alt Hacker News> I want to go toward a future that looks good and fair for regular people.
Do we agree that moving towards a future that's somehow "more advanced" as compared to the present (i.e. isn't going back to the past) would likely require giving up some land, water, and energy? That is, that progress is always a trade-off?
We don't have to agree that an AI-powered future specifically is "more advanced". For example, transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables is IMO a future that looks "good and fair for regular people". But building solar panels requires energy and water, placing them requires lots of land, building batteries requires mining lithium which is bad for the local environment, building hydro power destroys ecosystems, etc.
I imagine you don't oppose this because it's overall better for humans and the planet. I'm just making the point that there are nontrivial trade-offs, and building anything requires the use of resources such as land, water, and energy.
If we're in agreement so far, then I think the main thing we're in disagreement about is whether AI is actually worth the cost. ("What does this 'future' do for us besides take our jobs?")
And to this I'd ask, how should we handle such disagreements in a free society? I may think that Mr. Beast recreating Squid Game was a profligate waste of human and non-human capital, just to make a buck. Or more seriously, I'm a vegetarian. Worldwide, meat and dairy production accounts for (very roughly) 80% of agricultural land use [1], 30% of agriculture's water use [2], and 15% of total human GHG emissions [3]. I don't think the benefit is worth the extreme cost.
People disagree with me about Mr. Beast and beef, though. They think that these are worth the cost to land, water, energy, and the planet overall.
My question is, how should we resolve disagreements of this kind, where one person thinks another person's actions are spending resources in a way that is not worth the return? It seems much larger than AI.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8 [3] https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1634679
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The answer is, through elections and picking officials that get to decide these things. Like they did here!
Sure, we agree on that. Everything has a cost. I’m a lifetime vegetarian also.
Just because “progress has a cost” doesn’t mean I have to support whatever the owner class decides is progress. They are explicitly telling us their plan for AI: to take our jobs. This isn’t speculation - the CEOs are literally saying this openly, and we should listen.
Sam Altman can’t just throw around the words “cure cancer” occasionally and expect us to not see what he’s doing. The unemployment issue? He used to say we would solve it with UBI, and recently said he no longer believes that will work, without providing an alternative. I guess we’re just on our own while he destroys our livelihoods now?
The future the hyperscalers want involves insane energy and water use. What do we gain out of this exchange? Right now it’s fun that Claude Code does our job for us, but if they pull off their plan we’re a few years away from massive concentration of power, mass unemployment, AI assisted warfare, unprecedented misinformation campaigns, etc.
I don’t think I’m crazy for questioning whether this is worth it.