How long will it be until we realize AI is detrimental to society?
How long will it be until we realize AI is detrimental to society?
Here in the USA, you have to be afraid for your job these days. Layoffs are rampant everywhere due to outsourcing, and now we have AI on the horizon promising to make things more efficient, but we really know what it is actually going to be used for. They want automate out everything. People packaging up goods for shipping, white collar jobs like analytics, business intelligence, customer service, chat support. Any sort of job that takes a low or moderate amount of effort or intellectual ability is threatened by AI. But once AI takes all these jobs away and shrinks the amount of labor required, what are all these people going to do for work? It's not like you can train someone who's a business intelligence engineer easily to go do something else like HVAC, or be a nurse. So you have the entire tech industry basically folding in on itself trying to win the rat race and get the few remaining jobs left over.....
But it should be pretty obvious that you can't run an entire society with no jobs. Because then people can't buy groceries, groceries don't sell so grocery stores start hurting and then they can't afford to employ cashiers and stockers, and the entire thing starts crumbling. This is the future of AI, basically. The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don't have jobs and no income, not able to survive...
Like, how long until we realize how detrimental AI is to society? 10 years? 15?
At some point society will need to realize that traditional work that is handled by automation (whether AI or not) isn’t necessary and economic systems will have to change.
I’m not an expert by any means, and I just don’t see this happening in the near-term. My opinion is that for now (the short-term at least) it’ll just widen the gap between rich and poor.
Yeah, industrialization didn't end the world and complete automation won't either unless we decide to roll over and die instead of changing things so people benefit from the automation instead of suffering because of it.
Automation should be a good thing. If we can have things that need to happen be done more efficiently with less work we absolutely should. But we should distribute the results of those efficiency gains fairly, which is where the current system fails.
Also, this recent classic: I will fucking piledrive you if you mention AI again was really illuminating.
I don't get the point of the comic,, what happens to the money part?
That’s already been going to the wrong people for decades now.
The least drastic solution would be something like UBI, where a lot of people would be miserable, but at least will be able to put food on the table. (In case you’ve seen The Expanse series, I imagine that something like the part where Bobbie asks for directions on Earth).
A more drastic solution would be to not tie the worth of people to the amount of work they do or the amount of wealth they have.
That’s already been going to the wrong people for decades now.
The least drastic solution would be something like UBI, where a lot of people would be miserable, but at least will be able to put food on the table. (In case you’ve seen The Expanse series, I imagine that something like the part where Bobbie asks for directions on Earth).
A more drastic solution would be to not tie the worth of people to the amount of work they do or the amount of wealth they have.
Never, because it's not. This is the future:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/fully-automated-luxury-gay-space-communism
Let's get there as quickly as possible
Replace AI in your argument with industrial machinery, and you'll get your answer. People have always had similar concerns about automation. There are some problems, but it isn't with the technology itself.
The first problem is the concentration of wealth. Societal automation efforts need to start to be viewed as something belonging to everyone, and the profits generated need to go back in to supporting society. This'll need to be solved to move forward peacefully.
The second problem is failure to deal with externalities. The true cost of automation needs to be accounted for from cradle to grave including all externalities. This means the pollution caused by LLM energy use needs to be a part of the cost of running the LLM, for example.
You may be in the younger side, or just not remember, but this happens almost every 20 years like clockwork.
In the 80's it was the PC and computers at large.
In the 00's it was robotic automation that was going to be the end of manual labor.
Now it's this.
The sooner people realize that all of things are just about the small number of wealthy people who control resources making more money at the expense of the majority of all other humans, maybe something will get done. It's been tried before in various movements with little to show for it, but maybe I'm just cynical.
There will need to be a major shift in how economic flow works in order to support an existing or expanding population regardless.
Technology like the loom, the steam shovel, the aeroplane, rocketry, computers, nuclear energy, the internet, and now AI, are each tools that have really changed our world, and put many different people out of work, but it has also reduced a lot of back-breaking, time-consuming work, so it has allowed our world to go a lot faster. From an excavator being able to move a lot more dirt in a day than 5 men with shovels, AI can help with getting the initial ideas of the creative process, can help with parsing initial queries from customers, a first pass filter of a huge repository of legal documents, be a patient teacher for beginner programming or other subjects, and so on. Each tool can have been overpromised to do everything, but that doesn't mean it had no purpose.
With that said, any of these tools and technologies can be used for bad as much as they can be used for good. And combatting that doesn't just mean waiting around hoping for the people entrenched in power using tech to satiate their own personal gain, to suddenly reject their gains to commit them for the good of society. It means organizing to protect your neighbour. It means sharing the benefit of these tools with others, using them for good, and improving them for others.
My point is that it's not AI that will cause society to crash, it's greed and corporate greed, who are being assisted by the unrealistic hype over AI.
