I remember sitting in an art class where the teacher proclaimed using premixed black paint was improper: a true artist must mix their own black paint. I thought a lot about that when I first started using Photoshop and viewing digital art. I think about it now with AI.
Right now AI is a tool of MBAs who see it as a way to extract money from budgets by cutting costs on artists and writers. AI’s only proper use is as a tool by artists and writers.
I disagreed with that teacher then, and still kinda do, but I understand them completely: they were focused on fostering the artistic drive of the creator and eschewing shortcuts. I just think the artistic drive includes so called shortcuts as there is no predefined or ‘true’ path to being an artist.
It doesn’t solve the energy and emissions crisis we are facing but sure.
(the energy and emissions crisis are also byproducts of capitalism)
They don’t disappear if capitalism disappears. I agree with you capitalism needs to end in order to deal with them but there are hard issues that we have to deal with even with capitalism gone.
Even if the causes ceased we would still be left with residual emissions and degraded natural systems to try and deal with and a lower EROI society to do it.
They’re “hard issues” because we don’t have a centrally planned economy, we have to rely on the market to provide solutions.
Through a combination of marshaling the forces of production to build a renewable infrastructure and strict fossil fuel rationing during the build-up phase I think we could get the crisis under control within 5 years.
… I’ll admit that’s just vibes, though.
They’re “hard issues” because we don’t have a centrally planned economy, we have to rely on the market to provide solutions
As humans are very bad a predicting the future, centrally planned economies come with so many added problems that market based solutions are frequently more realistic.
Every corporation is centrally planned.
I recommend reading The People’s Republic of Walmart. Businesses have figured out central planning, there’s no reason it can’t be done for nations.
Yes, because it’s so great that they’re trying to run the nation like a business right now.
They’re trying to strip the wiring from the walls. They’re not even running like a business, they’re running it like VC.
Let’s not pretend they’re trying to centrally plan anything. The doggy department hates central planning. They just tell ChatGPT to come up with things to cut
No, they are not and how a business functions amd how a national economy function are incredibly different.
Walmart isn’t a federation, it’s very centrally planned. It’s also larger than a lot of nations.
The only thing missing is a military.
I get the sentiment and I wish it were true.
Some of the issues stem from material and energy limitations regardless of human organisation structures. Fossil Fuels are stored sunlight over a long period of time that means that burning them has a high yield and that’s given us a very high EROI society (one where there’s an abundance of energy for purposes that aren’t basic functioning).
I recommend reading The Collapse of Complex Societies by Tainter who discussing the energy limitations of society. Its before our understanding of energy limitations of technology and he’s by no means a leftist but it is still a good introductory text to it.
I’ve read Limits to Growth. I understand there are physical limits and that we can’t just grow our way through this crisis. Industrial civilization can not continue as it is.
But central planning would allow for us to transition to a lower energy society.
I agree but there’s a lot of detail about what activities a lower energy society precludes and my point is that energy intensive “AI” (mostly thinking about LLMs rather than targets applications of ML) probably aren’t part of it.
Deepseek showed that these chatbots can be run much more cheaply than they have been and it isn’t really necessary to build giga warehouses of servers. It might be possible to run them on even tighter hardware specifications too.
Of course, chatbots aren’t AI and the fact that they’re trying to use them as AI isn’t going to work out anyway lol
The Aral Sea is essentially gone and it was killed by poor Soviet planning. Capitalism was not the driving factor rather ignorance was and ignorance is held equally by all sides.
Capitalism isn’t the only thing driving environmental collapse. It’s industrialization
Central planners in the Soviet Union didn’t even have computers and they lacked the level of scientific understanding we have today of the environment, of our resources, and of the limits to growth. We’ve all heard about Mao killing the sparrows in China.
This isn’t a reason to never try central planning again.
They absolutely had computers, I have no idea why you would think the second largest economy that produced tremendous technological advances in its time did not have computers.You know Tetris was created by a Soviet programmer, right?
Planned economies are doomed at this point gecause we aren’t able to predict distasters and the planned economy cannot respond in an efficient manner when things go wrong. Humans aren’t smart enough and we do not have artificial intelligence capable of doing so.
They had computers towards the end, of course, but they were extremely primitive. The kinds of disaster predictions you can do on a machine built to run Tetris are nothing compared to what can be done with today’s technology.
Also, it’s not like markets can actually deal with disasters. Without at least some central planning disaster response and relief is impossible.
Planning for relief disaster and a planned economy are incredibly different things. Planned economies do not handle disasters well at all as they didn’t prepare for that disaster in advance (typically because how can you plan for the one in a hundred million chance that x would happen).
We largely have stuck with market based economies because they currently are much more responsive to changes.
While computers have gotten more powerful there is zero evidence to support that we have gotten to the point where they could run a planned economy in any fashion.
We largely have stuck with market based economies because they currently are much more responsive to changes.
No, we still have market based economies because they make a few people very very rich.
We needed markets before computers and instant mass communication. Things are different now
While computers have gotten more powerful there is zero evidence to support that we have gotten to the point where they could run a planned economy in any fashion.
What about the fact that market-based responses to COVID were universally worse than centrally planned responses?
And when we do that, I’ll stop fighting AI.
Uh… that’s just plain wrong. Everyone who seeks power (read: all governments) will abuse this technology the exact same way they’ve abused every other technology which came before it.
Unironically any good argument against AI boils down to an argument against capitalism. Every other one is horribly misinformed.
It is not just Capitalism…is is centralization in all its forms. Too much power in the hands of the few always leads to poor outcomes for the many. This is bigger than Capitalism.
Completely untrue.
The environmental impact would still be as bad, it would still spout out misinformation, it would still scrape for art against people’s will, the images would still be shit and not art anyway, and would still make an intellectual sinkhole.
If society isn’t built around competition and exploitation, the usage of AI can be limited to renewable energy. Whereas now, every gram of hydrocarbon and uranium will be burned to win the race for global domination.
I really disagree with this meme. For just one example, capitalism isnt why people are using ai to generate nudes of unwilling people and children. Without capitalism I do very much doubt AI would be where it is right now, but the cats out of the bag and it isnt going away if we didnt have capitalism.
That is unfortunately just human nature. The tool here is not to blame, but the person using it. People were making drawings of people unconsentually well before ai, then with the addition of photoshop the issue became even worse. Now AI is just the next step in allowing humans to follow their darker interests.
But the tool is so much more valuable than that.
Ai is pretty much like as any other tool. Knife is an extremely useful tool. It can either help you cook a delicious dinner or kill a man. It all comes down to what you are going to use it for.
If people think the big risk of AI is fake nudes… man, I wish that was the worst that could happen.
