Somehow I don't see arguments comparing powering AI with producing food to go over well with them.
Many opponents to AI do not view the tech as having a net benefit. Comparing it to food production would serve to make you look more the fool to them despite their claims about water consumption frequently being wacky.
I am finding that 42% of California water is agriculture and 8% of that is for almonds. 3% of state water usage on a luxury nut might not be moving the needle that much, but it does feel wasteful for a state that is perpetually hovering on drought conditions.
Right; anti-data-center sentiment is really a way of attacking AI as a technology; arguments about the water or power use of data centers are just an excuse.
Well, to be fair, the public has been going through a multi-year forced beta-test of AI all while CEOs keep going on national television and posting on social media how there will be mass unemployment because of AI. To say nothing of all the companies that have (and soon will) close up shop due to increased prices from the global memory shortage unrelated to the proclaimed job-replacing benefits of AI.
And let's not forget many of the remaining independent websites on the Internet closing up shop due to being unable to afford the substantial increase in hosting costs resulting from aggressive scrapers getting data to keep training AI on.
Or the massive improvement in bots and click-fraud due to AI, pushing an increasing number of companies to embrace heinous practices such as mandatory facial recognition for users to be allowed to engage in socialization.
Or the increased electricity prices already realized around much of the country due to AI both so much of the existing grid's supply and requiring expensive upgrades to the infrastructure - the latter of which is frequently paid for by taxpayers.
All for the wondrous promises of unproven future capabilities.
The real mystery to me is how it's a mystery to so many people why there's a large and enduring anti-AI sentiment.
SA is another one i remember now you mention it tho. getting a crash course in the nastiness of what was out there really helped me realize what my empathy base should be.
It's probably why i never got into 4chan at all.
Large-scale exposure caused no discernible degree of trauma. That's not a small phenomena that seems to have been ignored by policymakers and those who inform them.
> Large-scale exposure caused no discernible degree of trauma.
How do we know this? All I've seen so far is anecdata. As my own anecdata, an ex of mine felt she had been traumatized by watching horror movies at a very young age. Many years later she still had flashbacks.
Statistical anomalies exist, sure. But if there was any meaningful negative impact at scale, you'd think it would've shown up over the decades in trending therapy topics, to people bringing up traumatic memories of the old Internet, to....to something at scale.
Knowing what she's seen at that age, I'm pretty sure I'd have flashbacks as well. This wasn't the old internet, and it's not like the new internet is free of such content. I really don't think that we have a way to quantify this, but, as one sibling comment said, expecting no influence seems unrealistic – as is expecting that influence to be easily detectable. I'm sure my ex is not the only one bringing up such experiences in therapy and I bet if you ask experienced therapists they will have similar stories.
Even if it were reported at scale to each and every therapist, they rarely share even anonymized stories with others. Anecdata: I’ve talked to a bunch, and processed some of that shit, but nobody else hears.
No, but there's rough heuristic that are generally reliable. Psychologists talk. If a problem is recurring - they talk a lot amongst each other regarding the prevalence of the problem.
I don't recall there ever being a trending issue among psychologists - child or otherwise - dealing with clients who have been traumatized about the minimally restricted Internet of the 90's and 00's.
But if you don't trust this heuristic, then tell me - what distinguishes the belief that seeing horrible content on the Internet in the 90's and 00's led to a large number of traumatized individuals vs the belief that the ready availability of horrible content hurt a statistically negligible number of people and that it was a significant net benefit?
Actions and policies should be based on something more than intuition and belief alone.
And in the olden times, people got nightmares from reading books, or by hearing a horror story around a campfire. Banning everything that is scary or can cause nightmares or trauma would be a very difficult effort, and deciding a boundary of what is too traumatic and what is not would be very arbitrary.
Can we agree that there's a difference between banning things and making things difficult to access?
I'm an extremely liberal-libertarian free speech and free information advocate. I grew up in a world where as a 12 year old, on IRC, in 1992, I had people sending me fetish porn and child porn, and I developed the belief at that age that that was fine, if you were 12, you had the right to see anything you could, including other 12 year olds naked. But this was not something most 12 year olds were exposed to, and by the time I was 14 I was pretty clear on why they shouldn't be.
We live in a world where there is no such thing as a "ban". Oh, I know, I hated bans and railed against bans, and I don't think the government has any right to ban anything. But a ban is just an obstacle to people who want to violate the norm. A ban is only a way for societies to set up barriers between people and bad shit which is bad for society, and sometimes it's okay for there to be barriers. In 1992, the reason most kids were basically incredibly innocent and had never seen any porn at all at 12 years old, was that the barriers to it were reasonably high. If you were some kind of command line warrior child who could figure out IRC over dialup, then yeah, people would literally mail you brown paper boxes with porn tapes on VHS.
There are, actually, boundaries on what is too traumatic to show someone. Personally, I'd like to obliterate the behavior that fuels those things, rather than need to address the downstream issues of people seeing them. But there are things that are poisonous to society because they poison individuals, and there's a role for society and government to play in prohibiting those things, or at least preventing their spread as much as possible.
There is evil in the world, and it is sometimes necessary to stop it. Free information is not an unalloyed good.
The xz utils issue very likely included intentional efforts on the state actor to burn them out. That isn't something a culture change among users can fix.
Funny how Gemini generally takes into account all the words you type whereas Google search tends to ignore most words you type or otherwise direct you to results for thematically (or grammatically or semantically) similar words to what you searched but otherwise wholly irrelevant.
Google crippling search to bolster AI is a dangerous game. But without people going to competitors, what's the recourse?
They're already crippling their AI to perform what look like sponsored searches.
The plural of anecdote is not data but this does not feel like a one-off thing: I was trying to find where it would be possible to get to have a reasonable holiday, and asked Gemini to list me all the international airports in two named countries that had direct flights from my preferred departure airport. The response came back with a single proposed flight destination with "book here" prominently available.
Only once I told it that the search was NOT an impulse purchase intent and I really wanted to know the possible destinations - then did it actually come back with the list of airports that satisfied my search criteria.
Although if we are looking for the bright side, it did provide a valid and informative answer on the second try. I haven't had that kind of experience on SEO-infested Google search for quite a long time now.
Many opponents to AI do not view the tech as having a net benefit. Comparing it to food production would serve to make you look more the fool to them despite their claims about water consumption frequently being wacky.
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