Society can exist without jobs, not everything has to be capital, in fact reaching a post scarcity world is needed for communism.
AI hype is also overblown as fuck, I remember watching the CGP grey video Humans Need not Apply, like what, 8 years ago? Haven't really achieved some epic breakthrough did we?
For me from a software engineers perspective, "AI" is nothing but a productivity tool, it reduces the amount of mundane work I have to do, but then so does the IDE I use.
as humans we have been automatic tasks for a long time, just think about your washing machine, you have any idea how hard it would be to have clean clothes without them? Do you think we would be better off if we needed cleaning services that clean our clothes for us using human labour just so people have jobs? Or is it better to use that effort elsewhere?
This is the part of the AI conversation that always bugs me. People have just concluded that the hype is real and we’ve reached the point that people fear in movies. They don’t understand that it’s mostly bullshit. Sure, the fancy autocomplete can toss up some boilerplate code and it’s mostly ok. Sure, it saves me time scrolling through StackOverflow search results.
But it’s simply not this all-knowing miracle replacement for everything. I think everyone has been conditioned by entertainment to fear the worst. When that bubble bursts, IT will be the part which wreaks havoc on the economy.
"AI" returns mathematically plausible results from its tokenized training data. That is the ONLY thing it does. It doesn't consider, it doesn't fact check itself. "AI" in its current state is a party trick.
No matter what, it helps me incredibly.
It's saving me a hell of a lot of man hours on incredibly tedious tasks that would require looking up individual items in a wiki or the like and then directly populating the answers into a spreadsheet... Our team doesn't have the budget to hire someone to do it, so it basically just wouldn't get done without it.
Useful party trick for me!
They're starting to add options to cite references, consult documentation, some of the engines actually check their source code to make sure it's viable.
Now that they've hit stumbling blocks on organically improving, all those things you're talking about can be done with conventional techniques.
Your last sentence diminishes the value of the first sentence. These LLMs save me a ton of time and massively increase my productivity.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying it isn't useful, I'm just tired of hearing people say that the code "thinks".
People had the same fears about cars, the internet, computers, telephones, the printing press, and even just books and reading/writing.
What do you think happened to building full of engineers designing plans and making stress load calculations? What do you think happened to switchboard operators?
For now, I work in AI.
IMO, using AI to remove jobs is the business equivalent of the Darwin Award. No sane executive will look at AI and see job replacement. A dumb executive will look at AI and see more productivity gains. A smart executive will see AI as a way to improve tooling for workers that explicitly want to use AI.
Sadly, as with most tech improvements, we'll see lots of companies run by stupid people try to do stupid things with it. The best we can hope for is that there are opportunities for people to bail and find better job opportunities when their employer says "let's fire HR and replace with GPT", only to get absolutely brutalized by legal fees when their AI HR decides to fire someone for a protected reason, or refuses to fire a thief because they have a disability, or something that requires human intervention that doesn't exist, or one of the hundreds of ways that it could go hilariously wrong.
It happens all the time. I remember watching solid profitable tech companies pivoting to delivering large apps on the new iPhone app store because "it's the future", only to realise that spending two years to develop an office suite for the iPhone 4 was a fucking stupid idea in hindsight. I remember people firing web developers because WYSIWYG editors would mean that you could design and build a website in the same way you create a Word doc. Stupid execs will always do stupid shit, and the world will move on.
Yup.
Some guys I know who worked at a developer contracting house (that I briefly worked for as well) all lost their jobs over the course of a year or so, as the company started rapidly downsizing because “Copilot means we don’t need as many developers anymore, we can fill orders with a skeleton crew.”
I’m excited to see that company fail for their bullshit.
It capitalism. Capitalism will replace you with a machine. AI is just a tool.
The whole planet is threatened by AI. If you look at the amount of energy needed not only to power the infrastructure, but the energy needed to create the infrastructure, and compare it to the work produced, and the energy needed for humans to produce equivalent work, it's totally fucked and dumb as hell
Edit: to elaborate, there was this commercial for a Google Pixel I saw, people in group chat talking about a football game, person says "create an image of football gloves made out of butter". .08kWh later that image gets posted in chat for a chuckle. Dude, just say "gloves made of butter? smdh" Lady laying in bed talking to a glorified chatbot, just hop on Lemmy or reconnect with an old friend and save .16kWh. These are the most common use cases for AI, basically finessing a prompt a dozen times to make a Shrek and Garlfield comic that winds up in some Facebook group with 9 likes. Multiply those figures a couple million times tho and it's like holy shit. We somehow went from extremely low-bandwidth words to high bandwidth Youtube and Tiktok to the messiest bullshit humans have ever invented, to do things we could easily do with characters on a keyboard
Energy demands are only going to increase as we replace gas with electric alternatives. The problem you're pointing to is an issue with the current infrastructure.
