number. AI datacenters are already stretching electrical power grids and increasing peaker power plant use.
Data centers right now are about 5% of electricity use in the US. AI could easily double that share.
Yes, any major manufacturing ends up as a big number. It is still usually worth doing!
I was thinking about this the other day. Surely, a datacenter, even one optimized for machine learning workloads could switch gears and do other kinds of computations.
Even if the bubble were to pop, i feel like the worst that could happen is that we would have a bunch of inactive datacenters that could be switched on to meet demands of the growing internet. Kind of like how nuclear plants operate.
cmiiw to think along these lines though.
Well, stuff tends not to get completely wasted, but:
- AI datacenters are gold-rush rush jobs with interesting things like their own gas turbine generators etc.
- It's not clear that serving the internet needs us to double the amount of datacenter footprint. If anything, a lot of workloads are getting more power and space efficient.
- Most expensive thing is that we're filling them full of GPUs and with RAM tied up to the GPUs. That's infrastructure that we've paid the resource costs for and it's difficult to repurpose to something else.
I do think AI is going to grow a lot, so I'm not sure how much of the buildout will need repurposing. But I do think doubling our datacenter footprint and doing it in environmentally yucky ways will probably have some lasting effects and consume a lot of resources.
These are more like HPC supercomputers than garden variety datacenters. That's why there's so much concern re: water use for the electricity being supplied. (That's easy to address in principle, of course: wind and solar power use up negligible amounts of water compared to other sources.)
Most of the water concern is evaporative cooling of the datacenter itself. But IMO not too much of a concern. The energy use and the resource use to make the chips, etc, is bigger.
There was a chart on Twitter comparing the water usage of AI datacenters to that of the California almond farms and the golf courses all over the country. AI’s water usage is tiny compared to those.
Care to elaborate? Just taking the impact of data centers on locals is enough to validate his point. (Noise pollution, heat pollution and emissions from on-site gas turbines)
Local governments can do the trade off on tax revenue vs inconvenience
Yeah, it's weird, nobody's saying "we should make all the data centres use closed loop cooling even if it's more expensive for them!", but a lot of voices are yelling "AI uses water!", referring to the same thing.
I mean, email and Hacker News and Netflix use water, too.
Something that I've started looking into and I think could become an interesting metric is resource usage comparison of # of average-request prompts against minutes of audio/video streaming. Then we can start to say things like "you know, watching a 10-minute YouTube video uses roughly the same amount of resources as 60 prompts" and hopefully have a more down-to-earth conversation surrounding our ecological impact and how we assign value.
> the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths
The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state. Sure, it’s noisier and increasingly full of AI-generated slop, but are we already at the “everything was better in the old days” stage?
As for the destruction of career paths, technological change has been doing that for centuries. Digitization alone transformed or eliminated countless professions. I’d be curious what the authors’ moral stance is on those disruptions. Is the concern specifically about AI, or about technological progress more generally?
I put this blog under the old grumpy man file for now.
> The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state.
Sure it did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I mean it's almost like having a moral stance on the assembly line, or calculators. If they truly do provide massive technological benefits, and it turns out the externalities aren't as bad as some are projecting, it's hard to argue AI is not another extremely useful tool in your tool belt.
Now, if AI leads to global ruin/... obviously some people will be able to say "See! I knew this would happen!", but again, at this point it feels AI is no worse morally than the existing allocation of upside/downside that big-techgopolies have had for at least the last decade.
Calculators give you the right answer. AI gives you any answer. I work within a bureaucracy and instead of optimising processes and getting rid of useless documents, AI is being used to generate more useless text. It is the industrialisation of bureaucracy and it is a turbo powered waste of resources.
> don't want to hang out with him any more because he'll have his phone with him and it's automatic for him now.
This post sounds like selfishness/self-preservation masquerading as concern for humanity and the environment. You can be anti-AI all you want. You're wasting your breath and energy.
I don't know if the quality of my life has gone up because I have these tools that help me build things in exchange for less job prospects.
All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same.
Call me bitter. These are the same people who have been decrying and arguing with me that AI would never get where it is now. Stop your kicking and screaming already. It's not helping anyone.
> All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same.
That's how Russia got into current situation, btw.
Get in line and join the Hitler Youth! You have no say in the matter! Lead, follow or GTFO!
I have had a little success by arguing that "we can live without AI, but we can't live without X" and then I've managed to get some priorities in order. The AI craze is insane and it does have some support inside IT but it's the pressure from outside that's hard to resist.
Holy cow this is whiny And essentially saying no one else has morals… yikes.
Other people do understand AI sucks and are even anti ai while still using it… personally I have been anti tech forever (When it comes to privacy, bot misinformation, psychological health, all of it) but yeah dude I still use it and have a job in it bc it’s paying bills and it supports our family and there are some good things about it it’s not all bad.
In terms of actually trying to create a revolution in tech (unionizing, making change, ending it, whatever you think) I would love to see the bad things go but I don’t see it being possible. It’s like saying: I don’t like cars (and I’m better than everyone else bc I walk) bc cars are bad for the environment and people die STOP DRIVING CARS… there’s absolutely no way people are going to stop driving cars.
He left a caveat for you if you read it
AI is now much better and much more accurate than it was even a few months ago. Use Opus 4.8, etc.
