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msikora 2 days ago

Yes, absolutely in a good way

ponco 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The benefits of modernity (electricity, cars, iPhone, Claude) are good, but they come bundled with potentially terminal ecological costs which is bad.

doublepg23 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Have people (smarter than me) come up with a good equation - or at least heuristic - to determine what inventions are morally good?

I suppose it'd be from a utilitarian perspective?

Ex: My gut feeling is nitrogen fixing would rank "low" on "terminal ecological impact" against "positive benefits to humanity"; the Vinyl resurgence would be around the middle; private jets for the Epstein class would the highest etc.

ponco 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I was being a bit cheeky, but I’m not really arguing that individual inventions can be determined as good or bad. My point is it comes from the same underlying mode of production. "Claude is useful" and "the way we have organised society that led to its creation may be ecologically catastrophic” can both be true.

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CamperBob2 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yup. Best unplug your computer.

ponco 2 days ago | parent [-]

Darn, I tried this and the lithium battery kicked in.

ETH_start 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There are certainly ecological costs, but in the long run, Earth's life will only survive if an advanced species like ours is able to transport it off the planet before the sun expands and boils away the ocean and atmosphere, in approximately 800 million years.

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fragmede 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Fortunately, the rockets for that will be helped along with the GPU capacity to run rocket simulations on. GPUs not being used to run LLMs can be used instead for physics simulations to help make those rockets work.

ETH_start 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'm looking at the second and third order effects of technologies. LLMs massively increase the surplus capacity of human civilization, and it is this surplus capacity enables resources (including human capital) to be expended on developing frontier technologies like rockets that can accelerate the development of space-faring capabilities.

davkan 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That remains to be seen.

I for one am doubtful that AI as a whole has meaningfully improved the lives of just about anyone besides the few who have gotten rich. Meanwhile many have already lost their jobs as a result, even if AI is just a convenient scapegoat.

preisschild 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I disagree. People get dumber because they outsource thinking to fancy autocomplete and I haven't really yet seen work by LLMs that significantly improve the world.

tayo42 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You really think your life is better than 2 years ago because of AI chat bots?

If AI went away tomorrow idk if my life would meaningfully change

ToValueFunfetti 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

An AI chatbot diagnosed my rolled shoulders. I had assumed I had bad workout form. I would google "discomfort in upper back" or whatever and it would say "back pain after exercise means take a rest" and I would rest and it wouldn't get better until I lost interest in working out. It never occurred to me that this could be a medical problem, so I never asked a doctor (not that I had one to ask, as I was working retail at the time). Last time I started working out, I went to ChatGPT instead of google and it said "here's your problem, here's how to fix it" and it was right and I continue to work out and my quality of life has risen tremendously. YMMV

techpression 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I would see less fake news, fake profiles and fake content in general. I would be happier, even if I would miss some of it. It’s kind of sad how much we accept the idea of ”trust absolutely nothing” nowadays, even movie trailers for fictional movies are made to drive clicks for ads… obviously there has always been a large trust issue online, but with gen ai we entered a new era of it.