On one hand, you’re right. On the other, it’s normal that humans want to gauge the authenticity of the things they interact with. Some sort of uncanny valley thing.
And still, those humans would go outside and check when they heard an odd noise, so they could ascertain if it was a threat or not. This is more of this.
I have trouble understanding this. I don't see anyone complaining that we use microwaves and ovens instead of going for lit wood to cook or using search engines instead of crawling through libraries, or using Google Maps instead of using paper maps. These are tools. If output of an LLM conveys the ideas to be told, then what is the problem?
You are paying restaurants for food to be prepared in the way you want. But this is not the same. Someone created some content the way they want. You haven't ordered that content. And you complain it's not prepared the way you like.
One related problem I see, is the avoidance of accountability and responsibility thats prevalent. When people use AI words and don't check they actually match their intent or voice, and then if something was incorrect or didn't stand the test of scrutiny they avoid accountability and can say "The AI wrote it and I didn't check it closely". It seems similar to what we see in leadership chains in some organizations, we are struggling to hold those people accountable so we lash out on whomever and whatever we can so IMO thats part of the emotional undertone of the whiplash we see on AI content here.
Edit: Since this is possible, I think it's important to start to ask "did you use AI and disclose it?" as it sets the tone better.
"Translation tools" is AI, so it's correct that our AI-sensors went off.
Edit: Also, speaking as a trans person, the analogue would be looking at a trans person and noticing that they are trans. Which is not a transvestigation. (You wouldn't normally announce that said person is trans, because it's usually not relevant. It often is relevant if an article is written with AI.)
The idea of kids being a get-out-of-jail-free card to happiness and existential turmoil has never made sense to me. Kids are wonderful, but not because they’re not a magical gateway to happiness.
We’ve seen an incredibly powerful technology follow multiple exponential curves in its capability, but we’re supposed to ask why we’re telling ourselves “stories” if we think about what will happen if that technology continues to follow the curves it has been following without sign of hitting any walls?
Is AGI certain? No. But there’s currently no specific reason to believe it isn’t coming in the next few years.
This kind of logic only works if the percentages for each industry are all equally that small, so you can treat them as all equally bad, but they are absolutely not.
The single biggest non divisible sector you can realistically come up with is "personal transportation", but even that is only 10% of global co2. You can look at other sectors like "industry" and "energy" and I can guarantee you will be able to easily split things down into sub categories which have <5% impact on global co2 emissions.
But they didn't split it up like that. They said all data center emissions irrespective of what those data centers are used for — which can be an extremely wide variety of things since data centers basically run our entire network information internet economy. That's much more like saying all transportation emissions instead of splitting it up by type of transportation. Yes, that doesn't include the full life cycle emissions of creating the data centers. But I'm pretty sure that transportation, as a proportion of emissions, doesn't also include the full life cycle emissions of producing the cars, trucks, boats, and airplanes in the first place.
Also, I think it's worth pointing out that the sectors you list are like 1.5 to 2x larger than the one he gave and the largest nondivisble sector, you listed is literally 10x, which I think does more to prove his point than yours.
Also, by your logic, literally any new sector of the economy that uses any amount of energy, basically at all, should be banned, because it "all contributes." that's a consistent position to take and there are certainly people that hold that position, but that at that point seems like a fundamental axiological difference that I and probably OP are simply not going to agree with you on.
Thats OP's point - you need to reduce usage everywhere and pointing out that AI is only 1.5% doesn't take away from the fact that usage needs to be reduced there as well.
It's not really about which one matters. They all matter. But here is a rough breakdown of global fossil fuel energy usage:
* Electricity: 27%
* Industry: 24%
* Transportation: 15%
* Agriculture & land use: 11%
* Buildings: 7%
Then within electricity, data centers use about 1.5% of global electricity. Within data centers, AI accounts for somewhere between 15-20% of energy use.
So if you take 27% × 1.5% × ~17%, you find that AI is currently responsible for something like 0.07% of global fossil fuel emissions.
It definitely matters in the "every bit matters" sense, but also the numbers paint a really different picture than you'd get from statement like the one we started with.
What otheer industries are hyping the need for tens of gigawatts, maybe hundreds? On top of that they are hyping the idea of building utterly unrealistic space stations that would cost 10 times what the ISS cost. So maybe people are focusing on the dishonesty instead of the energy use. One or the other I suppose.
