I don't consider that anything good. Design is just about making new products faster, which is a bad thing as it accelerates consumerism. And medical scans? That might help maybe a thousand extra people at the cost of gigagwatts of energy used that is polluting the entire planet.
To me, all of those positives are dwarfed by negatives.
You can't be serious. This is a highly specialized field in a topic that a few dozen people have interest in. Rather useless and basically a mental stimulating game for some professors. I have a math PhD and know very well that math went well past its point of diminishing returns in solving real-world problems a long time ago.
Unproductive for the person perhaps, but not for the development of technology. But I do agree in general that using AI is not a great strategy for human beings. Read a book indeed.
> Maybe on break but while deep-working I just want the information necessary to do the job, the communication being there to communicate the information, efficiently.
The problem is that we are slowly be pushed to become cogs who only really think this way. We shouldn't just want to be the most efficient possible. Technology already reduces the ability for us to connect, which is why connections at work seem weird or shallow in the first place. We simply don't need each other as much, so it makes sense that AI seems like the next logical step.
Your sentiments are just your instinctual desire to move to the next local maximum in a sequence of descending maxima that lead to the bottom.
> My argument is that using a machine to replace your thinking, your voice, or your relationships is a very bad thing. Humans have intrinsic worth—machines do not.
I agree with that, and the only logical path if we are to preserve this principle is to eradicate AI, and not try and control it. There is no way to control it (think prisoner's dilemma, greedy individuals, etc.)
That is true. What will happen in with the world is that consumerism and capitalism will be pushed aside for direct technological construction. In this world, AI, rather than the market, optimizes.
> I am not saying that LLMs are worthless—they are marvels of engineering and can solve some particularly thorny problems that have confounded us for decades.
Disagree with that, because firstly, they have not really solved any problems that outweight the negatives that they have unleashed and will unleash on society.
So they make programmers more effective: is that actually a good thing, though? Fact is, most software is designed to make consumerism and corporations more effective, and that's not really a good thing for the long-term health of the planet.
Your article also indicates a sort of independence between keeping intellectual tasks primarily human and allowing AI/LLMs to work in specific domains. However, those with the power don't care about principles. They just want to replace as much as they can and use the human instinct to get ahead quickly to do so. And no amount of priniciple will stop them. AI is just too powerful to be used in a way that is consistent with human beings keeping their intellectual environment healthy.
Absolutely right. However, it's not good to replace too much manual labor, either. There is also a balance between too much and too little (i.e. not learning enough manual skills to take care of yourself).
There is a balance in both the mental and physical domains. Those who have a high intellectual capacity will probably think otherwise because intellectual activities is what THEY like to do. But the truth is, some people enjoy manual labor and it's not good to completely replace them either because there is art in manual work as well.
On the other hand, looking things up yourself allows you to become quite familiar with the way things work in a more detailed way than just getting the answer through an LLM.
That is right. Worldwide quarantine was also an even more difficult task in some ways if you really think about it but the world was much better at that (even if some countries lagged behind) because there was an immediate pain felt, not unlike a parent threatening the immediate revocation of priveleges. With climate change, there is no such immediate threat to the average high-consumption individual.
Well, that point itself is invalid. Because ameliorations such as the mapping solution actually makes it less likely that people will do something about the root cause – same as air conditioning makes it less likely that the rich will care about a warming climate.
Well that is true. No argument there. We do need to hit rock bottom, because humans only respond to immediate pain. We are too stupid to collectively work together.
A rather sarcastic reply, but I never intended to be original nor surprising. I'm afraid I had to point out the obvious, and for that I apologize as it is almost painful, but the OP statement of "people are working on it" is also equally painful in how obviously ineffectual it is.
Are they, though? Last time I checked, CO2 is going up without any "flattening of the curve". And whenever mainstream environmentalists annonce X megawatts added to the grid, a tech company announces that they need Y > X megawatts for AI. Plastic production goes up steadily without cessation every year, and there's still immense amounts of deforestation.
No, people "working" on it are intellectually amusing themselves with technology that could be a workable solution if only everyone actually took action and reduced their consumption, which doesn't need that technology in the first place. Pretty much all mainstream solutions are just psychological salves to make us think we are doing something.
Working on it, yeah right. We simply need to make significant reductions in CO2 output and no one is doing that.
Furthermore, technologies like this will make people less likely to do something about the root problem because it ameliorates it.
I think it's too much information to handle, and that information can interfere with the enjoymnet of what we already have. It might be useful in an economic sense, but its usefulness to life is questionable.
Personally, I think it's not such a good thing after all.
That does not imply that future progress is a good thing, nor does it imply that future progress will even be useful to the majority. It boggles my mind how some people make the logical inference that "all progress is good" based on "some past progress was useful".
To me, all of those positives are dwarfed by negatives.