Terence Tao is more credible to me than the views OP expresses in this heart felt, well intentioned but outdated essay.
We can't put the genie back in the bottle.
We can, however, try to ensure that the genie answers equally to everyone, which I think is the way to go.
—slave owners at the start of the Atlantic slave trade
I like that AI sucks
It’s the best scenario for AI to be like these robots from Star Wars forever. Silly, barely competent, comic relief. So, so much better than any doomer-philosopher blogpost.
LLM will always be clumsy, endearing, silicone regard unable to function without commands. I only worry about the jepa
It is fun watching the thieves squirm in this thread and being upset at others calling them criminals. "But think of the loom," they say. The loom wasn't stolen by a replicator.
Post-modem incel vibes. It’s always someone/something else making the protagonist an outcast.
Yeah, you're not an outcast if you're the one rejecting and cutting off other people.
One challenging thing about talking against AI is that it's both a centralizing thing, in that everything is supposedly to use AI as glue and linking center, and decentralizing, in that we can see all the leaf nodes become unreliable, then the outer nodes, because people just 'ask AI'. It's a dystopian idea that we should be making the computer itself the process, as opposed to just using the computer to help ourselves make the process.
the argument reminds me of the uncanny sense of being managed. i think there was a belief that having the skills that AI synthesizes was some kind of intellectual equity, when this was more of a convention and a promise than any kind of social contract that preserves the value and meaning of ones past contributions.
imo we've been living out a decade or more of the Doorman Fallacy ( https://www.jaakkoj.com/concepts/doorman-fallacy ) where people are just liquid labour with some minimum constraints to distinguish them from chattel, where the ironic effect is everyone gets treated like they are chattel but for these minimum requirements. Maybe this will move the concerns and opinions class to act to conserve some of our cultural capital base?
mostly i am not sympathetic to the author because we are not of the same tribe, but the essential argument that there's something to conserve that we arent with AI is a worthy concern. we should look less at problems and solutions and more upstream of what we want to preserve and still grow.
I don't feel like an outcast when I'm outside of the bubble of this community and outside of an environment like a workplace where people have to demonstrate enthusiasm for AI because they fear getting penalized for not using it.
That doesn't mean everyone shares my views outside of those contexts, I just don't feel any more an outcast than for having my own view on other issues.
Morality, good and evil, true or false, is a human way of thinking. AI sees the world thru the lens of efficiency, ROI and so on.
From https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...:
> *112. Having considered the issues of responsibility and governance of AI, we must now return to our central question: what does it mean to safeguard our humanity? The risk extends beyond the misuse of certain technologies. More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm in which we are immersed, and that is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.*
> AI sees the world thru the lens of
most probable next token
I do judge people for using AI. Especially engineers.
Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.
We've been through this exact same thing with crypto and particularly NFTs. Remember those? Oh sure, a shortened URL on a blockchain is worth millions. Remember that? This quote on cognitive bias is often brought out:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
So, just like with crypto, there are people inside the bubble who simply believe they're going to get rich off of whatever is happening. So instead of seeing the flaws or the exploitation, they see a system where ultimately they will benefit from it. In crypto, you saw people who missed out on Bitcoin so kept looking for the next Bitcoin in everything that came after. That's why rug pulls worked.
AI is just accelerating a trend where a few thousand people are increasingly owning everything. Automation (including AI) will just be used to further concentrate wealth. We will be minting trillionaires when the majority of the world can barely afford to live.
But there are people inside the bubble who don't see that or don't care because they think they will get rich so none of that will affect them. It's not even that intentional. A lot of people see poverty as a personal moral failure. So it's just that they view themselves as not having that moral failure.
A more realistic view is that not everyone can be Jeff Bezos. You're more likely to win the lottery than you are to end up a billionaire. Also, you're one bad day away from being unable to work. Medical event, accident, whatever. This is why we look after the most vulnerable in society because you could be one of them one day.
Exactly. Each time you criticize the techno-fascist system that props up AI here, people downvote blindly without even trying to understand why authoritarian regimes love surveillance technologies like AI allows
A principal dogma on orange reddit is the neutrality of technology. Most people here are opposed to the nigh inevitable incipient use of AI in mass surveillance but don't think that that has any relationship to their use of AI (for example) as "Google that actually works." Whether they are right, I am not sure.
I don't think that's true, from what I've seen the people on here are pretty consistently anti surveillance
Not my experience. Maybe it's your presentation that earns downvotes, not your message.
You can be a very principled person resisting and spotlighting norms you strongly disagree with, but how you do it tends to matter a lot. It makes the difference between people opening an ear to listen to you and reflexively pushing you away as an annoyance.
>Each time you criticize the techno-fascist system that props up AI here
Every time I criticize the Vikings on The Ultimate Vikings Enthusiast-and-Reenactment Society web forums, they downvote me too. It's ridiculous. Don't they have any integrity? Do they not believe in freedom of speech? One guy even started to rant about how the subforum's topic was specifically about a torment where the vikings would cut out of a man's tongue with a red hot knife... what does that have to do with my first amendment rights? just unbelievable.
TL;DR author confuses anxiety with morals, cuts people out of their life that they can’t cope with being around.
This has played out a million different ways throughout history, nothing special about this case, it just happens to be rooted in anxiety about AI.