Lead makes people dumb and violent. The opposite of intelligent. One of my colleagues from High School who is a homesteader posts the meme that whenever she hears A.I. she thinks of stainless steel metal straws stored in nitrogen and arm-lengthed gloves used for artificial insemination of cattle and goats on dairies and other farms that either want to import high-quality genetics or not keep a bull on the farm.The endless Facebook ads selling A.I. and warning us that A.I. is coming for our jobs, and therefore we need to regulate it to death so only incumbent players win!
All thoughts that come to my mind when I hear about the Artificial Intelligence in the news. The stock market took a pretty good dip yesterday, when the europhia of the slash-and-burn politics of Donald Trump wore off and the Chinese introduced a new form of Artificial Intelligence that doesnβt burn nearly as much coal-fired electricity, uses as much less toxic high-end electronic components and gives out better answers for a much lower cost.
The reactionary politicians are like we have only one solution to the Chinese eating our lunch β drill, baby, drill.
We are told we need tougher sanctions against China. We need to do more to protect incumbent players in AI space, to keep people with new and better ideas from moving our society. Of course, the Chinese will not be impacted by any of this. The reason why they innovated when American industry fell behind was because the Chinese were forced to do better with less. Try programming an Arduino Uno, and youβll become a lot better programmer. Not because a 32 KB memory and a 8 MHz processor provides advanced computing power, but because you have to count every instruction run and every byte stored in memory and find ways to do it better as you have no other choice. Working in a resource-constrained environment makes you more efficient and better. American industry, with itβs cheap energy, plentiful processing power and massive server farms is big, fat and lazy. American industry doesnβt have to innovate when they can waste.
Not that Iβm convinced that A.I. is real. Sure it can sometimes give you witty answers on Facebook or generate often weird pictures. But itβs endlessly hyped, much less blockchain and machine learning before it, but has only limited benefits in reality. Most A.I. innovation is not real, and is oversold. Itβs not unlike what we are seeing in the renewable sector or with electrification. There are real benefits to moving away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and electrification, but we should proceed with caution and try to understand the impacts of what we are doing. We shouldnβt go back, turn our back on technology, but we should be cognoscente of itβs limitations. A.I. wonβt change everything, though machine learning and large language models are useful in limited circumstances and can benefit industry and society in various limited ways.
There are real reasons to be concerned about A.I., renewable energy and electrification. But there are more significant reasons to be concerned about protecting incumbent players in industry, or believing that big centralized systems are only the way to move society forward. A.I. will be great as it moves to the personal computer and actually makes life better besides generating weird images, texts and broken code. Have you ever asked AI to help you with a coding project? The answers are usually terribly broken β OpenAI is slightly better then Meta AI but not by much. It can give you hints, but like most A.I. itβs broken.
The truth is incandescent bulbs, coal, oil, and trade sanctions and limits on technology wonβt solve the worldβs problems. The future isnβt going to be powered by steam or even horses. We need to be encouraging innovation and not protecting incumbents. Going back to 18th century technology wonβt solve our problems, even if our society is built on manure, coal, oil and garbage. We got to keep moving forward, developing better solutions but without overselling the new technology and fully understanding the impacts of what we are developed.