Jason GormanWe're 2.5 years into this gold rush, and I still haven't seen any gold. I've seen people selling picks & shovels. I've seen "gold experts" selling maps to the gold. I've seen CEOs announce they're going "gold-first". I've seen people selling land where they claim there's gold. But no actual gold.
Matteo Capucci@jasongorman uhm assuming this is about AI, what qualifies as gold for you? surely AI is hyped beyond disfigurement but my experience (esp outside academic circles) is that so many people use LLMs daily for their tasks... so there's gold everywhere by that standard.
@mc At massive losses and a huge environmental cost. Who is actually making money from them?
@mc Take Microsoft Copilot as an example. Almost everyone I know doesn't use it and doesn't want it.
@jasongorman well you could have made the same argument for search engines 20 years ago. massively energy-intense, unprofitable, used by (comparatively) few people. and take Bing as an example: nobody I know uses that.
I don't want to say everything AI is cool and unproblematic, but the nihilistic, Manichean rethoric is kinda tired by now. there's lots of good (many still potential---the tech is like 3 years old) uses of the new AI tools and the environmental concerns are weirdly specific (I've heard maybe 2 people in my entire life ever complaining about the environmental impact of social media or search engines... what's the sudden worry?)
Ciourte Piaille@mc
People can't remember/list all the problems associated with it at all time, but it seems like "AI" has all the problems of all the other things.
☑️ Profiting from people's work without compensating them
☑️ Exploiting and psychologically maiming underprotected workers for ridiculous hourly or task-based pays
☑️ Amplifying existing bias and discrimination
☑️ Using resources (energy, water…) needed by people
☑️ Polluting (greenhouse gas, rivers and ocean warming, poison dug out of the ground to extract metals…)
☑️ Being mostly controlled by the same people/companies trying to build yet another mono/oligo-poly
…
…
☑️ Working hand in hand with surveillance capitalism to bypass people privacy to get more data
☑️ Facilitating the spread of disinformation and the mass manipulation of opinion
☑️ Arbitrary censorship
☑️ replacing creative jobs with soul-crushing ones
☑️ Lack of accountability (bots will not magically become sentient, but I can see them being recognized as legal people in a few years, like companies already are, so they can take the fall for humans)
…
☑️ The mostly-empty promise to solve all the problems it creates with more of itself
But also new problems, like
☑️ Being insecure by design because "user generated input" is part of the code