My hottest tech take is that what big tech has actually succeeded at more than anything is a complete outsourcing of any and all responsibility for their actions.
They've succeeded at building wildly irresponsible tools that get used in wildly irresponsible ways and nobody in power seems to care.
Right now, the proliferation of "AI" threatens to slow down the energy transition. Energy demand from data centers is growing faster than anything else, despite the progress we've made making data processing, transmission, and storage more energy-efficient.
That's fucked up.
If there's a new religion, it's the one that techbros have: more computing will solve all our problems.
The faith that throwing more effort at cracking the AI nut will unlock new potential for humanity or whatever blinds the believers from considering any problems they might create along the way.
An addendum to this thread:
I have seen this attitude persist in the open-source world, too.
The finer realities are different, of course, but an author's imagination of how someone /should/ use their idea often blinds them to the real problems that show up later.
"That's misuse, not my problem"
Different, but many years ago I suggested some changes to the interface of a program that was as useful as cumbersome to use to the point of being almost unusable. The authors response went something like "the visual interface is for your convenience, not mine, I use the command line version".
It might be the pessimist in me but that's the way I see it going down. Look you look at social influence campaigns as a starter. Then given the cooling of relationships between world powers and these technologies, I very much see the next cold war.
I don't want to agree with this but I do.
However, there is a wild card: if our continuation down the path of throwing money and resources at AI doesn't actually produce anything truly useful, this will all have been a silly exercise.
And given the collateral issues of all "AI" stuff so far...
Really boils my nuts thinking about how we could have a tech boom for green energy, but the oil lobby and their allies and cronies are blocking it. So instead we're pursuing worthless tech that only makes the world worse with no obvious upsides.
No, but you see, using up all the grid capacity we have on AI is GOOD because that will let the magic computer boxes figure out what we need to do to solve climate change.
It's not like we already know or anything.
The whole "there must be one single magical deus ex machina bit of tech to solve it all, no we won't pay any attention to everything showing that we have most of what we need already, we just need to roll it out much much faster" thing from these people is so tiresome.
I mean, you *say* “deus ex machina”, but some significant proportion of the people working in the field *literally* believe that building a machine god is inevitable, and are terrified that whoever develops it won't have the right magic spells to bind it to our will.
We actually are having that right now, especially with the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, though I understand that it's not super obvious to everyone.
Because of the Inflation Reduction Act, other policies, & innovation, US installed solar & wind power capacity in 2030 is now projected to be double what it would have been before the start of the Biden Administration. Double! That’s good. Let’s do even more now. www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-roo...
given the number of silicon valley ceos who subscribe to longtermism, you're literally correct when you call it a religion. burn all our resources now so we can upload our brains (?) to eternal life (???) in paradise (?????) in a datacenter somewhere.
Spare a thought for those of us actually working in the tech sector.
We don't have the skills to go elsewhere but we're never allowed work on any of the obvious problems we can see out our own windows.
We're slaves to VC fads because that's all the work there is to pay our mortgages.
What we can do is very limited.
Other than cultivating portfolios of clients who tangibly improve people's lives as opposed to enriching the already wealthy...
It’s wild that techbros think that encoding the worst impulses of humanity into a computerized human-substitute will have good results.
Deeply and profoundly laughable people who should be made to feel crushing shame until they change.
I am beginning to genuinely question the character of fellow software developers that continue to work in the field of LLMs and generative AI, despite it not yet producing tangible benefits sufficient to outweigh the tsunami of misinformation, spam, deepfakes, and vast energy demands used to run it.
Last time I Tweeted about this on The Bad Site™ I got some pushback from some followers working in the domain, but I think we've given the projects more than enough time to demonstrate some redeeming qualities, and they've failed to deliver.
I honestly don’t know if solving our problems is even on anyones radar anymore. The goal is just to sell out. Tech needs a new Hype Cycle every couple of years to keep investors feeling that FOMO. Whether or not the end product is even useful is secondary to how many people made bank in the process.
Many of my colleagues over the years have earnestly expressed this review.
It's a little saddening, because I find so many of them are smart, logical people, then they have this blind belief that they don't reflect on.
Even people explicitly told they'll know neither the day nor the hour have trouble resisting latching onto signs the world is ending.
For those who believe in robot singularity...
I would argue this is part of a bigger issue with the mentality of out-of-touch techbros with poor media literacy. I remember how in the 2010s the thing that was gonna save humanity was going to Mars.
I refer to these people as techno fetishists, I also lump futurists in with them. The tech bros think it will make them rich, the futurists are completely delusional, and the techno optimists are just utopianists who put their faith in technology, all utopianism has brought nothing but suffering.
1
These people generally do not understand the technology they fetishize (as in an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion) and that lack of understanding on feed in to the fetishization of technology.
2
They always over estimate what technology can do and will do. They also actively ignore any issues with the technology to the detriment of others.
Last
One of my concerns with the impact of LLMs is precisely that we're wasting a couple of decades of making things more power efficient in the name of "AI" powered crap that doesn't do anything useful (other than the fabled market value) or that could be done in much less energy intensive ways.
Don't forget the vast amount of water it's taking in increasingly parched areas to run these bluffing machines, they could hardly be more cartoonishly bad if they burned orphans for fuel
I think the real issue with our energy transition is 50+ years of legislative capture by the fossil fuel industry that has obstructed everything from energy production to mass transit projects.
Blaming new tech is like blaming the wind for knocking over the house we made of matchsticks and hope.
Fun fact, two things can be true at the same time.
Pointing out one bad thing doesn't mean I'm dismissing other bad things. Why would you assume this is the case?
Seems so!
Another fun side effect of operating upon a weak induction is that it lets you go about your day believing that the point made by the original poster doesn't have merit.
What a fun world we live in today.
