How serious will the problems be in the future if people rely too much on AI or can't work and live without them at all?
How serious will the problems be in the future if people rely too much on AI or can't work and live without them at all?
That entirely depends on specifics.
Corporate America already is a soul-crushing land of terrible art, bad writing, and shoddy code. The artists, writers, and programmers there will have a mix of reduced job satisfaction and more competition for creative roles but a reduced portion of their workload doing the most creatively boring parts of the job. So, to the extent that “in-house creative” remains, it will more or less be the same blah it is today.
The big risk is the destructive cycle of LLMs and “GenAI” in specifically creative enterprises. If Disney replaced all their creatives with AI slop, and the AI continues its trend of unimpressive mediocrity, Disney as a creative corporation might shut down or even go out of business.
What’s worse about the above is that if it’s replicated on a large enough scale for a long enough time, we might wind up having no creatives at all and the whole skill set may atrophy away from our civilization.
On the other hand, if GenAI winds up substantially increasing the proportion of unemployed citizens, a UBI might be implemented and all those creatives who chased soul-crushing work just so they wouldn’t starve would do it for the pure joy of creation.
(All of which, of course, assumes that the runaway power demands of GenAI don’t destroy the biosphere…)
Depends on who controls the AI. If you are running it locally.
blog.mlc.ai/…/GPU-Accelerated-LLM-on-Orange-Pi
Then it doesn’t matter.
What water use does your phone have? Because an Orange PI has none. You can run it off a $5 solar panel and thus the energy problem is not there.
Stop conflating society destroying Capitalism with community built and maintained software. They may have functional similarities but the negative properties of Oracle Databases are orders of magnitude worse and different than FSF supported Databases such as PostgreSQL.
AI is the processed food of the brain/mental health.
That’s the problem. You will end up with a epidemic of people who are mentally obese and lazy and refuse to do anything about it.
You only become intelligent my exercising your brain. The issue with AI is it basically is like GPL for your brain, it lets you cheat and you have to make minimal effort, and your mental abilities atrophize..
If people can’t live without AI in the future, and access to AI ends, then people will die. Dying is pretty serious.
Here’s what’s happening right now, the rich are keeping their kids away from the AI crap. They’re being sent to private schools that still teach the traditional ways. They’re doing this to ensure that their kids will be in power in the future, and rule over the helpless slobbering idiots our public school system is currently releasing into the wild.
I don’t think this is sustainable, it will break in some terrible way, and everyone, including the filthy rich will have their asses handed to them. But, I don’t think that will lead to any sort of enlightenment or utopia, we’ll probably cobble together some barely adequate solution and then repeat the whole thing again inside of a couple of hundred years. Rinse and repeat until we finally kill everyone off. I mean, just based on how things have gone up till now.
We were all supposed to be illiterate because of TV by now.
Moral of the story is that doomers are always wrong.
Nothing can be maintained without at least some of the skills and knowledge that built it. Even something like generative AI like LLMs will eventually break down in some manner. Its just what happens with complex systems, be they physical or digital.
After that happens, we’ll be forced to learn either to fix the thing, or how to do without the thing. How painful that learning process is will depend upon how essential that thing is to our lives.
If AI goes away in a few years, barely a blip.
If AI goes away after a few decades, and we’ve allowed much of our accumulated knowledge to atrophy… It’s a crisis.
Arguably there are already people in this position. Or they are massively overskilled compared to any work they can get.
In unrelated news - will write SQL for food.