Infrastructure in this case refers to the data centers and LLMs. It takes hundreds of megawatt hours to train a single current-gen LLM and who knows how many gigawatts of energy are being consumed by the sum of LLMs at any given point but it likely dwarfs the sum of all energy spent training LLMs.
But then there's the energy involved in producing those cards, shipping those cards, the data centers themselves.
It wouldn't be preposterous to suggest that the sum of energy spent at any given time on generative AI is enough to power New York City. Might even be well more than
The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don't have jobs and no income, not able to survive...
Most solutions to this issue usually involve some variant of a universal basic income. However, that gets politically boiled down to "MOAR TAXES GOVERNMENT IS STIFLING THIS COUNTRY!1!1", so in countries like the US that want to keep the freedom of being able to be homeless and starving, it's not going to be possible.
I can answer that. We won't.
We'll keep iterating and redesigning until we have actual working general intelligence AI. Once we've created a general intelligence it will be a matter of months or years before it's a super intelligence that far outshines human capabilities. Then you have a whole new set of dilemmas. We'll struggle with those ethical and social dilemmas for some amount of time until the situation flips and the real ethical dilemmas will be shouldered by the AIs: how long do we keep these humans around? Do we let them continue to go to war with each other? do they own this planet? Etc.
Assuming we can get AGI. So far there's been little proof we're any closer to getting an AI that can actually apply logic to problems that aren't popular enough to be spelled out a dozen times in the dataset it's trained on. Ya know, the whole perfect scores on well known and respected collage tests, but failing to solve slightly altered riddles for children? It being literally incapable of learning new concepts is a pretty major pitfall if you ask me.
I'm really sick and tired of this "we just gotta make a machine that can learn and then we can teach it anything" line. It's nothing new, people were saying this shit since fucking 1950 when Alan Turing wrote it in a paper. A machine looking at an unholy amount of text and evaluation based on a new prompt, what is the most likely word to follow, IS NOT LEARNING!!! I was sick of this dilema before LLMs were a thing, but now it's just mind numbing.
AI developers are like the modern version of alchemists. If they can just turn this lead into gold, this one simple task, they'll be rich and powerful for the rest of their lives!
Transmutation isn't really possible, not the way they were trying to do it. Perhaps AI isn't possible the way we're trying to do it now, but I doubt that will stop many people from trying. And I do expect that it will be possible somehow, we'll likely get there someday, just not soon.
Depends on your definition of "we"...
now we have AI on the horizon promising to make things more efficient
sounds good
but we really know what it is actually going to be used for
Contradicts the first statement and the next statement
They want automate out everything. People packaging up goods for shipping, white collar jobs like analytics, business intelligence, customer service, chat support. Any sort of job that takes a low or moderate amount of effort or intellectual ability is threatened by AI.
OK you do know what they want to use it for.
But once AI takes all these jobs away and shrinks the amount of labor required, what are all these people going to do for work? It’s not like you can train someone who’s a business intelligence engineer easily to go do something else like HVAC, or be a nurse.
Highly untrainable people have always existed and are always the first to get replaced.
But it should be pretty obvious that you can’t run an entire society with no jobs.
Well not one based on capitalism.
The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don’t have jobs and no income, not able to survive…
Well the ones that can't do research and can't look up history maybe. AI is the new Robots, is the new assembly line is the new....
You are just using the age old technology fear narrative.
When Robots Take All of Our Jobs, Remember the Luddites (2017)
Automating jobs away is a good thing, many others here have explained why. When I read your title, I actually expected you would be writing about how AI is "detrimental to society" because it makes mistakes that humans don't make and is therefore useless for anything serious; this, I would have had a harder time arguing against.
Automating jobs away is a good thing
I remember seeing someone post this comic a while back, thought it was a pithy explanation.
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/TheWealthofDragons.png
But AI is only going to get better in the long run. How is that a solid argument?
What is AI, according to you?
It's a marketing term, aimed to create a void. So I wonder what products you think fills this void.
Ugh, I hate that you're right about this. It used to mean a topic of study in computer science. Now it means...I don't even know what it's supposed to mean.
Is AI really only detrimental to society? We're in the initial stages where they promise the world in order to get investors attention. But once the investors realize what it's actually capable of they'll have to focus on what it's actually capable of.
I think sometime next year we'll have a crash, and all the companies pushing AI will be forced to either focus on quality, or find the next thing to push.
Not AI TV's with Bluetooth connection to your phone! Those will be totally fine! Go ahead and say things about Trump and then go to Amazon and search for the grass trimmer you love. Go ahead and talk about the truck you like or the computer ram you need. So you work for Costco? Hmmm tells us more? Are you at the executive level? You wouldn't be a purchaser maybe 🤔? Or what?
