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Comment by Capricorn2481 | Hacker News Reader

Okay, but a lot of people are calling environmental and content theft arguments "political" in an attempt to make it sound frivolous.

It's fine if you think every non-technical criticism against AI is overblown. I use LLMs, but it's perfectly fine to start from a place of whether it's ethical, or even a net good, to use these in the first place.

People saying "ignoring all of those arguments, let's just look at the tech" are, generously, either naive or shilling. Why would we only revisit these very important topics, which are the heart of how the tech would alter our society, after it's been fully embraced?

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Well they're separate issues. Someone could plausibly take the position that air travel should be banned for environmental reasons, but that has no relevance to the utility of air travel. If a group of people were loudly proclaiming that planes were not only bad but useless, anyone who routinely uses planes would obviously find them non-credible.

They're not separate at all, especially if the question is "How hard should we push people to use this."

To be clear, there are a lot of people who routinely used airplanes who don't post-covid, but insisted that they had to. Yeah, I think it's pretty wasteful to fly across the country for a 30 minute meeting. Most don't fly at all. I don't know what mass-psychosis white collar industries were under to think that was necessary.

They're 100% separate. "Planes aren't useful" and "planes don't work" are completely different sentiments than "it's pretty wasteful to fly across the country for a 30 minute meeting" and "we shouldn't push people hard to use air travel".

I know for a fact that planes work, because I've been on a plane and observed it lifting me high off the ground and rapidly transporting me to a distant location. The fact that planes typically emit CO2 doesn't make their existence and utility some kind of mass hallucination.

This distinction may sound a bit silly, because I assume we all agree that planes literally work. But the point I'm making is as it applies to AI. Like many people, I know from experience that AI isn't vaporware and is extremely useful for many purposes. I'm sure many others haven't had the same experience for various reasons, and factually report their observations in good faith — but that's different from pushing a narrative which one wishes to be true, regardless of how valid the reasons for that wish may be.

> I know for a fact that planes work, because I've been on a plane and observed it lifting me high off the ground and rapidly transporting me to a distant location. The fact that planes typically emit CO2 doesn't make their existence and utility some kind of mass hallucination.

You're arguing with an imaginary person. Read what I wrote. I didn't call AI vaporware, I said we shouldn't consider its integration into society purely on technical merits, ignoring the cost, which I think could be big if OpenAI's very public plans are made reality. You're making a strawman.

The mass hallucination is not that plane's are useful, it's that a plane is the only reasonable solution to human communication.

Honestly, you're just further illustrating the complete erosion of nuance that comes when you paint people with concerns about AI as frivolous.

There's no straw man. If what you're saying is you agree with me, then you're the one imagining an argument where none exists.

The environmental argument is frivolous as long as people fly to Vegas for the weekend or drive a F150 to the office. Why is this as special domain?

debating the environmental and public health effects of AI negates the possibility of debating those same things with respect to cars/trucks ?

Charitably, I think you can read into that a not-unreasonable (if unproven) assertion that there are many lower hanging fruits on the tree that would do endlessly more good for the cause to pick than data centers, and AI at least has the arguable potential upside of alleviating some of those specific burdens-- better health care and less environmental pollution through various improved forms of automation. Or at least when addressing the stub claim of the sort in the GP comment, you should assume these fairly straightforward subclaims pre-emptively and respond to this stronger form of the argument. It saves time, at least if you're going to seek out a discussion it does. Plenty of counter claims to them, but it gets the conversational ball rolling in a productive direction and if the response in turn is less constructive then you also know not to bother any more.

Driving a massive truck in the city is stupid too and most short flights should be replaced with high speed rail. And AI wastes a monumental amount of resources.

I think that form of argument is called "whataboutism". Whether flights waste energy or are environmentally unfriendly is really a separate issue. Both things can be bad.

> The environmental argument is frivolous as long as people fly to Vegas for the weekend or drive a F150 to the office. Why is this as special domain?

I keep seeing arguments like this. They sound like a bit like a form of nihilsm. Do you really think we shouldn't worry about risks to the environment simply because we're all hypocrites on that front in one way or another? I get the frustration and have been guilty of using this type of argument myself in the past, but refusing to discuss a problem because the people raising the concern are imperfect human beings doesn't seem like a tenable position.

I wouldn't ignore those arguments but most of the time, they're so poorly formed (eg. using data without logic), they aren't really worth listening to. If you believe AI provides no value, then any environmental cost is too high for you but you can't convey that by trying to dramatize how high it is. That's dishonest and I think people rightly turn off it.

Right now Open"AI", Oracle and everyone else are burning billions of dollars to buy and run these llms, they raise the price of energy around them, they provide negative economic benefit. It's dishonest of you to pretend that isn't the case.

I didn't know AI provides negative economic benefit overall. Is that what you're saying or just the it's negative for the local economies because it drives up power prices? That's an obviously small-scale, short-term and solvable problem.

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