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Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI
(www.theonion.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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Technology
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As an IT Professional i hate AI, because many People favor AI in Situations where statistical Algorithms are already good.
I agree that AI can be helpful and inspiring for new Algorithms but in many cases AI is used to replace Algorithms, wasting huge energy resources in the process - instead of just improving said Algorithms.
The huge energy needs are... yeah
There was an article in our newspaper not long ago about the possibility of using AI to optimize the CO2 footprint of concrete.
Like, everyone was suuuper into it, and it genuinely did a good job at what they needed it to do. But actually using this at a large scale throws the benefits completely out of the window in terms of raw energy consumption to even run it.
I feel like this is inevitable with any new tech. Social media, cryptocurrency, instant messaging, the Internet itself. ML is the new kid that people want to use any way possible to make money, until they realize as you said it can only help in so many situations.
More often than not a nice sql query and some programming gets the job done.
I don't think it'll stay this way forever, just a lot of annoying hype atm, but I don't fault the technology itself for that.
I actually did an ML project at my job, much to my chagrin, to develop a chat app that lets us ask questions about our product.
It actually turned out really cool and was dead simple to implement. Now our employees (customer service team esp) can ask questions with a "trust but verify" approach to solve customer problems and surface information quickly. Saves a lot of time otherwise spent sifting thru documentation and support articles.
as usual, the problem is capitalism
AI is a broad family of statistical and simulation algorithms.
They don't replace algorithms, they are algorithms very powerful for some cases. For other cases they are less powerful, or overkill and they shouldn't be used. But there is no dichotomy, as one (AI) is part of the other (algorithms)
Desserts are a type of food, yet the dichotomy is still useful.
How is it useful? Dessert vs food?
"At the end of the lunch nowadays everyone want to have a dessert, but this is wrong because they should have food"...
The sentence AI vs algorithms sounds pretty much like this
There is one thing you have left out though; machine learning lowers barriers. It takes years to become a good statistical analyst, data engineer, or what have you. Now, I can train an AI to analyse the data and sure, when done right the results will be 90% as good as if I studied statistics for 10 years and did it myself, and yes there are pitfalls to be wary of, but now there are a lot of people with access to these tools that were previously out of reach.
The biggest challenge humanity as a whole is currently - i am not exaggerating - solving the climate catastrophe. In this context, i don't care if machine learning lowers barriers.
I don't want it even - Because we don't have that many resources available to solving this existential crisis of humanity. I want energy and resources to spent wisely with benefit to society. Much of how machine learning, AI and bitcoin, etc is used today does nothing (and is even harmful) in that regard.
If your target is lower carbon emissions then you are targeting the wrong group. Green electricity is already plenty possible, and we'd be on a doomsday course even without AI.
The problem is not the power consumption of AI but the over reliance on fossil fuel power plants.
I disagree - i think only relying on green electricity is good, but it won't solve the devastating status we are currently that is the climate catastrophe.
Scientists currently say we are on track of their worst predictions. We need radical change, and one such change is reducing our consumption of resources drastically, globally. Consuming less power makes it much easier to use green electricity for this power.
True but it would mean talking about AI in this context is completely irrelevant.
AI isn't even close to being the biggest offender when it comes to industrial power consumption. To talk about AI in this context is practically a distraction, with how insignificant it is. You might as well bring gaming into the conversation while you're at it. It's even less relevant to the conversation than the likes of bitcoin mining.
It's not like latter where a) you need insane levels of power for all cases in order to get anywhere and b) that's the only barrier. You can train an AI on a gaming laptop. Bigger data sets might require, I dunno, a server, but that's never not been true with any kinds of heavier loads. And once you have your data model, you can just keep using that like you would in any other program, without a power draw any more notable than any other program.
Also, you cannot just go 'I want an AI' and have that magically make you money and shit. You need it to have as much direction, programming expertise and planning as any other computer program just to even get started. That will already remove the many people who have no idea what they're doing and just want to make free money.
