So we objectively have too large of a population, but not if we change our standard of living and you want AI to solve this problem not by reducing our standard of living but instead by reducing the population?
Comment on Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal
masterspace@lemmy.ca 3 days agoFrom a long term environmental standpoint that’s not at all clear cut.
We objectively have too many humans in our biosphere for our current rate of resource consumption and we should significantly drop the overall number.
However, our current standard of living is mostly the result of a shared economy where we pool and share our resources and have a shit ton of people working.
Right now neural network algorithms consume a lot of processing power and resources, but they also solve whole new classes of automations problems that computers haven’t been able to solve before.
If we actually want to maintain our standard of living and reduce the population size, we may very well need AI automation utilities. They can keep scaling down in size and power consumption in the way that a real human can’t.
aislopmukbang@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
If we actually want to maintain our standard of living and reduce the population size, we may very well need AI automation utilities. They can keep scaling down in size and power consumption in the way that a real human can’t.
Theoreticisizing LLM’s usefulness and resourcefulness doesn’t help you there. For now they are rather useless embaracingly inefficient resoucehogs existing purely because of the bubble. It’s a gamble at best, or a waste of resources and a degradation of human workforce at worst.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
AI is not just LLMs, and it’s already revolutionized biotechnical engineering through things like alpha fold. Like I said, “AI”, as in neural network algorithms of which LLMs are just one example, are literally solving entirely new classes of problems that we simply could not solve before.
altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
LLM is what usually sold as AI nowadays. Convential ML is boring and too normal, not as exciting as a thing that processes your words and gives some responses, almost as if it’s sentient. Nvidia couldn’t come to it’s current capitalization if we defaulted to useful models that can speed up technical process after some fine tuning by data scientists, like shaving off another 0.1% on Kaggle or IRL in a classification task. It usually causes big but still incremental changes. What is sold as AI and in what quality it fits into your original comment as a lifesaver is nothing short of reinvention of one’s workplace or completely replacing the worker. That’s hardly hapening anytime soon.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
LLM is what usually sold as AI nowadays. Convential ML is boring and too normal, not as exciting as a thing that processes your words and gives some responses, almost as if it’s sentient.
To be fair, that’s because there are a lot of automation situations where having semantic understanding of a situation can be extremely helpful in guiding action over a ML model that is not semantically aware.
The reason that AI video generation and out painting is so good for instance it that it’s analyzing a picture and dividing it into human concepts using language and then using language to guide how those things can realistically move and change, and then applying actual image generation. Stuff like Waymo’s self driving systems aren’t being run through LLMs but they are machine learning models operating on extremely similar principles to build a semantic understanding of the driving world.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
lol keep dreaming :)
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
arstechnica.com/…/protein-structure-and-design-so…
I don’t have to dream, DeepMind literally won the Nobel prize last year. My best friend did his PhD in protein crystallography and it took him 6 years to predict the structure of a single protein. He’s no at MIT and just watched DeepMind predict hundreds of thousands of them in a year.
tjsauce@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Most people are cool with some AI when you show the small, non-plagarative stuff. It sucks that “AI” is such a big umbrella term, but the truth is that the majority of AI (measured in model size, usage, and output volume) is bad and should stop.
Neural Network technology should not progress at the cost of our environment, short term or long term, and shouldn’t be used to dilute our collective culture and intelligence. Let’s not pretend that the dangers aren’t obvious and push for regulation.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
lol like we actually share
Soggy@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Stop this ecofascist shit.
We can support the current population, it’s just not profitable or popular to do so.
Birthrates naturally level off as societies develop. Many are already seeing negative growth.
Our current standard of living is mostly predicated on offshoring the suffering and waste to the global South, but even that could be comfortably leveled off if we weren’t living under Capitalism.
We don’t need large AI farms, we need empathy. The techbros will not save us.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
If your solution ignores the site of human psychology it’s not a solution, it’s a quixotic quest.
Yes, and as their standard of living rises to meet ours, the whole becomes increasingly unsustainable without technological advances.
There is a more plausible path for neural networks to be involved in climate change solutions then their is for you to replace capitalism.
SunSunFuego@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
my brother in christ what are you saying? you know that rich people are the biggest polluters?
you know how ai datacenters literally destroy our planet? and for what? these supposed automation tasks will not serve us. we will have mass poverty and more wealth concentrated into the hands of a habdful of tech bros. it’s the industrial revolution all over again.
the global south is suffering from our actions. and how do you define living standards? do you think a capital slave that works in deadly conditions will be happy becase now they have an iphone and access to electricity? No. a slave is still a slave.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Yes, and what do you think is happening as other countries rise out of poverty? We have way too many humans on this planet to support everyone having a middle class lifestyle.
Yeah, right now. But if you tried to render 4k videos in 1990 it would also take a full data center and enormous amount of power, but computer chips can do this thing where they get smaller and orders of magnitude more efficient over time.
innermachine@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The rain of down votes on ur comments shows me that Lemmy has become every bit as much if not worse an echo chamber than reddit. Facts of the matter are humans are overcrowding the plant and gobbling up all the resources at an unsustainable rate. Human population DOES need to drop a bit of we are to use this planet long term, lest we spell our own doom in a few hundred years by picking this once beautiful planet to the bone.
teft@piefed.social 2 days ago
Only on lemmy would someone think 22 total votes of which only 3/4 are downvotes would be considered a “rain of downvotes” imagine if you were in a room with 22 people and 4 agree with you but 18 didn’t. That wouldn’t be considered a flood of downvotes. That’d just be a minority position.
Whostosay@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Lmao no
I’m sure that if AI could get to the state where it could even approach maybe doing those things, it will mesh very well with capitalism and we’d all benefit collectively. One of the core tenants of capitalism.
I hope someone drops you on your head again
umbrella@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
capitalism works by extracting surplus value from workers so the owner class can have it.
surplus value can’t be extracted from technology, it can only make workers more efficient cost for cost.
we don’t own the datacenters, therefore it won’t ever be making value to us.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Your issue is clearly with capitalism, and yet you’re brain deadly bitching about AI instead.
Miaou@jlai.lu 2 days ago
They’re the ecofascist yet you’re the one saying “you’ll shit in the mud and you’ll like it”.
Birthrates lower partially thanks to higher standard of living, which are not sustainable for 7+ billions people.
Not that I think LLMs are going to help in any way, but every time someone mentions overpopulation, all the counter arguments I see are loads of anti system rhetoric with nothing to show for it.
You think soviet Russia was/current China is sustainable?
Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
The earth can easily sustain our current population at a 1st world standard of living, but only if we are orders of magnitude more efficient. That means things like no mass car usage, eco-urbanisn, no more single family homes with quarter acre empty lawns, widespread plant-based foods as the norm, and repairable technology that actually lasts decades instead of planned obsolescence and cheap plastic junk that fills up landfills.
You don’t need to be some anarcho-primitivist/Ted Kaczynski wannabe living in a wooden shack with one set of clothes.
Now is that viable in the current societal climate? No, people, especially Americans generally hate much of those eco-urbanist ideas. As long as Capitalism is the default economic system and neo-liberal politics is the default political approach to democracy, we will continue marching towards a consumerist doom.