Posted by mooreds 4 hours ago
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.
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
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.
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.
- 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.
I mean, email and Hacker News and Netflix use water, too.
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.
Sure it did.
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.
> What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter?
Very subtle.
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.
If your company's goal is to generate "more useless text" they would have done it with or without AI. AI just let's the peons responsible for producing that text do so significantly faster, with some percentage loss in "quality" baked in. Are you mad their jobs are easier? Was their text once not useless and now it is?
Again, it's like saying the conveyor belt is evil because it lets us generate more useless toys/candy/guns/... and research into improving the conveyor belt should instead be going toward more valuable things. However it ALSO has those effects on EVERYTHING. It lets you produce more drugs, books, food, clothes, necessities, and yes, some useless items too.
Same with AI. Sure you can use it to spew cat pictures, but you can also use it to generate significant quantities of non-trivial useful (not necessarily bullet proof, but undoubtedly _useful_) output in a fraction of the time and/or HUMAN capital (butts-in-seats, time-on-task, ...) than before. Now, as always, value is in the eye of the beholder (which is why your C suite gets giddy at all the useless text output).