Why do you discount the immense gains due to AI that the public can use cheaply?
There has to be a name for this fallacy.
There has to be a name for this fallacy.
You fundamentally believe that AI is useless and that it wastes energy and hardware. Shouldn't you then want the bubble to burst even faster? If not, you are just delaying the bubble.. but to what end? So that you personally won't be affected? This is a morally bankrupt stance to take.
My ideology is at least more coherent in this context. I think AI is useful, and AI being cheaper for the masses is good for them rather than the value being captured by a few companies.
But it's objectively true that if the market crashes tomorrow, lots of normal people lose money. This hits extra hard – which happened back in 2007/8 – if that's the day your life-long savings are converted from stocks to cash.
Are you arguing that because those pensioners can now get a frontier model cheaper than they can today that this is a net benefit?
If market crashes tomorrow due to commoditised models, it is true that those people who bought these stocks would lose money. But its honestly not a big part of it - if you run the numbers, pensioners will lose 10% of their money.
This is a transfer of wealth from people who have exposure to these stocks vs everyone else. Do you disagree with this transfer of wealth? It comes down to that.
You're shadowboxing a strawman you've built, my friend.
> You fundamentally believe that AI is useless and that it wastes energy and hardware.
That is not what I believe. I believe that AI is useful at concentrating power in the oligarchy and that increasing energy and hardware cost is a nice side effect that further helps that goal.
> Shouldn't you then want the bubble to burst even faster? If not, you are just delaying the bubble.. but to what end? So that you personally won't be affected? This is a morally bankrupt stance to take.
That is in fact what I want. You're projecting your preference for the bubble to continue onto me, when I have never said such a thing. Only from the ashes of the old can we build the new.
> I think AI is useful, and AI being cheaper for the masses is good for them rather than the value being captured by a few companies.
I believe this is naive. If it's controlled by a few companies, they can end the cheapness at any point. I believe that is part of the plan, once they've made the masses sufficiently dependent.
I believe it is useful. I don't think its worth arguing at this point with anyone who thinks AI is a net bad to humanity, even when it is controlled by public. Its kinda extremist.
I literally said the opposite? You keep arguing with some phantom you've made up.
> thinks AI is a net bad to humanity, even when it is controlled by public
Also not what was said. My point is precisely around it being a tool for private power concentration. If it was publicly owned, that would not be the case, obviously.
> I don't think its worth arguing at this point
I don't think you were ever arguing, you have not addressed any of my points.
I'll go even further and tell you my read of what is going on: You cannot engage with the actual arguments, because doing so would force you to confront the inconsistency of your ideology. To step out of ideology hurts, so you instead address a strawman you've built and then escape the conversation when that becomes untenable.
So I'll assume you think AI is useful for society and a net good if it were not controlled by capitalists. Again I wouldn't have to assume this if you had been straight about it.
If you think AI is useful if it were publicly owned, surely high energy costs and hardware costs are necessary if the public were to use it?
Whats the point of talking about hardware and energy costs when that's something the public needs to bear that cost in one way or another, whether by voting for it or not?
If the bubble bursts and the models become commoditised, the margins on hosting drop to near zero and people can access models at much cheaper costs and there's no central authority (like spooky oligarchy who control power) that you are scared of.
So why is hardware and energy costs even a problem if the public consents to using AI with their own revealed preference?
Because it's not the interesting question. The interesting question is what it does as long as it's controlled by a handful of people.
AI's usefulness depends on that question, it cannot be answered in isolation. A lighter is useful in the hands of somebody starting a camp fire to warm themselves and their community, but dangerous in the hands of an arsonist trying to burn down said community.
> If you think AI is useful if it were publicly owned, surely high energy costs and hardware costs are necessary if the public were to use it?
Public ownership and public usage are not the same thing. Again, ownership and power dynamics are the point (that you still haven't addressed!)
> Whats the point of talking about hardware and energy costs when that's something the public needs to bear that cost in one way or another, whether by voting for it or not?
How have we established that the public needs to bear it one way or another? If AI was public, we could have usage restrictions based on societal merit, as an example. Not every AI use is ... useful. All of them are costly to society.
> So why is hardware and energy costs even a problem if the public consents to using AI with their own revealed preference?
What are you talking about? The grandma's electric heating is getting more expensive so some jerkoff can create deepfake porn or so capitalists can fire workers. They're not the same people.
Ok so you want people to vote for public AI usage. Like if I want to use AI for my own research, I need to first vote for it, get it approved for its "social merit".
Is this the kind of utopia you are arguing for?
It's the only way to avoid the catastrophic power concentration issues and resource allocation issues you still haven't addressed.
It's not exactly a new concept either. All sorts of things need approval (usually ones with high resource cost and externalities, see a pattern there?), be it buildings, flight plans, oil drilling, power lines or any number of other examples.
As with some other stuff (the de minimis exception for customs comes to mind), we can of course talk about exceptions for smaller-scale personal use, but large industrial use with heavy pollution and energy use implications should be treated like any other heavy industry.
You still haven't made any case against my structural argument. You still haven't provided any evidence in favor of your viewpoint. You keep digging into hypotheticals about alternatives (at least you've stopped with the straight up strawmanning, I guess), but you've never bothered to justify the implications of the status quo you support.
Kind of funny considering how you started out by accusing others of fallacies and being morally bankrupt, mindless extremists. Maybe the shoe's on the other foot?
Your utopia is me asking some one approval before I use my LLM for my own work.
I'll let others decide whether this is extreme or not.