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That whole paragraph is clever :)

Just saying: those are also carbon-based lifeforms :D

I disagree. I think you absolutely have a moral obligation to consider the impacts of your product.

Who are you to say you know better than the market?

You really don't think the scientists & engineers making these tools know some things better than the market?

Good point - folks should stop teaching them that. If your kid is really in a sea of dangerous adults their phone won't save them anyway.

Being on "social media" is a fundamentally unsocial activity: you do it alone, it makes you lonely, and it separates you from others. Some people manage to bootstrap a social layer on top of the base medium, but most are being driven apart for profit.

I call it _anti_social media.

This is kind of like saying a kid can never become a better programmer than the average of his teachers.

IMHO, the reasons not to use AI are social, not logical.

Ditto. AI has the power to make you believe stuff without you noticing, why would they bother with garish ads when they could make you think it was YOUR idea to buy Chlorox?

I guess maybe the garish colors could increase your suggestibility indirectly maybe?

The environment wins (less tokens burned = less energy consumed)

This is understandable logic, but at a systemic level it's not how things always go. Increasing efficiency can lead to increased consumption overall. You might save 50% in energy for your workload, but maybe now you can run it 3 times as much, or maybe 3 times more people will use it, because it's cheaper. The result might be a 50% INCREASE in energy consumed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

What I want is for THIS to stop. "Listen, no one wants to hear about your moral issues, just stfu."

Don't give up so easily. Let the discomfort in and try & figure out why people keep saying "omg LLMs" until you can hear what they are actually saying.

We need your help! Can you please use your creativity to build resilience to climate change in your community instead of experimenting with more ways to spend computing power?

Using AI to improve facebook ads... y'all are the breakers from the Dark Tower series.

People who know alcohol is bad for them and don't want to keep being drunks but keep drinking, people who believe phones are bad for their kids but still buy them, people who understand AI will significantly degrade the environment if it becomes ubiquitous but still work to help it become ubiquitous...

Mathematicians who publish proofs that are later proven inconsistent!

I suspect we have fundamentally different views of how humans work. I see our behavior and beliefs as _mostly_ irrational, with only a few "reasoning live-zones" where, with great effort, we can achieve logical thought.

we can apply the rule, "-A cannot follow from A", etc. regardless of the A

You can't think of any domains where we are unable to apply this rule? I feel like I'm surrounded by people claiming "A, therefore -A!!"

And if I'm one of them, and this were a reasoning dead-zone for me, I wouldn't be able to tell!

You should go talk to your librarians, you can totally influence all these things!

I totally agree. I see this "people don't want to do hard stuff" argument used all over - completely disregarding tens of thousands of years of people doing hard stuff.

It comes off to me as the author not wanting to do the hard stuff of working towards their values. Just kind of defeatist and trying to make a splash but leaning on a pretty weak premise.

Either you own and control something, or you do not, there's no third option.

I think there's a full spectrum you're missing. You can own something with other people, and your level of control can be continuous, not discrete & binary. For example, my public library is funded by my local government, which I can influence with lobbying and voting. I can join the board of the library, and I can just go and talk to the librarians in charge to influence their decisions.

In an individualist consumerist mindset things are pretty stark : full self-hosting or full submission. If you reject that mindset there are many more options.

Energy doesn't disappear, but obviously it moves from useful forms to unuseful forms. Same with water. Your sarcasm just comes off as naive arrogance.

Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage. And our energy usage is destroying the environment.

Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage.

https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/b3b696c0-226d-0137-f265-1d2...

Yeah, it's a tradeoff. I don't mean to be glib, but on one side we have a loneliness epidemic, mass misinformation campaigns, and centralized control, and on the other side we have better information about restaurants, easier after-school arrangements, and community blogs. I really don't mean to say that the benefits are not real benefits - they are! I just think their price is way too high.

People in my community are bragging about getting off social media - it's like a new status symbol around here.

I want to push back on this narrative - I got off facebook and now my friends just text me instead. A few of my friends also got off facebook. Sometimes I can't see a facebook event so I text a friend asking for details. It's fine.

This mindset is cancerous

Thanks for posting this! I was also flabbergasted and it's nice to see at least one mention of the huge environmental impact!

I assume that we are neurons in a bigger brain that already exists!

I started down this belief system with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

https://tixy.land/?code=sin%28t*sin%28t%29%2F9-x%29*sin%28t-...

I think doing stuff like this probably has more downsides than upsides.

The inconsistency of an optimistic blog post ending with a picture of a terminator robot makes me think this author isn't taking themself seriously enough. Or - the author is the terminator robot?

I think I disagree with you on many points, but ultimately, if we are overthrown by AI, I hope you are right!

I may have lost the thread here. Are you thinking it's _likely_ AI would prioritize better ways to control us, or are you only brainstorming potential slivers of hope we might have?

As a side note: in the case of chickens, humans do have better options if you are optimizing for biosphere health. Only people optimizing for short-term profit would grow chickens the way we do. I think the analog for AI overlords is that we have to hope they care more about overall balance than about competing with other AI.

Interesting. Do you have a theory about why so few humans have taken it upon themselves to advance the butterflies, despite having plenty of resources?