Honestly I was workshoping “unfucking the goose” as a way to say some things can’t be unmade. Like nuclear weapons or LLM’s. It seems like I’ll need to keep looking for another weird idiom to express the idea, the goose seems to be distracting.

You seem to be doing everything in your power to miss my point and putting words in my mouth about the issue. To state it more clearly AI is not like cfc’s in hairspray, it’s like nuclear weapons. CFC’s had a cheap alternative that was just as effective, AI doesn’t. Personally I don’t see the benefits for AI but as the article and poll suggest a lot of people do. We’re not going to get rid of it, because the will is not there and the hypothetical benefits are too alluring for the capitalists and their fascist cronies that run the world.

I don’t like AI, I think the technology is way overhyped and the potential dangers could be civilization ending so it’s not worth the risk. I understand you seem to be of the impression that if you belittle and badger people who broadly agree with you on probably 90% of the issues that will somehow translate into lawmakers regulating the tech or AI enthusiasts losing their excitement. Where we disagree seems to be at whether or not the technology can be gotten rid of, but it’s more like nuclear weapons and climate change control than leaded gas and cfc’s in that the people who hold the power want the tech and they can’t get the proposed benefits elsewhere, even if they have not yet manifested, if they ever do.

There are a number of studies on the methodology of polling that suggest the margin of error is much wider than typically reported by polls by about an order of magnitude in part due to sample size. Although there are a number of non-sample size related issues, like the one you mentioned and people misreporting/lying, at play as well.

I’m not going to lie, the jobs numbers where several orders of magnitude more than I was expecting when I started looking it up. I’m personally struggling to find work because my field has been taken over by AI, but my point is that those numbers are a drop in the bucket compared to what they will be in 5 years. I might have gone a little overboard but what I really wanted to highlight is that all of the problems we’re facing now are still just in that 5% and the remaining 95% are going to be much worse than we can imagine if we do nothing (which it seems like that’s the plan).

I don’t really care for AI personally. I 1,000% agree with you about not wanting agents forced on me or my private data used to train new models. I have used ChatGPT and Claude on occasion but it’s kind of lack luster. Like it’s almost useful for everything I’ve tried to use it for from surrogate social interactions to research assistant. It’s too constrained and limited to be able to do anything really interesting. And I agree that there are some serious current problems that need to be addressed, especially worker displacement and data center build out. I just find it irksome how overstated or misattributed some of the issues are and also how little room there is for nuanced conversation about it.

It very much is still mostly a future problem, everything you’ve mentioned is mild in comparison to the potential disasters and some of those are kind of nothing burgers.

Job lost: Actually, over 175k people have been laid off due to AI since they started tracking it in 2023. That number is likely to be underreported due to private terminations and layoffs that aren’t being reported. In the same time frame 664k people total (including AI layoffs) have been laid off since 2023, so AI lay offs only make up about a third of layoffs companies are doing.

AI Psychosis: It makes splashy headlines but only a few dozen people have been inspired by AI to commit suicide or murder. Roughly 50k people commit suicide each year so 30 people is kind of a rounding error and if you dig into the individual cases those people had already determined to die by suicide and tricked the AI into giving them advice about it. I can’t find any good data about non-lethal AI psychosis numbers, but the phenomenon is linked to people who already have a personality disorder. Just like many people having manic episodes or psychotic breaks claim religious or conspiratorial circumstances, so too will they claim AI.

Environmental impact: So AI data centers consume slightly less power and water than a traditional data center. That’s largely because traditional data centers use load balancers to keep the hardware running at as close to full speed as possible while AI data centers are more spiky in usage. Also next gen AI hardware is moving to closed loop liquid cooling which never needs fresh water while traditional data centers use evaporative cooling which requires large amounts of fresh water. The only reason this is news is because new data centers are being built, but if there were a different technology, like a novel social media platform, that was expanding their data centers all of the same arguments could be made against that. Also this is the most pointless thing to argue about. Power and water are costs, companies hate costs, there are substantial resources being invested into how to use less power and water, so this problem will actually be solved eventually.

Mass surveillance: AI is a flashy and fashionable target for ire, but it’s far from the only technology enabling mass surveillance. Solar panels, advanced lithium batteries, advanced imaging, sdr, and a host of others are all just as important to the effort. If anything blaming AI is sort of like blaming immigrants for the country’s problems when we should be going after the organizations and institutions that are buying and using the tech.

Propaganda: This is one of those future problems. A few AI images and videos is nothing compared to what AI will be capable of once it matures. Right now it’s mostly individual actors and some institutional ones using it, but just wait until it can advise the psychology underpinning the propaganda and create individualized agitprop.

Destroying Culture: This is another hypothetical future problem. Yeah there is AI “art”, but so far the art world isn’t responding to it. There are no up and coming AI artists and the AI actors they’re pimping have uncanny valley problems. The truth is, at least in the United States, the culture has been deteriorating rapidly for the last ten years, mostly due to the extreme politicization of daily life and the destruction of shared reality, which is a social media problem, not an AI one. AI doesn’t help things because it’s capable of generating infinite content to reinforce reality-blind world views but it didn’t start the problem and if we got rid of it today it wouldn’t get any better.

