Generative AI could generate tons of e-waste by decade's end
techxplore.com
techxplore.com
Like, really? If you've used ChatGPT and it didn't do anything useful for you, I'm sorry, but the problem was between the keyboard and the chair.
What does ChatGPT do for you?
I don't know about the claims, but "the claims are exaggerated" is very different from "AI is waste".
For example, did a month ago they anticipate the computer use tool? When did they expect it to happen?
If I just took on 1 million USD in debt without a clear plan how to repay it. I would not feel optimistic and imaginative about how I can spend this money. I would go into risk averse mindset.
You ask it about Hölderlin, and quality drops off, because Hölderlin is not that well studied in the Anglo-American sphere, the majority of Hölderlin studies is in German. It's odd that it cannot translate what it ingested in German and bring it back up in English.
And when you ask it about chemistry ChatGPT is totally lost because it has no idea about concepts, even though the concepts are explained in the textbooks it has read. Until there is a breakthrough that allows AI models to gain understanding all these models are plainly useless.
One can tell - any graduate student in any of the sciences has read way less than ChatGPT but their understanding is infinitely better.
But I do think it's overhyped, and I was referring specifically to the generative AI which although cool, doesn't actually create anything new.
We'll probably get another AI winter once the hype dies down, but we'll have added a few more tools to our toolbelt.
We're finally going to have dictation that works reliably, voice assistants that don't suck, really sick photoshop tools, grammar and writing style checkers built into Word that can provide real feedback, a lot of stuff that just wasn't possible before.
In case it is unclear, a similar article was going around the Internet a few years ago complaining about the “tons of e-waste created by Apple Airpods”.
Yes, that’s true in the sense that Apple was producing “tons” of e-waste annually… two of them. One ton wouldn’t be “tons”, you see, so the article was technically correct in the dumbest and most nakedly deceptive way possible.
Waste is about inefficiency. It implies no or negative utility. There’s a hint of huge landfills and truck after truck of bulky stuff filling that up.
AirPods and AI chips are the opposite of inefficient! They’re some of the smallest, densest, most concentrated and space-efficient products ever made by man.
To invoke the word “waste” in juxtaposition to these things is so absurd, so contrary to their essential nature that it’s clearly a deliberate falsehood, signalling membership in a group by its absurdity. It’s like the official statements on RT that yet another oligarch “fell out” of a window. Everyone knows what really happened there. The claim of defenestration is a coded signal telling the listeners a very different message to the verbatim text.
Someone who is scared of AI wrote this article or had it written on their behalf. It’s the product of a Luddite, or someone whose job is about to be replaced.
“Stop the efficiencies! My career as a copy editor is at risk! I mean… it’s surely wasteful to optimise my job away with a chip that’s a mere square inch in size and weighs a gram!”
Even if we were to take these claims at face value... none of these things imply that the thing is useful.
Even as discarded waste, electronics tend to be more useful to recyclers because they contain copper.
Another obvious aspect it that it may help do work that could be done by people, thus helping to keep the worker class - that’s you! - subdued, fighting amongst yourselves.
Meanwhile the ‘good stuff’ can only be offered by those large companies, who have the power to make them ‘good enough’ thus making the rest more dependent.
It’s been a while since 2007, all the incentives are there to keep the ball rolling, but it will stop at some point.
Then we IT people with six figure salaries will learn that we should have listened more to David Graeber.
Apple has a few new cool AL based components in iOS 18. But one of the ones they've spent the past year harping on is the Cowboy frog emoji generator.
We did. It's a kind of safe house for gut flora. Not as important to modern humans, but it allows some of your gut flora to survive dysentery, cholera, etc. It's also a place for your immune system to get acquainted with the beneficial bacteria in your gut flora, and seems to fulfill a number of other roles in the immune system
More to the point of AI: this may also be like the dotcom bubble. Lots of hype that far outstrips the capabilities of the technology, but the technology is ultimately useful and impactful. Few companies survived the dotcom crash, and a lot of the tech companies with the biggest impact were only founded in the decade after the crash, when the technology was more mature and expectations more realistic
This makes no sense. Carriages weren't invented in the 1900s. They were displaced by a new technology. LLMs are not the carriages of our world, they are the cars.
> We have no use for crypto-currency
You have no use for it, but a lot of people do (not just for speculation).
You know it sounds like a line from a David Foster Wallace novel, but nope it’s real life. I get that a lot these days.
Isn't this true statement about literally any other technology? Do you think the railroad craze[1] was really about railroads?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
>Another obvious aspect it that it may help do work that could be done by people, thus helping to keep the worker class - that’s you! - subdued, fighting amongst yourselves.
>Meanwhile the ‘good stuff’ can only be offered by those large companies, who have the power to make them ‘good enough’ thus making the rest more dependent.
If you replaced the preceding paragraphs to be about weaving machines, this could pass for ned ludd's writings.
Twenty years ago we had the iPod, and 'tech' consisted of exciting consumer products we all wanted in our pockets and services that would enrich our lives by enabling our creativity and connecting us. Of course in business one aims to make a profit, but one could hope to do so simply by making things people wanted. Today, it doesn't feel like that. Sure — recent AI developments are hugely impressive, but what value are companies like OpenAI creating and who, other than AI geeks and researchers, is really hankering for this stuff? It feels more like an arms race towards something completely unknown. It's a collective panic that AGI (read: God) is just around the corner and whoever gets there first wins everything.
There was no such insanity in previous 'tech' eras. There's always been competition and hype, but the prospect of unlocking the technology to end all technologies has never before been credible enough.
Sounds like something that would apply to tractors or looms as well. Do you think farmers or textile makers had a choice on whether to use those technologies or not?
>Sure — recent AI developments are hugely impressive, but what value are companies like OpenAI creating and who, other than AI geeks and researchers, is really hankering for this stuff? It feels more like an arms race towards something completely unknown. It's a collective panic that AGI (read: God) is just around the corner and whoever gets there first wins everything.
>There was no such insanity in previous 'tech' eras. There's always been competition and hype, but the prospect of unlocking the technology to end all technologies has never before been credible enough.
So which one is it? In the first half you're implying AI doesn't create value and that nobody actually wants it, but then in the second half you're saying it could be the "technology to end all technologies", which has obvious value.
> So which one is it? In the first half you're implying AI doesn't create value and that nobody actually wants it, but then in the second half you're saying it could be the "technology to end all technologies", which has obvious value.
Yeah. I thought this could be confusing. What I mean is not that such technology is likely to appear any time soon; rather that it’s thought to be likely. It would certainly create value if it came along, but it’d also be the end of the world as we know it.