Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”
-
Two intrinsic problems with the current implementations of AI is that they are insanely resource-intensive and require huge training sets. Neither of those is directly a problem of ownership or control, though both favor larger players with more money.
And a third intrinsic problem is that the current models with infinite training data have been proven to never approach human language capability, from papers written by OpenAI in 2020 and Deepmind in 2022, and also a paper by Stanford which proposes AI simply have no emergent behavior and only convergent behavior.
So yeah. Lots of problems.
-
This post did not contain any content.
I don't really agree that this is the biggest issue, for me the biggest issue is power consumption.
-
Techno-Feudalism is a specific idea from Yanis Varifakous, about places like Amazon, Ebay, AliExpress, Steam, Facebook, even YouTube to some extent. It has to do with the Market Place controlling which prices are promoted to buyers and sellers, and is about price fixing and capturing industries that the bulk of the population required to do commerce.
This is a very important concept to note and understand because it relates to the end of two party Capitalism (where buyers and sellers negotiate prices with each other).
So no, the use of fuedalism isn't to indicate something about old school mechanisms of crowd control, brutality and repression. It's a reference to the serfdom and economic aspects.
I've read Varifakous and don't find his claim that it's anything new beyond the technologies used to be at all compelling.
So no, the use of fuedalism isn't to indicate something about old school mechanisms of war, weaponry, brutality, or repression. It's a reference to the role of economic serfdom and the economic aspects of fuedalism.
Teotihuacan was the center on an empire but it had no military.
What I'm saying is that they even go with divine mandate at this point. Just because their not jousting and are using abstractions that are enabled by modern technology instead of castles doesn't make it fundamentally a different, new thing. Commerce and who could engage in it was heavily regulated by feudal lords and organizations that they ran or allowed to run.
It's literally just the same shit with better technology. The far-right isn't that creative.
-
I've read Varifakous and don't find his claim that it's anything new beyond the technologies used to be at all compelling.
So no, the use of fuedalism isn't to indicate something about old school mechanisms of war, weaponry, brutality, or repression. It's a reference to the role of economic serfdom and the economic aspects of fuedalism.
Teotihuacan was the center on an empire but it had no military.
What I'm saying is that they even go with divine mandate at this point. Just because their not jousting and are using abstractions that are enabled by modern technology instead of castles doesn't make it fundamentally a different, new thing. Commerce and who could engage in it was heavily regulated by feudal lords and organizations that they ran or allowed to run.
It's literally just the same shit with better technology. The far-right isn't that creative.
Oh it's the same shit as Feudalism, but with technology... Thanks for letting me know that's what Techno-Feudalism means. So glad we had this enlightening conversation to figure out those two words.
-
It varies massivelly depending on the ML.
For example things like voice generation or object recognition can absolutelly be done with entirelly legit training datasets - literally pay a bunch of people to read some texts and you can train a voice generation engine with it and the work in object recognition is mainly tagging what's in the images on top of a ton of easilly made images of things.
Image generation, on the other hand, not so much - you can only go so far with just plain photos a researched can just go around and take on the street and they tend to relly a lot on artistic work of people who have never authorized the use of their work to train them, and LLMs clearly cannot be do without scrapping billions of pieces of actual work from billions of people.
Of course, what we tend to talk about here when we say "AI" is LLMs, which are IMHO the worst of the bunch.
-
data centers are mainly air-cooled, and two innovations contribute to the water waste.
the first one was "free cooling", where instead of using a heat exchanger loop you just blow (filtered) outside air directly over the servers and out again, meaning you don't have to "get rid" of waste heat, you just blow it right out.
the second one was increasing the moisture content of the air on the way in with what is basically giant carburettors in the air stream. the wetter the air, the more heat it can take from the servers.
so basically we now have data centers designed like cloud machines.
Also the energy for those datacenters has to come from somewhere and non-renewable options (gas, oil, nuclear generation) also use a lot of water as part of the generation process itself and for cooling.
