My Anti-AI Manifesto | Hacker News Reader

My Anti-AI Manifesto

alessandrorosa.altervista.org

9 pointsalesrosa13 comments

> The events in the last three centuries attested that super-powered countries and corporations contributed to render the world worse than what they found.

The world is worse off than 300 years ago?

Indeed. Think of how much we lose sitting in our AC rooms, eating our safe food, having light and hot water 24/7. And the anesthetics and antibiotics that allow surgery. We are softies.

Real men work the field with plow and welcome the gangrene that could come from a scratch. And the amputation is only done on whiskey overload. For both the surgeon and the patient.

None of these "AC rooms, eating our safe food, having light and hot water" requires super powered corporations or countries. Safe food requires a functional country able to enforce food regulations. That is it, super powered country not needed. Ordinary low power democracy is enough for safe food, having light and hot water.

AC rooms require just normal functional economy where many companies create and sell AC. You dont need super powered monopoly for that.

The power of super-powered countries and corporations went up and down during those 300 years.

The claim is not that the world is worst off, but that the super-powered countries and corporations are making it worst off. Then you have backslash against them, rules and regulations, economies based on competition of smaller parties. Democracy can be on the loosing path or on the winning path.

Super-powered countries and corporations are not helpful or necessary for the good stuff. But they are capable and willing of causing huge harm. They come along with philosophies that make their operators believe that causing harm to others which pursuing power is a good thing on itself.

Thanks for getting my point. I'm rather worried about the future.

This feels more like unrelated political dissatisfaction packaged to hitch a ride on the AI discourse train. The experience of struggling for solutions only seems to disappear if you lack ambition. Keeping the amount of thought you put into problems constant only requires broadening your horizon to new problems.

I understand that you didn't follow my point about the waste of energy and water at all. We are going to face a very serious problem, such as global warming is. Politics always enters everything we talk about, and my text does not contest ambition. Hence your comment looks completely pointless. If you are not code developer, I tell you that saving resources is highly recommended when the system state is critical. If you are, restart from the basics.

Misses the point. Now that things are easier, we have greater agency, not lesser.

I don't miss the point. Most of the comments that have been posted here seemed to be written by people blinded by efficience and power. None of them took care of my points about the waste of energy and water. Any technology threating against the natural habitat and its creator is no good.

The same argument has been used against most data center operations from the beginning. You can criticise specific bad actors and bad practices (like Musk and his blatantly illegal gas turbines) without morally condemning an entire field of technology through the lens of religious environmentalism. There is nothing about the technology that prevents data centers from running 100% renewably.

There should be no plan of building new data centers up to that time. I am not against new technology at all, only against indiscriminate use. It's like cars and motorbikes. People are illuded that they drive good tech, but they are strongly contributing to pollution. This is a topic that should join all people.

Then there's a difficult question to answer: Who should get to use AI and who shouldn't?

The data centers aren't there for no reason, they track demand (and a large helping of hype). It's the same question that arises with cars. A single person driving a car is relatively unproblematic. It's when individual usage adds up that it becomes problematic. And what did decades of car opposition do? A lot less than what happened when a better way to do it (read EVs) came up.

Good point about cars!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com