Microblog Memes

Americans often say this

First off, I'm not American.

You are saying that cruising in a several ton metal missiles, often alone, back and fourth over the planet or to McDonalds is necessary!

First of all, fuck off, I've flown back and fourth across the planet exactly once and that was to see my father before he died. I hadn't seen him in 25 years, because he left to the US to pursue something resembling income when I was 2, as our own country was only just getting started economically. Second of all, I said it's "often necessary", not strictly always necessary.

we have invented train, bus, bicycle, electric cars, please for god sake stop working for astroturfing oil company proxies

Who's been astroturfing oil company proxies? And anyway, when talking about the CO2 impact, trains, buses and electric cars are part of the number. Bicycles quite a bit less, because the CO2 there is production (once per bike and not comparable to a car or a train) and the extra food you need to eat. But trains, buses and electric cars absolutely do use energy - and therefore increase CO2 emissions, even if indirectly.

But the most important part

Do you think these are just different technologies that happened to have been developed simultaneously? These are all from the same spark. Neural networks giving rise to emergent unexplainable phenomenon when prodded in very very specific ways. Ai research is almost all trying to understand how the fuck that happens and why it can do all these things.

Radiology is a good use case. Ai porn maybe not so much.

I realize that neural networks are the basis of all that, but I'm saying we don't need to be pushing everyone to use a super energy-expensive chatbot instead of a regular search. We don't need AI chatbots embedded into literally every software application we use daily. This doesn't benefit the research, it benefits stock values because AI is a buzzword and you CAN'T run a publicly traded company without saying you're harnessing the power of AI, shareholders will literally murder you.

That's why people are dunking on AI instead of cars. Because 99% of public-facing AI is useless shit people actively dislike and so is 99% of AI energy usage. With cars, I'm willing to bet at least 10% of trips are strictly necessary, and 40-50% of trips are deemed necessary because of stupid car-centric city design with no transit, so still necessary, but for the wrong reasons. I doubt more than about 50% of trips are just leisure altogether. But these are just numbers pulled out of my ass to illustrate a point: There is some car travel that is necessary, some car travel that could be avoided by political change, but is currently necessary for the people doing it. But very little AI usage that is necessary.

Google, Microsoft, etc, aren't building billions upon billions of dollars worth of data centers at a never-seen-before pace to run models that benefit humanity. They're doing it because right now all the money in the world is in building a better "Here are the tallest buildings in NYC to jump off after losing your job" machine than your competitor, and shoving it in more products nobody asked for.

And worst of all, just shoving more and more input data at larger and larger LLMs alone isn't likely to cause new breakthroughs in AI. For all we know, it might be a dead end in the search of AGI - and they're well into diminishing returns as far as investing more and more energy into training new models is concerned.

For sure cars are worse for the planet than AI. But cars DO something. They get you to places. AI tells you how to kill yourself, or how to make pizza with glue, etc. Its best use cases are for cheating at homework, and replacing human workers without even making sure AI CAN do their jobs (good luck hiring all your support staff back, Klarna). It's currently a completely new plague on the planet, and tech CEOs are doing everything to point it out more and more. You know when was the last time I heard anything from Gernot Döllner or Ola Källenius? Fucking never. They don't shove themselves everywhere to let you know what they're doing to destroy the planet. At best they'll tell you what they're doing to reduce their impact. But tech CEOs right now will outright tell you they're going to fire everyone they can, build as many energy-intensive data centers as they can, and drain desert towns of their last drinking water, just so you could see what it would be like if the chick from Avatar had 3 boobs.

THAT is why people are mad at the AI industry.

Americans often say this