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I really hope Democrats do that. As a Republican this seems like it would be the biggest free political gift of the decade. Take a brand new issue very much open for debate and give the best side to President Trump, the most skilled political messenger of a generation.
It seems like a no-brainer. On balance, the current panic will almost certainly pass. The future is a debate between an expanding, triumphant vision of more energy and processing and building a new world, or a reactionary vision scared of change and unwilling to countenance any. Please, please give us this, I would love for Republicans to be the bold party with a new vision of industry.
I don’t think this will go the way you imagine it will. At least, there’s a lot of room for people to change their minds. I don’t think it will help that the concerns about water and toxins are basically fake news. The challenge that AI will rapidly change society is more serious and I think there are a lot of serious anxieties mixed in with that. But if one party wants to retrench and back away and the other wants to go forward into the future that seems like a free gift to me, no matter what the polling looks like right now, thank you, thank you!
I think the problem is that a good portion of the public has these points precisely backwards. They believe in the stupid water and toxin points, while believing that AI is all empty hype that will surely end in a rapture-like bubble pop that will magic everything away and make all technology revert back to 2021 again.
I've had frustrating discussions with people in my life who say that all the data center build out isn't worth it for "a better search engine." I had to make the point that if it is all hype, then they don't need to worry about the environmental effects of data centers, as we'll have a 5-10 year period of build up and usage and then all the infrastructure will be shut down and put on moth balls. The idea that LLMs and generative AI might actually be something new and interesting is not very widespread.
Heck, my D&D group has people who think that Mythos-tier cybercapabilities literally do not exist, and I still have art friends who act as if bad hands are an inevitability for AI art.
Where do you put me, in that I think that data centres themselves are mostly harmless, but also that so-called 'AI' is mostly useless?
I think being AI skeptical is fine up to a point.
Doubting AI can do things it has been able to do for four months is different from doubting capabilities we haven't seen yet, and might never see. I think there are smart reasons to believe AI might never be significantly more capable than it is (though I don't agree with this position.)
Even from a pure business perspective, I'm open to the idea that AI might be a bubble. But I have forced myself to watch Youtube videos by people confidently predicting that AI will all go away when the bubble pops because it is too expensive to run, and I just feel like they genuinely haven't done the first bit of research on the topic. Like, how hard is it to find out about local models for both text and images?
At the very least, now that these things are out in the wild, there's no way that the open weight LLM and image model genie is ever going back in the bottle. The unit economics of frontier AI may never work, but AI slop is here forever.
Yeah, I think it's quite possible that Anthropic and or (especially?) OpenAI have over-leveraged themselves and suffer some horrible fate and possibly derail the economy, but I doubt AI will go away, even if its pace of improvement levels off. I think the worst-case scenario is it becomes a niche for hobbyists and cybersecurity types, like Linux or something.
I think @OliveTapenade is wrong inasmuch as coding and cybersecurity is not "niche" but correct inasmuch as software is something like 5% of the US economy and people who are inside of the AI [information] bubble don't realize that not everything is computer.
If 'niche' is too dismissive, would it be better to say 'bounded'? Thus far bots seem to be very good at interacting with data, but they do not interface with the world beyond that. I think I stand by the idea that they're a wordcel technology. Maybe they will put all the coders out of work, but that leaves the overwhelming majority of the economy. I can't help but feel like people who work in data manipulation are over-generalising from their situation to everyone.
This is closer to what I am getting at.
However I am not sure it will stay this way. Using LLMs [and other AI: LLMs may not be the best model to actually accomplish this, and at best they are probably only part of the puzzle] to do object manipulation will likely become a thing. CAD is already real, 3D printing/cutting is already real, throwing LLMs into the mix comes with real risks but also real upsides.
Everyone is very enamored of software, but robots building houses, if possible (and I expect it will be) will probably be where the money is actually at. I think that AI companies have over-focused on using AIs to write software (although, to be fair, it's the lowest hanging fruit) to the detriment of pushing more mundane but vastly more important and, over the long term, remunerative physical labor.
I think they're trying harder than ever, but it just turns out that building general-purpose robots is friggin' hard (sorry, Asimov). Human-level intelligence is a tiny little evolutionary whoopsy that's like a million years old. Language? Maybe 100k years. Programming? Don't make me laugh. But processing sensory data and navigating the real world? Evolution has been selecting for that since the beginning of time. We have, uh, a little catching up to do.
What's funny is that I think LLMs are already at a level where they could handle the high-level organization of a robot's work (albeit perhaps not cost-effectively). e.g. looking at the environment and seeing where the laundry is and where to put it. But they're not very helpful for the dumb low-level motions (what we think of as muscle memory). I believe we're making progress on it, but there hasn't been a giant spike in capability like with LLMs.
I don't actually think you want general-purpose robots, though. What you need is a series of frameworks within which robots can cut, weld, print, fasten, and manipulate objects. These frameworks should go from small to very, very large. The small ones are used to make microwaves and toaster ovens, the medium-sized ones to make cars and airplanes, large (mobile) ones to make houses, and the giant ones to make ships.
General purpose robots are tempting because they don't require replacing preexisting architecture but the truth is that you shouldn't want to retain preexisting architecture. General purpose robots intended to be a 1:1 replacement for humans won't build things much faster than humans (although you can run them on a double shift) and, worse, you'll still need to change up your infrastructure every time you need to make a specific model. If you get a general-purpose framework then changing your production line becomes largely a matter of software redesign.
This is massively significant because it brings down the cost of technological improvement, experimentation, and customization. It also makes industry dual-use again. During World War Two, factories that could make a car or refrigerator were quickly pressed into making tanks and airplanes. We cannot do that today because modern tanks and airplanes are extremely bespoke pieces of equipment. We need manufacturing that is capable of doing that again.
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