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Comment on Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it

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JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

On the one hand, I get it. I really do. It takes an absurd amount of resources for what it does.

On the other hand, I wonder if people said the same of early generation comptuers. UNIVAC used tubes of mercury for RAM and consumed 125KW of electricity to process a whopping 2k operations per second.

Probably not. Most people weren’t aware of it, nor did they have a care for power consumption, water consumption, etc. We were in peak-American Exceptionalism in the post-war era.

But, had they, and computers kinda just…died. Right there, in the 1950s. Would we have gone to the moon? Would we have HDTV? iPhones? Social Media? A treacherous imbecile in charge of the most powerful military the world has ever seen?

Probably not.

So…I do worry about the consumption, and the ecological and environmental impact. But, what if that is a necessary evil for the continued evolution of technology, and with it, society? And, if it is, do we want that?

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BlackDragon@slrpnk.net ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
LLMs are dead end tech which is only useful for people who want to do unethical shit. They’re good at lying, making up nonsense, sounding like humans, facilitating scams, and misleading people. No matter how much time and energy is spent developing them, that’s all they’ll ever be good at. They can get better at doing those things, but they’ll never be good at anything actually useful because of the fact that there is no internal logic going on in them. When it tells you the moon is made of various kinds of rock, the exact same thing is happening as when it tells you the moon is made of cheese and bread. It has no way of distinguishing between these two statements. All of its ‘ideas’ are vapor, an illusion, smoke and mirrors. It doesn’t “understand” anything it’s saying, all it does is generate text that looks like something someone who does understand language would say. There is no logic in the background and there cannot be.

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oyenyaaow@lemmy.zip ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Image
(www.computerhistory.org/revolution/…/83)

early generation computers fueled a demand that was being supplied by rooms and rooms of human calculators calculating and checking each other’s works for scientists, engineers, businesses, and government agencies

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(Manhattan Project, Atomic Heritage Foundation picture)

they would not have died out, because they were a necessary part of the evolution of technology at their time. more importantly, they were more accurate than their human calculators. computers don’t forget to carry a number to the next digit or flip them around. barring exceptionally rare cosmic radiation events. and their technological progression fueled an ever greater need until now when tech has entered post-scarcity when it comes to calculating power.

generative AI in contrast was an offering looking for a purpose. spare gigaflops no longer needed for tech people are trying to sell by building more and more hype for calculating power. sucks to be the one who invests into it, but that’s business. sometimes investment don’t work out. if microsoft can’t hype up a demand then it is unnecessary technology.

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- JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  That first picture is great. That’s essentially generative AI, right? You cast out a problem and have it solved multiple times asynchronously, then find the (mean/median/mode) value.
  
  I do wonder how many of those ladies (weird how “computer” was a largely female profession, and then IT quickly became a largely male profession. Not making any commentary here, just kind of a showerthought observation) got laid off because of the computer. I wonder what they did after their jobs were replaced by it, and if that in turn was a net positive for them/their families.
  
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  - myotheraccount@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Many of the female “computers” became programmers. IT being a male profession is a later development, partly fueled by home computers being marketed as toys for boys. It’s also mostly a western phenomenon. In former soviet states MINT professions are much closer to a 50:50 split between women and men.
    
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JTode@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Those old computers you speak of: They worked. There is no comparison to be made here.

They were built in order to give us an edge on the battlefield. More accurate artillery and the like. They did math which humans could do, but which would take humans weeks or months, and the answers were required within timeframes more like 12 hours, because war.

They were so useful, so valuable, that they were worth the treasure spent. They conferred a kind of superintelligence to their users. Those with brains to understand could see this, and so yes, hobbyists found their way to building their own machines, once small CPUs became available, however janky. Anyone who had to do math, who had to do math, went into debt if they had to, and learned to use these janky beasts because the advantage was weeks or months of time they didn’t have to grind on paper.

There is nothing about AI that resembles any of that.

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