I very much doubt it will do that because access to that information was already available to anyone who wanted to know. It was not a secret. All AI did was to provide it via single interface, for a fee - which strangely do not go back to the original source of the knowledge, but to the AI company these days. This is not democratisation of information, it's commodification of it.
I think it is very much different. Previous revolutions allowed us to fall back from manual labour to more mental driven work. Now even this is not going to be an option. Soon we're going to be reduced to be useful for spare parts only.
This is only the case for the Industrial Revolution.
There have been many other thinking technologies and they ALL have been attacked in exactly the same way.
* Socrates attacked the invention of writing, arguing it would make people intellectually lazy.
* Abbot Johannes Trithemius argues in "In Praise of Scribes" in the 15th century that the Gutenberg machine would make people intellectually lazy.
* Lots of people in the 1960s attacked punch card computers, and automation in general (!), on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy.
* Nicholas Carr attacks Google in a famous article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", on the basis that it would make people intellectually lazy.
And so on and so on and so on.
"That which has been is what will be, And there is nothing new under the sun."
It is because of this history that any argument such as the author makes, arguing that AI would make people intellectually lazy, must start already from the lamentation of the downfall of human intelligence from the days of Socrates, or must explain why this is different.
It is obviously not different.
There are three mental skills being offloaded onto AI:
1. Domain-specific skills
2. General intelligence (g)
3. Recall
Of these three, the danger with 1 is offloading them too early, before the AI is "good enough" to be better than human experts. This is a genuine concern and we should do things carefully. However, if the AI is good enough, there is no danger here.
Recall is the mental skill that all of these innovations have "hurt", but it can simply be trained explicitly and synthetically. We will certainly have to structure our societies more and more in the future to synthetically exercising recall (like we're now synthetically exercising our muscles), but if we do this, offloading recall at work is not a big issue.
As for general intelligence, this is the most harmless to offload, because, as far as I know from the literature, it cannot really be trained, and it does not really degrade either.
"If AI is good enough there is no danger" ?? Who's going to be validating the AI expertise after the experts are gone? Another AI? This is a downward spiral into oblivion and worst case, obsolescence.
The way the transformers work, getting to the point 1 will probably never be possible - more likely that the capital will just say it is good-enough "in the name of profits" and legislate to protect AI companies against any litigation from AI made mistakes. To a certain extent it is happening already - and all the IP and Copyright theft for model training has been brushed aside already. Yes there are few odd lawsuits here and there but they will be inconsequential and soon forgotten.
Recall is already being massively affected. I see it in our teams at work and I am also affected myself to a point. I very much doubt there will be a massive restructure of societies to allow us to work our brains out - mental gyms. They do exist now, in various chess clubs and are not that popular - that this will become a norm is a wishful thinking, and anyway, we will be too busy fighting one another for the last few remaining jobs.
General Intelligence without Recall and those hard acquired Domain-specific skills means nothing really - just our bioware defaults.
Ah ok, then drought aren't a problem I guess? Guess what happens when you pump ground water faster than rain water replenishes it? Guess what climate change is disturbing?
This your your typical HN take, aka "I thought about a random problem I barely understand for 12 seconds and I think I figured it out better than domain experts"
There are plenty of places built around water for obvious reason which are now experiencing droughts at an increased rate... It's not a problem for most of us yes, but it's a problem for more and more people.
> Fully two thirds of earths inhabitants live near large bodies of water.
Most of these large bodies of water are salty, it's expensive as shit to desalinate it completely infeasible to pump it in land for agriculture and people
It doesn't need to be desalinated for evaporative cooling, does it? Maybe they use fresh water because we allow it and it's cheaper. They should outlaw that where it makes sense.
Why would you bring sea water if you're hundreds of km away from the sea?
Either the entire world is stupid and has been for decades and you're a genius. Or your 5 minutes take on the subject is completely unrealistic and you're missing half of the story ?
1) I said that 2/3rds of all humans live near large bodies of water so evaporative cooling was probably fine for most of us.
2) You replied that it was saltwater and desalinating it was expensive.
3) I pointed out that saltwater evaporates fine. You seem to have assumed that cooling can only be done with freshwater for some reason.
4) You now seem to believe that I'm a simpleton who is suggesting that the people who live near large amounts of freshwater should also import salt water for some reason? Honestly I'm lost. They don't need to, they have fresh water which will also evaporate fine.
