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Sigh.
If it was so easy to point out how LLM benefits the common man, then you'd have an easy response in your back pocket. You didn't, and instead responded with ridicule, the equivalent of 'lolno'.
I'm not accusing you of bad faith. If anything, the only hostility in this argument I'm seeing comes from you. I'm asking you to back up your argument with something. I've seen instances of LLMs being utilized to impressive degree, and I know of atleast one person that I find interesting to follow who says similar, so while I'm skeptical I'm atleast willing to hear him out.
My basic argument boils down to this: I don't think you can extrapolate the above and expect similar return out of the common man, or ways it benefits them.
Still, I do want to step back and clarify something. When I see the argument in the wilds - I'm not talking about the motte, I'm talking elsewhere about people comparing Data Centers to Nuclear Power, I read their implied statement as to say that, yes, they equate Data Centers in importance to Nuclear Power. And when asked 'why', they never give a solild answer - they either reflect, or attack. Or, as you called them, my strawmen arguments. It's why I brought it up. I find the comparison rather silly, or an actual use of a slippery slope fallacy.
You said something very unusual and, when I asked for elaboration, proceded to defend a different statement.
Now you want me to defend my position when I have not advanced any.
Ok.
Here are some things I use AI for every day:
Here are some things I know my friends have used AI for:
Here are some things I have seen AI being used for on the internet:
These are all multi-billion dollar industries. Translation alone is probably $100B+, dare I say even more if people get over the privacy concerns and we have babelfish auto-translation wearables.
Nobody has been able to explain any benefits of AI to you? What on earth are you talking about?
I’m not even sure what a charitable explanation looks like. Maybe you just got out of a coma? Maybe all your previous interlocutors couldn’t speak English? Maybe you are blind and use text-to-speech and have missed a lot of news?
You didn’t just stop there. You said that data centers themselves have no benefits for regular people. Need I point out that we would not be having this argument without data centers. Data centers are not some new category of invention. They are large networks of computers specialized for processing data. We would not have militaries or banks without data centers. We would lose a lot of industry and a lot of farms.
Now, if the statement is just that nuclear is more important than data centers, well, that’s debatable, that’s fair, I can squint and I can see the case. Energy is pretty important. Nuclear would probably be even more transformative if it hadn’t been limited by so much regulation. Nuclear and data centers, it’s hard to say which is more important, the water or the glass.
Now not all of these changes have been positive, and if you want to we can debate whether the good outweighs the bad. (I lean toward the good.)
And there has been a lot of hyperbole about what AI is ultimately capable of up to the belief that it could destroy the world. (I say not.)
And there are a lot of practical problems that merit a lot of caution, and I don’t like the way AI art makes everything uglier either.
But if your position is that AI has done nobody any good and nobody can explain to you how it has… I’m not even sure how to parse that. I think the most charitable explanation has to be that you’re just strawmanning, because that makes a lot more sense than the ignorance otherwise required. There are wars being fought on intelligence produced by AI, financial markets are being optimized by inputs from AI, satellites in space, computer chip factories, farming schedules, weather forecasts.
You are benefiting from AI in hundreds of small ways right now even if you don’t touch a chatbot.
If we went back five years and described this technology people would call it fantastical. It’s changing the way we understand language and thought itself, this is before we get robots and self-driving cars and satellites to blanket the earth in WiFi. The worst AI slop applications are wildly more impressive than what was thought possible even a few years ago. Science fiction.
And now that we have a miraculous machine that can turn dirt into thought we have a political movement that wants to stop this because they don’t like data centers.
Actually I don’t think that’s it at all, I think they’re just worried, with a lot of justification, and data centers are just how you attack this thing that’s changing everything.
Unfortunately, though, all that’s going to do it make this world-changing technology more expensive, and therefore rare, and therefore concentrate its power in the hands of the few.
It turns out it’s a property of math, you string enough transformers together with enough data and computers can translate into arbitrary languages and draw pictures and write code and do math. There’s not really any stopping it, the question is whether we can harness this change for good or will passively sit and let it change us for the worse. Because the genie’s not going back into the model.
Anyways, I hope that the above goes some way toward clarifying my position, which I hope is not too bloomer or too doomer. But when I hear that you can’t think of anything good to come from AI, I wonder if you’re doing yourself a disservice, because all that belief is conditioning you for is passively accepting or even resisting changes that you could actively harness to your own great good.
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