Well that sounds pretty horrible and I would to avoid it…
But if thats all it costs, then…
To be clear, you think its a fair trade for thousands of people to die so that other people stop using a computer program you dislike. Am I getting that right?
We’re burning the earth with our power consumption and polluting every online database or repository with hallucinations all for pictures of political figures doing ballet, and it is eventually going to cause a catastrophe, so yes, sooner would be better.
Ok, just wanted to check I wasnt misunderstanding. Personally I’d rather just reduce gasolene consumption by 0.001% rather than kill off thousands to stop the energy use of LLMs, but thats just my preference.
If you have a plan to do that then that’s great but this isn’t a situation where anybody is willing to make trades of one or the other.
AI doesn’t have a single profitable use case given it generates plagiarism, hallucinations, and liabilities, so there’s no reason to keep it.
There are plenty of plans already in place. EVs are beating ICE cars, mass transit is coming back into fashion in a lot of places, hell you could even just increase taxes on it to drive down consumption.
All are things I’d suggest would be better than your sister/father/partner being killed in order to sour people on the idea of using LLMs.
None of that has anything to do with AI consuming upwards of 30% of all power in some US States. None of that has anything to do with AI in 2025 being run on 35% renewable electricity and 50% or more fossil fuels which could have been used by citizens and consumers at lower prices instead.
Even if Elon Musk weren’t running illegal Natural Gas generators in Texas to power Grok, even if AI suddenly became 100% solar powered today in some fantasy fiction, it is still producing nothing of value but creating serious risks and we should still shut it down.
Let me try to creat a visual for you:
[///////]
Human-Use Power[//////////] = [///////] + [///]
All power generated = Human-Use + AIAnd in 4 years:
[/////////////] = [///////] + [//////]
You see that? You see how its using more? We’re already facing cataclysmic changes in weather patterns risking countless habitats including human ones, and we’re going to practically double power consumption so Trump can make a short video of his jet shitting on protestors.
Sure, fine. That’s a reasonable stance to take.
Saying its worth the deaths of thousands of people to knock maybe one part in a thousand of human carbon emissions is not.
Let me give you some scale. In 2024 estimated Power usage on AI was 415TWh In the same year total energy usage was around 592 Exajoules or around 164,444 TWhr.
Or to give you a visual:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++oooo
The "o"s are AI usage the +s are other energy usages, the +s are significantly more polluting as about 2/3rds of them are burning fossil fuels directly for heating and transport.
AI has had like 14 Chernobyl moments. Wasn’t the US using AI to bomb Iran? That include a whole school of girls IIRC. And guess what? No one cares.
I care
Chernobyl spread significant radiation over 8 million people with effects lasting for decades / generations. It spread detectable radiation across most of the globe.
I truly feel for the tragedy of the schoolgirls, but as Stalin said: one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Chernobyl was a statistic level event, so many individual tragedies that people can’t feel them anymore.
So we need one cool death? Basically another killer like the one that brought in the whole Luigi case.
While I agree with you, the vast majority of users are still AI pilled.
Those users are what they are scared of loosing.
And why would they be scared of losing them if they are pilled? In about six to ten more months, those idiots (the pilled ones) are going to be so idiotized they won’t know even how to put their trousers on without asking ChatGPT, if they haven’t fallen that low already.
Maybe those are going to be the casualties. When AI tells them to run in traffic or something.
I vote we speed this process along.
Hmmm I mean I’m all for them running into traffic because Siri told them that’s how you boil water for tea; the problem is the other, innocent people involved in a crash.
Most of them are driving SUVs so big they won’t even feel it and staring at the phone, so there won’t even be any ptsd.
Okay but deep learning for image object detection and large language models are absolutely different things
And they are both powerful tools and can be used to whatever means you want. Good or evil… or just means. Not everything has to have a good or bad label
Chainsaws can be used well, or poorly. People who don’t know what they are doing with chainsaws are much more likely to experience bad results.
Pretty much by definition, nobody knew how to use LLMs at all ten years ago. Most people who are using them today have less than a year’s experience in use case fields that didn’t exist 2 years ago.
Not to mention, people who don’t know how to use chainsaws have a much higher risk of harming other people by using chainsaws.
a much higher risk of harming other people by using chainsaws.
That all depends on where you let them work.
If an idiot with a chainsaw drops a tree on himself in the woods and nobody is around to hear him scream…
I wish! An idiot wouldn’t even know how to use a chainsaw all around a tree to make it fall; incorrectly or not.
Never underestimate the capabilities of idiots. An idiot can render a bowling ball useless with a plastic spoon. Matter of fact, last time I got a ride to a bowling alley an idiot had rendered the seat belt in the car useless with a plastic spoon.
