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Comment by GorbachevyChase | Hacker News Reader

A scourge? I get some kind of valuable use from it almost every day. This criticism sounds completely out of touch.

You are capable of considering effects of systems outside of your immediate, moment-to-moment needs?

are _you_ capable of consdering the advantages that AI can bring instead of simply focusing on the easy parts like pollution and energy?

AI has incredible potential for both

But the negatives are spiraling out of control. Pollution and energy and the amplification of structural social problems like wealth stratification, authoritarianism, media manipulation...

With great power comes great responsibility, and we're living in an era in which our culture has shifted dramatically towards accepting immoral, short-sighted, and reckless behaviour.

you could have said the same about any technology - industrial revolution, the internet - anything really.

always easy to talk about concerns.

> instead of simply focusing on the easy parts like pollution and energy?

Yeah, I completely agree AI is fantastic with no downsides; as long as you ignore all of it's down sides.

Do you think it's a good thing to ignore the downsides when advocating for something?

Commensurate to the actual cost?

Certainly commensurate to the price. It's up to the companies to bring the cost under the price.

AFAICT, fears of the marginal costs of LLM inference being high are dramatically overblown. All the "water" concerns are outlandish, for one—a day of moderately heavy LLM usage consumes on the order of one glass of water, compared to a baseline consumption of 1000 glasses/day for a modern human. And the water usage of a data center is approximately the same as agriculture per acre.

I don't think anyone has a single agreed upon number for the water consumption, with the higher estimates focusing on a lot of wider externalities and the lower estimates ignoring them, such as ignoring the cost of training.

it doesn't have to be agreed upon but even the largest estimates don't come even close to how much corn farms use

> The water usage of 260 square miles of irrigated corn farms, equivalent to 1% of America’s total irrigated corn.

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake...

Roughly 1% of corn is used for actual food consumption btw.

Compared to the fair market cost of human labor? It might be thousands of times more efficient.

> as they are currently implemented

As they are currently implemented, I get daily value from them.

At what cost? See discussion here. And who bears the burden of that cost?

Sure you can look away from child labor providing you the latest iphones or lithium mines for the same or electric cars destroying pristine tropical jungles and entire ecosystems, many folks do so very comfortably. Then some others don't.

Different moral values and such.

Are you using a phone and computer or bank or website that doesn’t have mined materials?

Surely you use things with negative externalities because you get value from them.

You participate in $the_thing so surely you must support $the_thing, right?

I would get value from stealing, I don't steal from people. The argument or question isn't about if it has value to some people, the question is, does the value to some people outweigh the costs that are imposed on others.

Didn’t know you are the complete humanity.

Somebody get daily value from rising food prices, isn’t as good for humanity

It’s no more useful than when google and stack overflow was at its peak! All I want is to find docs. The coding performance is lackluster, oversold and under delivered. Everything else gen AI is dystopian.

Why not debate me rather than downvotes? Eh hallucinations break my workflow and end up costing me more time debugging then it’s worth.

Do you have children? Post some pictures of them so Grok can show us what they look like unclothed and covered in "yogurt".

It's possible to imagine LLMs implemented responsibly, but our ruling class has decided against that.

Let's avoid falling into the trap of assuming the worst of people when replying to comments.

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