If water is scarce where you live, you live in a bad (and relatively rare) place that humans aren't meant to live. You should be talking to your representative to make sure data centers don't waste your imported water just because it's cheaper.
That doesn't matter though, what matters is that sources of freshwater (rain over land) stays roughly the same. We can't assume that changes just because we evaporate water in a data center
It matters because there's almost none as it is, and you don't collect 100% of the water you use just because it rains. Water gets polluted, trapped underground, locked up in glaciers.
Statistically speaking, compared to non-fresh water and compared to how much we actually use as a species, there is very, very little fresh water available to us.
I do need an entire ocean of water to live a normal lifestyle. Only some amount far less than the many, many, many quadrillions of gallons of freshwater we have.
If you live in the desert, stop doing that... or get them to laws for your specific place in the world. Where I live we have something close to an infinite supply of fresh water.
Three percent of two thirds of the entire planet is enormous. We aren't running out, and never will.
Some people just live in places that aren't suitable for human life and survive only through technology. Those places need to have different laws about water.
For example, I shouldn't be forced to use a low flow showerhead when I'm 100 miles from 1.3 quadrillion gallons of fresh water. If you aren't next door to lake Michigan then maybe you should be.
Because you're the only person on earth who matters, clearly.
Also, it's not 3% of 2/3. It's more like ~1% of 3% of 2/3. Most of the fresh water on earth is locked up in glaciers or trapped deep underground. You can absolutely lose surface water, too - when pipes leak, for instance. And that happens all the time because a lot of the water infrastructure is ancient. Where I live, there are still thousands of miles of Victorian-era pipes. These crack all the time. You don't just get that water back straight away when it next rains.
Where the heck does it go? Space? You're talking about the entire planet here. There's nowhere for it to be lost to, unless you're cracking it into hydrogen and oxygen or something.
> Because you're the only person on earth who matters, clearly.
As I said elsewhere in this third 2/3rds of humans live near large bodies of water.
It goes into the soil and can take a long-ass time to get back into any our supply. Yes, it's still on earth, but it's no good to you if it's locked up in the soil or the polar icecaps. And that's not to mention the ridiculous ways we pollute water that make it very difficult if not impossible to recycle. This stuff really isn't as simple as just drain the lakes and rivers. We absolutely could run out of fresh water, and pumping it into data centres is a terrible idea.
> We absolutely could run out of fresh water, and pumping it into data centres is a terrible idea.
Maybe if you live in a desert. I'm not going to. We don't all live in the same place, and different rules are necessary. I suspect that much of the talk about evaporative cooling comes from treating places where it is sensible to do as if they are places where it's not.
There is a lake not far from that it would take about 3 days to cross on foot at it's SHORTEST point. Walking the full length would take about TWO WEEKS, someone would probably die of dysentery along the way.
Water scarcity is a regional problem that's being passed off as a universal concern for all of human-kind. It isn't. Earth has water, lots of it. Some places are just crummy places for humans to live.
AI or more precisely the way it is being sold to us is the most responsible factor here. People by nature are lazy and will take shortcuts given an opportunity. AI is the ultimate shortcut these days, a "mental crutch" majority of the people using it are leaning on. Humans just did what they always do, be lazy - AI should never have been used for processes with this level of life-altering impact because what happened here was bound to happen.
Nobody's "selling it" as more reliable than it is. People are assuming it's more reliable than it is.
> People by nature are lazy and will take shortcuts given an opportunity.
So, um, the fact that humans are behaving incompetently means we should shift the responsibility onto a machine?
Suppose a human had looked at some crappy surveillance video from hundreds of miles away, and told the primary investigator "that looks like it could be her; you might want to check it out". Would that human be the most responsible person in the chain? The moron who took that as gospel and actually made an arrest has no agency at all here?
Come on, a facial recognition match? Facial recognition probably shouldn't be used because it's bad when it works, but everybody with a functioning synapse knows that facial recognition is going to get lots of false hits.
heat dissipation is one thing - another is the recycling - anything he shoots into the orbit will essentially be disposable, single use DCs. Once they fail, it will be just a dangerous junk waiting to be deorbited. And all the precious materials which normally get recycled will be lost....
This is the AI which called itself Mecha Hitler, and the owner's response to it making CSAM on demand was to limit this to paying customers and cry "free speech" in response to all the outrage.
"A Great Argument" for Capitalism and "competition" being the drive of innovation... also shows how antimonopoly regulations are just ink-on-pages and zero real-world applicability...
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