alt Hacker NewsI’ll do the Minority Report here: I loved the article, the point being that rich people hyping AI for their own enrichment have somewhat shutdown rational arguments of benefits vs. costs, the costs being: energy use, environmental impact of using environmentally unfriendly energy sources out of desperation, water pollution from by products of electronics production and recycling and from water use in data centers, diverting money from infrastructure and social programs, putting more debt stress on society, etc.
I have been a paid AI practitioner since 1982, so I appreciate the benefits of AI - it is just that I hate the almost religious tech belief that real AI will happen from exponential cost increases for LLM training and inference for essentially linear gains.
I get that some lazy ass people have turned vibe coding and development into what I consider an activity sort-of like mindlessly scrolling social media.
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"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics "
Robert Solow, Noble Prize winning economist, 1987.
I've literally not met one person in tech who thinks LLMs will become sentient or conscious. But I always see people online claiming that there are lots of people who believe that.
Where are they?
Are we sure that's not a misunderstanding of the terminology? Artificial diamonds, such as cubic zirconia, are not diamonds, and nobody thinks they are. 'Artificial' means it's not the real thing. When will conscious, actual intelligence be called 'synthetic intelligence' instead of 'artificial'?
Incidentally, this comment was written by AI.
The most important cost that you didn't mention is the loss of social trust and the harm that will do to social infrastructure.
Junior developers will find it harder to be hired and trained. The case for lesser known artists and musicians is much worse. The scientific literature will be flooded by low quality AI slop with questionable veracity. Drafts of Good debut novels will be harder to find. When someone writes a love song, their romantic partner(s) will have to question if it was LLM generated. Nobody will be able to trust video footage of any kind and will have a much harder time telling what is the truth.
I don't think standard economic indicators are tuned to detect these externalities in the short to medium term.
I just want to call out how much I appreciate the comparison of “vibe coding” to the endless scroll.