Once it stops making money.
With a couple niche exceptions, AI hasn't started making money. What it has done is attract venture capital investment.
Venture capitalists are driven by a fear of missing out on the next big thing. A billion dollar score pays for a thousand bad million dollar bets, and AI that lives up to the hype could be worth trillions. This is also why every existing tech company is scrambling to add an AI thing to its products even where it makes no sense.
My theory is that it will never stop making money because they want less people in society in general, it's a way of trying to kill people off without actually having to do it yourself. As the number of people shrinks due to poverty and being unable to feed themselves, basically mass homelessness, and only the elite few surviving, those elite few won't have to do anything because they already had tons of money, and now AI can do all the hard work that they were too proud to do before. So I think it'll always be profitable. Just not for everyone.
What you're saying makes no sense. People need to realise that those at the helm are actually as stupid or worse than the average joe. They are profoundly uneducated and just happened to be in the right social circles to reach power. This is especially true in the US. As for AI, someone thinks there's money to be made from AI so it's getting pumped. Same shit for crypto. What we really need is a French revolution in the US, but that will never happen because even the most destitute of US americans thinks they're a millionaire who just happens to be on a low luck slump, so they will never revolt against the elite that "they are a part of".
how long until it's not making the right people money anymore? Sometime after that.
People simultaneously seem scared of AI automating jobs, and of there being too many old people for the young people to look after as they'd be too busy with their jobs. Wouldn't those cancel each other out?
there being too many old people for the young people to look after as they'd be too busy with their jobs
When your entire society revolves around working for a salary or for getting paid, that's why you can't take care of the old people. Now suppose AI automates a lot of stuff and we have time for taking care of older people... How are we supposed to do that without jobs? That's the problem
I'll make those robots do that job
The 12 year old video below explains the root cause of economic misery. Technology is a tool that can be used for good or evil. But the ruling class wants ALL the money. So technology is often used for more efficient oppression.
Meanwhile, we working class folks are too busy working and/or distracted (often fighting with each other) to mount any real resistance.
Already figured it out. I am waiting on the rest of you.
Right now there's a huge arms race between the big companies looking to be first in harvesting immense profits. The hype train is rolling, to attract business and investment.
If it becomes clear that its not profitable and won't become profitable, then the sudden revelations will come.
I think social media provides a good reference to start speculating an answer to your question.
how long until we realise the ones trying to force ai into everything are detrimental to society. Billionaires, big corporations and other tumors like that.
AI isnt the problem as it can be used for beneficial things, its abusers are.
Distracted by media and a market of commodities
We’re just resources, units for their economy
And they want technology that’ll make us obsolete
I mean why pay for workers when you can automate machines
yeah we’re being ruled by other human beings
who seem to have forgotten what that means
we’re hamsters on a wheel we’re a human fucking farm
And they’ve worked us to the bone we’re all weathered and wornhttps://ludlowpdx.bandcamp.com/track/times-new-roman
Every Empire on this Earth has fallen...and Floating very much is not flying. 🎵
And so as to not leave you with a Gordion Knot:
The structures of our state economies are going to matter in terms of protecting democracies, and by that I mean if you look at economies that were based in the kind of small producer economies like New England was vs states like the South and the American West that were always built on the idea of very high capital using extractive methods to get resources out of the land either cotton or mining or oil or water or agri business, those economies always depend on a few people with a lot of money, and then a whole bunch of people who are poor and doing the work for those Rich guys -- and that I'm not sure is compatible in terms of governance without addressing the reality that you know if people have more of a foothold in their own communities, they are then more likely to support the kinds of legislation that Community [Education, Healthcare, ..] and that may be the future of democracy, if not a national democracy.”
^ https://youtu.be/D7cKOaBdFWo?t=2139 Heather Cox Richardson, professor of American history
“Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectually and morally.”
Mutual Aid By Pëtr Kropotkin https://thereitis.org/kropotkins-mutual-aid/ https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarcho-mutual-aid-an-introduction-and-evaluation
Solidarity Economies, and Mutualism, will be the way forward.
To follow Corporate and their bought-out state institutions is to to walk willing into one's own ruin.
they can’t afford to employ cashiers
They've already removed most of the ones in the UK, it seems. Really worrying stuff when you realise how much they crept in during covid.
Most importantly "AI" doesn't exist.
But it's also worth nothing that absolutism is almost never helpful. I don't think data, statistics, computers, etc. are inherently evil technologies. It's the usual problem of how capitalism directs research and development towards violent control instead of liberation.
General Artificial Intelligence doesn't exist - we don't have HAL9000 or Terminator or Cortana yet.
But up to that point, and almost certainly even past it, the AI effect means the more sophisticated AI things become, the more people think "well </insert ai thing/> isn't actually intelligent or an AI".
As Larry Tesler says: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."