this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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'How dare technology keep doing stuff?' is a deeply weird criticism.
This isn't like crypto bullshit, where finance-bro jackasses did databases in the least efficient possible way. We're pushing the boundaries of results-driven artificial intelligence, modeled on how biological brains work. Is it miraculous? Not exactly. But it's answering a lot of questions that were exciting forty-odd years ago and suddenly exploded into relevance due to parallel computing... intended for video games.
Bemoaning the last year-ish of outright witchcraft, based on the up-front costs of training models that will run on a phone, is a perspective that seems more performative than plausible.
I deeply dislike the line of argument that goes "we shouldn't bother reducing our personal energy consumption because 100 corporations produce 70% of greenhouse gases" or similar arguments. Of course we should. Because it's the right thing to do.
But it's also true: those 100 corporations and their ilk absolutely promote a false narrative that personal responsibility is the solution to climate change, in order to prevent climate regulation that might harm their bottom line.
And frankly, I think that's what's going on here with panic over AI power consumption. Corporate lobbyists and PR creating yet another distraction to slow the course of climate regulation and guilting ordinary people for doing ordinary things in the process.
Personal responsibility has always been capitalism’s mechanism for normalizing corpo behavior. The fake Native American trash commercial in the 70s, banning home cleaners that business can still use at industrial scale, buying new electric cars being somehow carbon better than just not being a vehicle consumer every five minutes, there are examples going even further back in time, but my brain doesn’t currently have enough caffeine to dig further back.
It's atomization of responsibility.
Considering one crosspost for this is the sneer-club hypocrites at awful.systems, there's also the interplay of bad-faith criticism and bad-faith excuses, for their own sake. Individual randos have picked an allegiance and will now engage in kneejerk loyalist ad-hoc justification, because they think that's how things work. Going from arguments to conclusions would be ridiculous, to them. Their claims are not intended to be evaluated.
Myriad douchebags have jumped from crypto to AI as the next buzzword cult that might make them hideously rich. People rightly condemning them also tend to jab at whatever bullshit they're pushing, now. Some of that's going to be legitimate perspective on an over-hyped autocomplete, powered by copying every book in the library, using racks of video cards running full-tilt 24/7. Some of that's going to be inane performative mockery of creative tools that border on magical and should scale down to translate speech right in your earbuds. All I can guarantee for you is that the aforementioned douchebags will not know the difference. Neither will their loudest critics. They'll both say 'you just don't understand!' because they're just shuffling cards and this deck is not deep.