Illusion — Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis (which it is facilitating), get rid of poverty (on which it is heavily relying), and unleash the full potential of human creativity (which it is undermining)?
You must log in or register to comment.
Who tf thinks ai will solve climate change? I’ve never heard that ever.
I’ve heard that from plenty of people
iirc, there were some statements from companies (Microsoft?) that we won’t have to worry about AI’s effect on climate change because it’ll also come up with the solutions
We’ve had the tech to drastically cut power consumption for a few years now, it’s just about adapting the existing hardware to include the tech.
There’s a company MythicAI which found that using analog computers (ones built specifically to soft through .CKPT models, for example) drastically cuts down energy usage, is consistently 98-99% accurate, simply by taking a digital request call, converting it to an analog signal, the signal is processed then converted back to a digital signal and set to the computer to finish the task.
In my experience, AI is only drawing 350+ watts when it is sifting through the model, it ramps up and ramps down consistently based on when the GPU is utilizing the CUDA cores and VRAM, which are when the program is processing an image or the text response (Stable Diffusion and KoboldAI). Outside of that, you can keep stable diffusion open all day idle and power draw is marginally higher, if it even is.
So according to MythicAI, the groundwork is there. Computers just need an analog computer attachment that remove the workload from the GPU.
The thing is… I’m not sure how popular it will become. 1) these aren’t widely available and you have to order them from the company and get a quote. Who knows if you can only order one. 2) if you do get one, it’s likely not just going to pop into most basic users Windows install running Stable Diffusion, it’s probably expecting server grade hardware (which is where the majority of the power consumption comes from, so good for business but consumer availability would be nice). And, most importantly, 3), NVIDIA has sunk so much money into GPU powered AI. If throwing 1,000 watts at CUDA doesn’t keep making strides, they may try to obfuscate this competition. NVIDIA has a lot of money riding on the AI wave and if word gets out that some other company can cut costs of development both in cost of hardware and cost of running it, and the need for multiple 4090s or whatever is best and you get more efficiency from accuracy per watt.
Oh, and 4) MythicAI is specifically geared towards real time camera AI tracking, so they’re likely an evil surveillance company and also the hardware itself isn’t explicitly geared towards all around AI, but specific models built in mind. It isn’t inherently an issue, it just circles back to point 2) where it’s not just the hardware running it that will be a hassle, but the models themselves too.
Same kind of people that think we can effectively pump enough CO2 out of the air, and other idiotic climate solution magic. Wishers that want to keep consumption at all time highs, basically.
People selling AI certainly would like you to believe it’ll fix that and everything else that ails ya
Yeah this was more or less Ray Kruzweil’s take all the way back in 2005.
I got a mail about that from my union recently… I think they had some talks about it.
There was a Twitter post about great uses for AI but it’s not being developed. The one I aligned with was scraping grocery store ads and creating a shopping list based on the best prices and personal preferences.
AI is solving problems for the business class. They are trying to stop paying people. AI has use cases to actually make our lives better but are antithetical to the capitalistic companies and would likely try to stop any AI use that undermines their bottom line.
You don’t need AI for that. All it takes is some standardized markup like schema.org and a discoverable price list page that can be read and understood by everyone.
We already had something similar with RSS, where you subscribe to your favorite blogs and forums, and the RSS reader on your computer would tell you which sites have new posts, so you don’t need to scan all of them each day. For some reason people stopped using RSS, and instead published their stuff (or notifications about new posts) on Facebook, twitter etc.
The same system could be adapted for (grocery-) price lists. However the big brands would never do that, because then it would be very easy to discover which products suddenly got more expensive.
I’m not sure how that’s a useful thing besides convincing people to spend money on something they done need? Like, you either need a product at the grocery store or you don’t. I don’t need corpo bullshit ad bots to beg me to buy shit.
I don’t think I explained it well.
I shop at 4, maybe 5, different grocery stores. Some products I have preferences whereas others I don’t.
For example, say this is my grocery list for the week:
- grapes (never buy at Walmart)
- composition notebook
- ground turkey (only buy at Wegmans, unless there’s a sale)
- oat milk
- chocolate chips
- eggs
I want an AI to scrape every grocery store’s weekly ad or their website along with any coupons that are available, and determine the best price and, based on patterns of sales, what I should wait on and what time of day I should shop.
I got what you were saying, it’s just not something I can imagine ever caring that much about. Either I need a notebook or I don’t. I’m out of grapes and want some or I don’t. I don’t need a shoddy piece of software to tell me any of those things. And attempting to micro optimize for sale events? Like, this just isn’t a sensible way to live your life.
You have failed to understand it AGAIN. Good job failing.
It does NOT tell you what the list is. Period. Stop assuming it will advertise to you. You are repeatedly describing how you have FAILED to understand what it’d even be attempting…
Nobody said it made the list for you. The idea was moronic that it would tell you when to get these things. Which is idiotic because YOU ALREADY NEED IT.
If you relied on shitty software less your reading comprehension would be better.
You explained it fine. And I agree it’s a great use case. I’ve heard so many like this. It’s a potentially a great interface to a lot of things and I think that’s why there’s a big push to make people shit on it. Seems like Lemmy is a foothold for hating on AI. I don’t think the problem is your explanation its just cyclical people looking to hate on something. Just look at daily posts here about AI. They’re all similar to headlines I see in places like r/Canada towards immigrants
They’re taking our jobs They’re assaulting our women Think of the children Our culture is gone
Every headline is some variation of that followed by toxic takes towards the subject.
Really disappointing to see really cool new tech with loss of potential get shit on by a place like Lemmy where I thought people were more open to advancements in tech.
I think you explained it fine, it just doesn’t make sense to people who only go to the same place.
It doesn’t make sense to me and I’ve got three grocery stores and a walmart within miles of me.
Plus hiding market prices behind apps… Give me that data peasants
Illusion — Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis (which it is facilitating), get rid of poverty (on which it is heavily relying), and unleash the full potential of human creativity (which it is undermining)?
Because we keep reading sensationalist advertisements presented as articles instead of experimenting with it ourselves, understanding what it is
And unfortunately, this article is also just a response to media clickbait, not a discussion point it tries to look like
What it will actually do is transfer more wealth to the top. That is what these projects do.