-
This is where "universal basic income" comes into play
More broadly, I would expect UBI to trigger a golden age of invention and artistic creation because a lot of people would love to spend their time just creating new stuff without the need to monetise it but can't under the current system.
-
Also the energy for those datacenters has to come from somewhere and non-renewable options (gas, oil, nuclear generation) also use a lot of water as part of the generation process itself and for cooling.
steam that runs turbines tends to be recirculated. that's already in the paper.
-
This post did not contain any content.
-
This is where "universal basic income" comes into play
Unfortunately one will not lead to the other.
It will lead to the plot of Elysium.
-
And a third intrinsic problem is that the current models with infinite training data have been proven to never approach human language capability, from papers written by OpenAI in 2020 and Deepmind in 2022, and also a paper by Stanford which proposes AI simply have no emergent behavior and only convergent behavior.
So yeah. Lots of problems.
While I completely agree with you, that is the one thing that could change with just one thing going right for all the groups that work on just that problem.
It's what happens after that that's scary.
-
...in the same way that someone who's read a lot of books can make money by writing their own.
Do you know someone who's read a billion books and can write a new (trashy) book in 5 mins?
-
I don't really agree that this is the biggest issue, for me the biggest issue is power consumption.
That is a big issue, but excessive power consumption isn't intrinsic to AI. You can run a reasonably good AI on your home computer.
The AI companies don't seem concerned about the diminishing returns, though, and will happily spend 1000% more power to gain that last 10% better intelligence. In a competitive market why wouldn't they, when power is so cheap.
-
My biggest gripe with current AI is the same problem I have with anything crypto.
It's out of control power consumption relative to the problem it solves or purpose it serves.My biggest gripe with AI is the same problem I have with anything crypto
crypto: It's out of control power consumption relative to the problem it solves or purpose it serves.Don't thrown all crypto under the bus.
Only bitcoin and other proof of work protocols are power hungry. 2nd and 3rd generation crypto use mostly proof of stake and ZKrollups for security. Much more energy efficient. -
This completely ignores all the endless (open) academic work going on in the AI space. Loads of universities have AI data centers now and are doing great research that is being published out in the open for anyone to use and duplicate.
I've downloaded several academic models and all commercial models and AI tools are based on all that public research.
I run AI models locally on my PC and you can too.
That is entirely true and one of my favorite things about it. I just wish there was a way to nurture more of that and less of the, "Hi, I'm Alvin and my job is to make your Fortune-500 company even more profitable...the key is to pay people less!" type of AI.
-
My biggest gripe with current AI is the same problem I have with anything crypto.
It's out of control power consumption relative to the problem it solves or purpose it serves.Here we are using recycled bags, banning straws, putting explosive refrigerant in fridges and using led lights in everything
lol, sucker. none of that does shit and industry was already destroying the planet just fine before ai came along.
-
This post did not contain any content.
brian eno is cooler than most of you can ever hope to be.
-
But you can make this argument for anything that is used to make rich people richer. Even something as basic as pen and paper is used everyday to make rich people richer.
Why attack the technology if its the rich people you are against and not the technology itself.
It's not even the people; it's their actions. If we could figure out how to regulate its use so its profit-generation capacity doesn't build on itself exponentially at the expense of the fair treatment of others and instead actively proliferate the models that help people, I'm all for it, for the record.
-
This post did not contain any content.
That's... just not true? Current frontier AI models are actually surprisingly diverse, there are a dozen companies from America, Europe, and China releasing competitive models. Let alone the countless finetunes created by the community. And many of them you can run entirely on your own hardware so no one really has control over how they are used.
-
Techno-Feudalism
I'll say it, yet again. It's just feudalism. "Techno-Feudalism" has nothing different enough to it to differentiate it as even a sub-type of feudalism. It's just the same thing all over again, using technological advances to improve the ability to monitor and impose control over the populace. Historical feudalists also leveraged technology to cement their rule (plate armor, cavalry, crossbows, cannon, mills, control of literacy, etc).
Attaching "tech" to everything makes it more palatable. Desirable even. It masks the fact that feudal lords are reinventing everything but with "tech".