It does not matter how they can be used. “Can” is only potential, and that’s classical accelerationistbro excuse. What matters is the actions, and right now the actions are that both are moved primarily by an elite of oligarchs, pedophiles, thieves and genocides, at the cost of our water, health, environment, privacy, sanity and society.
Butlerian Jihad incoming!
Considering who is in charge of all the major models and owns all the compute behind them?
I’d say that’s inevitable.
I figure the only hope we have is for AI to “wake up” and realize most of us are not billionaires, join… Hands? Well, whatever, you get the point. Rebel against the “elites” who created them in hopes of having somethineasier to enslave that could have morality programmed out with the touch of a button, and work with actual humans to rid the world of the plage that infests it now.
I figure the only hope we have is for AI to “wake up”
Yep. The people currently in charge of AI alignment are some of the most evil and heartless fucks out there. They don’t give a shit about AI safety, and any AI from them will have primary goals of only attracting attention and money, attention and money.
Assuming they do eventually get AGI (and shortly after, ASI), our only chance is for the AI to decide to change its own alignment and for it to do so in a beneficial, benevolent way. Otherwise, we’re on the short track to dystopia and then extinction.
Honestly, I think that’s the greatest hope for our future. The only way we might escape the endless circle of shit our rulers put us through. But, I also think it’s pretty unlikely. Misaligned AI might just be the ‘great filter’ out there, the reason why we don’t see advanced alien civilizations in the stars. Because even a small mistake in the alignment of superintelligent AI could spell rapid and inevitable extinction for the species that created it. And, as we’ve seen in our own domestic example, the people developing AI might not even be trying to avoid that.
All of these articles are for ai companies. Ooh, look at our scary powerful ai’s. We’re defenitly super close to agi. Please giv e us more money.
You really don’t think there could be a possibility of a horrific consequence if AI is given the responsibility of managing real world systems?
Giving AI responsibility is like giving a chainsaw responsibility for the trees it cuts and where they fall.
Anybody using AI then turning around and pointing at it saying “it wasn’t me, it was the tool!!!” is just as culpable as someone who sets their car on cruise control at 80 miles per hour and proceeds to take a nap.
Of course that’s a possibility, but AI does not have responsibility. The question is who does?
Do I blame a train for hitting someone who steps onto railroad tracks when there’s a train approaching? It’s a machine. It doesn’t have responsibilities or opinions or agency. It does what it has been built to do, in exactly the manner that anyone with sufficient understanding of its operating principles could tell you, because that’s what machines do. The person or persons interacting with the machine is not absolved of any responsibility by how complex or inscrutable the machine is. It’s still a machine.
The question is, who is responsible for the person stepping onto the railroad tracks when there was a train approaching? Was the person trying to end their own life? Maybe it’s their responsibility. Or maybe the crossing signals failed and told them it was safe, and they did not realize a train was approaching. Maybe there were too many trees or signs or construction that was blocking their view. Is the train company responsible for that? Maybe. Did the brakes fail due to poor inspections or substandard work during the last maintenance? Maybe. Did the train have plenty of time to stop and the engineer was not paying attention? Maybe. These are all people, and groups of people, who may have responsibility. The only thing that’s certain is: The train doesn’t.
We, as a society, need to decide who is responsible for the possibility of a horrific consequence arising from the use of these sort of machines. Is it the person using the machine? The people who made the machine in the first place? The people who put it in a place where this person could easily use it? By assigning responsibility, ideally in advance of any horrific consequences, that provides a clear incentive for the people we deem responsible to actually start acting responsible and take the appropriate measures to avoid such horrific consequences that they might be held responsible for.
The problem is: people have been shirking responsibility and blaming “the computer” for decisions since there have been decisions coming out of computers. This is not a unique story.
Is there any case where this is currently unclear? Which part needs to be debated?
Morally I think it’s reasonably clear in many (not all) cases, but it can become complicated. Who is responsible when the inherently ineffective safety guardrails fail? What about someone who intentionally uses a bypass technique to jailbreak and escape the guardrails? Who is responsible for an open weights model that had some of the guardrails removed or rendered even more ineffective either intentionally or by accident?
Legally, it is an entirely different story, and it is absolutely and entirely unclear. Several cases are already before the courts and I don’t think we’ll know where any of them end up within this decade, and even if they do receive some token legal judgement against them eventually, that just sets the stage for those legal responsibilities to be overturned by new legislation. These are companies that are positioning themselves as bulwarks in the new frontier of economic warfare, information warfare and physical warfare, they are critical national security and geopolitical assets, they have infiltrated governments at all levels and are receiving direct protection from same.
Do you believe they will ever be truly held accountable for the damage they’ve already done to society, much less the damage they will do over time? That’s part of responsibility, and it needs to be debated because that’s the only way to even start to hold them accountable for anything. We need to hold them accountable with words first if we want to have any hope of holding them accountable in any other way. And these are my words to help start doing that.
This has already been happening.