Destroying Education Outcomes: Again this is a problem that AI has exacerbated rather than caused. For the last 20 years, study after study has shown that students who are given individual access to a screen, whether it’s a phone, tablet, or laptop have significantly reduced education outcomes. AI has enabled struggling students to skate by a failure that would have them held back or required to retake a class, but the real source of the problem is screens in the classroom.

There are probably multiple flashy clients and gui’s for it, but if you’re already used to the terminal, I’d recommend rsync. This might be the wrong syntax but something like rsync -av ~/local/project servername:/var/www/html/ would take your local files and update the web directory of your server with only the files that are more recent. Rsync will even read your ssh config file so if you’re got an entry for your server you can just use the host name.

I ran a little blog for a while using a static site generator so I setup the git server on my web server and wrote a git hook where every time I pushed to the repo the server would pull it’s cloned copy of the repo into the html directory. Took me a few hours to setup but it made updating the blog as simple as pushing to the repo.

This is probably a controversial take, but US based AI companies aren’t really that evil compared to the baseline of Non-AI US based companies. Oil & Gas companies and Social Media companies are far more evil than the AI giants. Yeah they’re lobbying for zero regulation and their products are becoming moderately dangerous as time goes on, but nothing on the level of what Exxon or Meta has done. 95% of the danger of AI is still in the potential future and assumes no guardrails or safe guards, but that’s actually not in these companies interests. ChatGPT or Claude hacking stuff is a bad look for openAI and Anthropic and their engineers are all working to close those gaps. Same with AI psychosis, the companies don’t want that and have already made great strides to limit how the public models can interact with people.

It’s just that discussion of AI online has become so weirdly hyper-polarized you can’t really have a nuanced discussion about it.

Having said that those future potential dangers, especially worker displacement, really ought to be addressed sooner rather than later because even if the AI utopia happens and no one needs to work, yada yada yada, the 20 or 30 years to get there will be a living hell we might not survive as a global society.

What makes you think I’m pro-AI? Because I don’t think 1,000 people are enough to represent the opinions of countries with populations ranging from 10 million to upwards of 350 million? Gallup says they want to survey India too, is 1,000 people enough to represent the opinions of over a billion people? It’s how most polling is done, but it’s still not a large enough sample size to be representative and the data science tricks still leave large margins of error according to the research. Did you read the article or the poll I linked? The results of the poll were that most of the world is in favor of AI and enthusiastic about it despite what US citizens may want or think.

I’m not pro-AI at all, but I also realize that you can’t unfuck the goose, especially if the neighbors are much more enthusiastic about it than the US is. In regards to the technology I would like to see laws that make AI companies liable for crimes committed by their products, laws that require companies to pay extended unemployment benefits for workers displaced by AI, and a tax on companies creating or utilizing AI or owning even a single share of those that do that would go to fund reeducation for displaced workers. I’d also like to see a law where media created, even partially, by AI can’t be copyrighted. Right now it’s just a somewhat precarious (of being overturned) judicial ruling.

The survey paints a different picture in the rest of the world, however. In Singapore, which had the highest portion of daily users in the study (46%), more than 80% of those aware about AI expect the tech to improve their everyday lives, and 77% think it’ll help the country. In China, where 35% of people report using AI daily, most people expect it to help the country. The story is similar in Israel.

The article’s title kind of cherry picks the results, which centers the survey around US interests. However large swathes of the world are very much pro-AI, which puts the prevailing anti-AI sentiment in the US at odds with global trends. It also highlights an interesting problem anti-AI advocates aren’t really exploring. It’s less so about some arms race between countries over the technology and more to do with a difference of global opinion. Even if efforts to slow down or stop AI progress in the US were successful, the desire to is not shared by our global neighbors.

Still, optimism about AI doesn’t necessarily appear to translate to trust in the tech’s accuracy. According to Gallup, people who use AI daily were generally more trusting of its results, especially in high-adoption countries like Singapore, Israel, and China, while less frequent users remain skeptical across the board. In the U.S., only 45% of daily users expressed that level of confidence. Altogether, only 36% (median) of the people surveyed said they trust AI’s results a lot.

It would be somewhat alarming if that wasn’t the case. If people who used it more trusted it less, that would indicate some dire faults in AI systems efficacy that could lead to major problems in the future.

Commissioned by Microsoft, the Gallup study currently has results from 37 countries, where researchers polled about 1,000 people in each country between April and July.

There are some data science tricks researchers use to make such a small sample size more representative, but even so 1,000 people is such an infinitesimally small sample size there isn’t much nuance to be had. Certainly the results are worth being moderately skeptical about. The article also doesn’t actually link to the actual poll which tells a somewhat different story.