You could say the same about cars. An US American might not be able to imagine life without them. But while trucks, vans, and ambulances have their meaningful use, many European cities are moving away from allowing personal cars as dominant means of transport because bicycles and public transport are frankly better and do not impose such a high cost on the community.
Coming back to the AI topic, saying “it is here to stay” is not a valid reason to avoid discussion what it is good for, what are the costs. whether the Linux communities are willing to pay those costs, and whether there are perhaps better solutions for what AI promises.
Also, back when the tobacco industry was lobbying and promoting their products despite having knowledge of their massive consequences, it was seen as something that would “never go away”. Today there are laws in place that ban smoking outright in some places, so I hope AI gets the same treatment soon…
That something is here, does not mean it has to be. Cancer is here too, but we’re still trying to do something about that.
There is a fascinating parallel to tobacco in that the LLM technology seems, like “social media”, to be deliberately engineered to be addictive by design. A thing we should focus more on.
(By the way, using cars is also somewhat addictive: Humans do have a time budget of about one hour per day for commuting and daily errands. If you start to use a car, the average distance you go daily will expand, and it is very difficult to go back from that, even if you don’t really have more time, or don’t need the car any more. This is probably relevant to ai because the mechanism by which cars hook us is that the brain stem is basically programmed to use alternatives which are less effort, and so people use the car for everything because it is so comfortable.)
You could say the same about cars. An US American might not be able to imagine life without them. But while trucks, vans, and ambulances have their meaningful use, many European cities are moving away from allowing personal cars as dominant means of transport because bicycles and public transport are frankly better and do not impose such a high cost on the community.
Coming back to the AI topic, saying “it is here to stay” is not a valid reason to avoid discussion what it is good for, what are the costs. whether the Linux communities are willing to pay those costs, and whether there are perhaps better solutions for what AI promises.
Also, back when the tobacco industry was lobbying and promoting their products despite having knowledge of their massive consequences, it was seen as something that would “never go away”. Today there are laws in place that ban smoking outright in some places, so I hope AI gets the same treatment soon… That something is here, does not mean it has to be. Cancer is here too, but we’re still trying to do something about that.
There is a fascinating parallel to tobacco in that the LLM technology seems, like “social media”, to be deliberately engineered to be addictive by design. A thing we should focus more on.
(By the way, using cars is also somewhat addictive: Humans do have a time budget of about one hour per day for commuting and daily errands. If you start to use a car, the average distance you go daily will expand, and it is very difficult to go back from that, even if you don’t really have more time, or don’t need the car any more. This is probably relevant to ai because the mechanism by which cars hook us is that the brain stem is basically programmed to use alternatives which are less effort, and so people use the car for everything because it is so comfortable.)