• Nocturne Dragonite@lemmygrad.ml
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    4 days ago

    Great essay, read the entire thing.

    But this won’t happen while we are still stuck in “you used AI? I instantly think less of you as a person.”

    This part here, and the fact that people refuse to critically engage with it is what bothers me the most about the anti-AI crowd, most especially people who proaim to be communists. Most of the arguments against AI are either moralistic (you’re stealing) or subjective (it looks bad), and while environmental concerns are obviously something to be accounted for, the problem is once again capitalism. They think they need these huge resource draining data centers because they’re focused on computational power rather than efficiency, like how DeepSeek did with their r-1 model.

    At the end of the day I can only hope that we can utilize this technology to our advantage as communists.

    • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      3 days ago

      I think I had a bigger part on the environment in the drafts but either I never wrote it in or I removed it. I always urge caution in how we approach the climate… with AI it’s difficult to even tell just what kind of impact it’s actually having. There was a whole thing with an article about a texas county or something that urged people to take fewer showers bc it needed the water for a data center, and the source was a satirical newspaper that was putting out an anti-AI story. I probably didn’t include it in the essay because I didn’t know what to add to that.

      and when you look at the gallons of water used (first of all they’re not taken out of the environment, they go back into it, but yes they can deplete) it turns out to be almost nothing compared to the entire area consumption. I’m pretty sure I meant to write more about the environment in the essay because I also remember writing about the colorado river and how the US dammed it to provide free water for water-intensive crop culture in arid Southern California, to the point that when the river reaches Mexico there’s almost no water left.

      On top of which the meat industry is the biggest waster of water followed by the US army for biggest polluter, that was kind of my point with the linkedin moralizing… CEOs congratulating each other for cutting back on Youtube a little (or, I kid you not, emptying their inboxes once in a while). Like the average person in the US consumes as much water in a year as it takes to produce between 14 and 22 burgers period. But again, capitalism.

      I kinda circle back to the climate in the second section when I address westerners… we want instantaneous solutions, without going through the development phase of these solutions. And if we don’t have them we don’t want anybody else to have them either.

      The one thing I’d support against AI is banning it in the West so that China can overtake us lol. But even then, there’s a lot of research going on by computer scientists in the west using neural networks for very cool things.