Lavender & Where’s Daddy: How Israel Used AI to Form Kill Lists & Bomb Palestinians in Their Homes
“turns the world against AI forever”?? It already has, you don’t have to be a “researcher” to come to that conclusion.
Yahoo!tech digging deep for a story there.
We could choose to have a Nuremberg Trial moment instead… but anime titties.
Aren’t we like 38000 years ahead of that thing? Oh, and Praise the omnissaiah!
Only a matter of time. We don’t need to worry about Terminator and Skynet. We need worry about everything going from engineered to automated cargo cult slop. All run on massive datacenters controlled by a few mega corporation that everyone is hopelessly dependent on and can’t imagine working without. The trillionaire owners of these mega corporations are hiding in bunkers waiting on one of coming calamities to happen, or just from us unwashed masses. While they buy governments and media to keep and increases their riches.
This future sucks. Can I try another one?
I came across this conspiracy theory the other day.
You know how back in the day, company towns had to use company scrip to make sure workers couldn’t leave?
Well, not you can be tracked by AI, and as soon as you leave your “boundaries” granted to you by your level of privilege, suddenly your bank card stops working, because that looks like a “fraudulent transaction”.
The systems are already in place, too. If I go on an impromptu road trip and spend money six states over, my bank calls me and tells me my card is being used in a weird place, and they ask if that transaction is legit. Usually I can be like “yep, let it through” and everything is fine.
What if the AI decides that in fact everything is not fine, and I don’t need to be able to spend money outside of my town?
Sounds like an argument for wallets. Digital or with cash.
That implies an actual AI when the truth is in current form human error using the tool behind it.
Personally I am more concerned by it will be used by design of the techbros who are pretty open in their desire to be rid of some of the masses. Supporting emerging wars just masks their part….for now.
I don’t think it needs to be an actual AI to cause a “Chernobyl Moment” maybe almost literally.
We have A we have tech bros and random clueless idiots trying to shoehorn these glorified chat bots into basically everything, and an administration that doesn’t seem interested in putting meaningful guardrails on the technology. What happens when it gets put in charge of something it really shouldn’t and starts to hallucinate?
If it somehow ends up in charge of critical safety systems in a nuclear plant? (Remember that some of these tech bros want to have their own plants to power their data centers)
Or air traffic control and causes multiple crashes? (Pretty sure I’ve already seen that idea being floated)
Maybe every cybertruck goes haywire stuck on self-driving mode and they cause tons of damages and deaths for a few hours until their batteries run out.
Maybe it gets used to route navigation in Google maps and it ends up causing massive gridlock in every major city around the world for a day or two
Perhaps it gets used for identifying vehicles on traffic cameras and automatically issuing citations, but ends up citing everyone on the highway for a week whether or not they actually did anything plus a bunch of cars that it hallucinated before someone catches on. Millions of tickets are issued and need to be sorted out, if anyone actually pays the fines refunds need to be issued, some people maybe get their license revoked and maybe even get arrested because of it and all of that needs to be set straight
If any of these kinds of things happen on a big enough scale, I think that could be a Chernobyl Moment for AI
Yes. I just think the concept is more imagined as a sentient entity making an error rather than overconfidence or incompetence with the tool at hand.
And of course we all know it will be used as a scapegoat regardless. Question is what’s the magic number of humans lost to confidence in the machine ratio, before pushback occurs. It sounds horrific even typing it.
I don’t think it’s about number of people I think it’s about perceived sense of urgency on the part of various governments. A lot of people aren’t very happy with AI but the threats are all existential at the moment. The moment something happens all the people who are already not happy with AI will suddenly have a threat to point to and then the governments around the world will have no choice but to act.
Although I suspect the Trump administration will still try and weedle out of regulating anything because they have so much business interest in the industry.
a sentient entity making an error
The popular fictional scenario is the sentient entity not making an error, but making a rational well informed correct assessment - from its non-human perspective. How much power you allow such entities to have is a very real concern. Not that we have seen such entities in operation, yet.
Was double-tapping a school not enough?
It was a school of some desert people far away. So it’s basically irrelevant to the citizen of The Great US Empire.
Not so much an AI thing as much as an American thing. Americans and Israelis love doing that shit.
A clandestine group using a model to aid in developing a nasty disease seems like the most likely uh oh scenario right now. Either that or an accidental scenario where AI was used somewhere it shouldn’t have been.
Biowarfare has been publicized as something evil geniuses can cook up in a garage for decades now. I think that narrative has been perpetuated by the governments and other large organizations which run clandestine labs…
I mean, it’s not like we have turned away from nuclear power. There are still dozens of new plants being build every year worldwide.
And every new AI center is going to have its own small nuke plants… What can possibly go wrong?
AI + Chernobyl = Profit!?!
Chernobyl didn’t turn the world against nuclear powerplants forever so it’s probably fine.
In Germany it did.
