I also don’t buy the arguments. The arguments about helping humanity cure diseases as if those are some of the leading Causes of suffering. The bar is so low that we don’t event need to cure diseases, we just need to lift the entire floor with basic solutions like: housing for everyone, continued education on healthy eating and just general continued education on like living. Life coaches so many very basic things that don’t require a novel solution or a data center.
Solving a disease like cancer as justification for everything else seems like not a great trade off. I don’t say that to dismiss those who have lost people to cancer. But the technology just is being utilized in so many harmful ways and the things it enables: job loss, surveillance, misinformation, just feel like problems that aren’t worth it. Have we even heard of a solved diseases? If anything haven’t we heard that ai will make even worse bio warfare?
Yeah, it's insane people are using the argument that we'll pour trillions on moonshot cancer research when pouring trillions into universal healthcare would probably save countless more lives.
It's this kind of argument where the mask sort of slips because it always has to be an argument that also has the benefit of enriching himself and his friends.
Millions of humans go to about their work every day and do mundane and boring work every day for a salary at the end of the month. A lot preceive this as modern day slavery but still continue to work.
So humans are not doing better than an AI as per your requirements. Also what you are referring to is more related to AI alignement and safety (specifically loss-of-control).
Your condescending tone about what people want is crazy. You don’t even acknowledge that this will have a real material impact negative impact on people who are not tech workers. Everyone’s electricity bill will go up. And the argument is always that the benefits will come down stream. But it ignores the real fact that: it will affect people immediately, once electricity bills go up. And all of that for the sake of compute for a technology most people don’t like anyways? Your comment about them being misled implies that they haven’t done their own research to understand the impacts these things have on their communities.
> You don’t even acknowledge that this will have a real material impact negative impact on people who are not tech workers.
Of course I don't acknowledge that, for the same reason I don't acknowledge the “real material negative impact” of wind and solar farms or desalination plants: because there's exceedingly little of it in reality.
> Everyone’s electricity bill will go up.
That's trivial to fix by the electric utility charging datacenters at a higher rate. That's exactly what NV Energy is seeking regulatory approval to do here, and what Seattle's electric utility should be doing (if they ain't already).
>technology most people don’t like anyways?
Most people don't like streaming video and social media? These datacenters ain't exclusively for AI.
>Your comment about them being misled implies that they haven’t done their own research to understand the impacts these things have on their communities.
Correct, and I'll even exply it: the overwhelmingly vast majority of them have indeed demonstrably done zero of their own research on the actual impacts these things will have on their communities and mine. They're entirely parroting talking points fed to them via social media, and those talking points invariably boil down to things that are either not actually applicable to local datacenters or are just outright lunacy on the same level as 5G towers controlling minds via COVID vaccines.
Absolutely! I don’t think people are really considering the full effects of just letting ai be the middle man. I mean Sam Altman basically said this is what he wants Gwen he said intelligence is a commodity no?
We are without our consent introducing a party in between people. The models become the arbiters of who does and does not get a job. It feels problematic.
There will be a great arbitrage for people who do not use LLMs.
If your HR department is using ChatGPT to filter resumes, you’ll end up with people who used ChatGPT to generate resumes. I don’t want to make a “slippery slope“ argument, but my gut feeling is that the quality of your organization will deteriorate quickly.
On the other hand, I am a handyman/subcontractor. Almost all of my work comes through phone calls, texts, and one-off emails. I only work with people that are recommended by a trusted sources. I haven’t handled a traditional resume (mine or other people’s) in over eight years.
If I started interacting with somebody and they seemed like they were a computer, that would be the fastest way for me to know I should move on to another client. If they can’t take the time to interact with me, how am I supposed to perform hundreds of hours of physical labor for them?
And I feel the common response of: well just use the model that’s available. Ai is and will probably always be resource constrained and profit driven, that means we will eventually see a world where poor people have worse resumes than rich people and there really won’t be any way around it because the man in the middle has the final say
Not too long ago I bet resumes that were printed from a computer were preferred to resumes typed on a typewriter. What happened was that computers became commodities. It is reasonable to assume that LLMs will become commodified too.
That would hardly be surprising. Monospaced fonts make natural language a pain to read, so what that would prove is that well-presented resumes are preferred to poorly-presented ones.
This case is different, as the LLM output isn’t measurably better than the human output (unless you have a particular love of bland corpo-speak).
before it used to be HR, so you always had a party in between "actual" people. HR (mostly) never cared about the CV, they just look at a checklist and see if it matches.
Take a look at how things worked before (and still do): employers decide who get jobs based on a combination of personal biases, nepotism, and ulterior motives while applicants present distorted versions of themselves and network/pull strings to put the odds in their favor. That seems more problematic.
You would be surprised at the process in other industries. What you are describing is the tech job market specifically.
Other fields have their own problems, including credentialism and ballooning concomitant student loans, but do, by strict convention, not hire based on vibes or pulled strings. Often to their partial detriment, as the cure -- ie, strict oversight of hiring that also forces the hiring manager to ignore important implicit signals -- is alive and well in medicine, law, civil engineering, education, and the trades. Notable exceptions include entertainment, sales, real estate, and software engineering.
By optimizing for vibes, the tech industry gains "Spidey senses" in the hiring loop but pays for it in impartiality.
IMO this precipitated the DEI movement's advent, as it was seen as a way of remediating the drawbacks while preserving the information channel.
Without it, expect either homophily, and, eventually, a harsh and remedial credentialism.
I'm a physician and have recently been on both sides of the hiring process for new physicians and residents at a few different institutions. It's absolutely not meritocratic--you'd be shocked at how strong a role connections and pedigree play. The hard requirements are just table stakes, but the selection process from there is completely subjective and susceptible to all kinds of problematic biases. Generally people don't want to rock the boat and discuss this stuff openly, but it's absolutely a problem that needs to be pointed out.
Solving a disease like cancer as justification for everything else seems like not a great trade off. I don’t say that to dismiss those who have lost people to cancer. But the technology just is being utilized in so many harmful ways and the things it enables: job loss, surveillance, misinformation, just feel like problems that aren’t worth it. Have we even heard of a solved diseases? If anything haven’t we heard that ai will make even worse bio warfare?
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