No, the real conversation needs to be had about industrial machinery, especially older iterations that treat power as something in infinite supply.
hey, that's a better critique or commentary than in the onion article.
while i don't doubt people are trying to shove AI into a lot of places it's not optimal yet, (which is entirely fair and reasonable to point out) i don't think that's a fair reason to poo-poo any use or positivity about AI in any context.
rather, it's become a really big fad to hate on AI and insult anyone who uses it. i mean, the technology is still young, but the stuff it's already doing was "impossible" and "never going to happen" a few years ago. now we are developing things like text to 3d, which makes me excited for a future environment where you can dictate design and animation for entire animated experiences/movies.
independent creatives will have a blast with it. salty onion article writer will be angrily yelling at his computer.
I think i am hating AI this much is also due to the fact that we as humanity have big troubles fixing the climate catastrophe. And not only does AI in 99% not contribute meaningful things towards this huge challenge, rather it accelerates the problem with its huge energy needs. Needs which i call "waste" compared to the much more important problem of solving climate catastrophe.
It is the same reason i hate bitcoin.
This onion article captures my emotion much better than anything anybody has said in recent years. Because it expresses my Hate towards Managers which much power, much money - who could do lots of great things to society by being ousted. Those managers won't listen to any arguments i could give, nor would they ever see my argument. They care only about money and greed. By not listing facts this onion article is much more to the point.
It is glorious satire, loving it.
bitcoin never had a use other than "will become valuable?"
many (myself included) believe this technology will probably be the only one that will develop fast enough to actually help with the climate crisis.
optimizing research and academia as well as environmental issues through information processing. people are excitedly talking about automated proof-checking and context finders that can sift through hundred of papers while you check your coffee. this stuff is good for science and science is good for environmentalism. maybe go after the politicians and companies that are not possibly going to be a benefit in the struggle against environmental collapse.
why do people keep relating it to bitcoin? because it uses GPUs? that's literally the only connection.
somehow people have associated it with crypto and NFTs as if they are even mildly related. perhaps because those things are easier to hate, so why not associate them.
I think this is the wrong direction of trying to solve the climate catastrophe - as long as Big companies continue their egoistical greed for money, climate catastrophe will accelerate. As those big companies won't choose inconvenient but necessary solutions, they have to be forced by the state. If money is even a small amount of motivation, it is greenwashing.
We have to kill capitalism. This is the only solution which lets society focus on society instead of money.
that's definitely the best bet, although i feel AI tools being used by the people who actually want to fix the environment are going to have more success than those asking the people in power to change the system or themselves.
although if you have ideas on that front i'm all for it.
i just don't believe the anti-AI fanti-~~nerd~~AI-bro fad is really helping.. anyone, in any way.
We already have at least a century of research telling us that burning fossil fuels leads to climate change. What's AI going to do at this point?
give us a way to fix the issue without relying on the idiots at the top being decent human beings.
if you can fix that issue then we wouldn't have so much of a problem.
i'd expect AI to help through information processing for research and engineering. current AI tools are already useful to many as co-pilot tools. not everyone is creative enough to get use out of AI, but we are moving towards being able to dictate and gesture in natural language to optimize some things that may have taken a lot more time. it's also valuable for certain efforts in optimization and engineering. does everyone hate alphafold now too?
i think a lot of the AI hate right now is from the fact that it takes thought and creative use to get the most out of available tools. as we all learned, if it isn't already "AGI" it's 100% useless for everything forever.
I just don't even talk with people about it anymore. Keep my interests to myself because it doesn't fucking matter what it is anymore-- being trained in tech, having a love for tech, all it is is a setup to find out the shit that you like in the field that you know has already been fucking stolen and driven into the ground by the neckbeard settler techbros that have been the bane of your existence and industry since before you were even born.
Not worth talking about it anymore, to anyone.