Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

AI would be great if(currently its mixed for me,and whats the best thing you can do ATM ):

• The Datacenters didnt drain like 3 oceans and half of the power grid(or used solar energy + air cooling only,the only way to solve this is Local LLMs currently or specific AI solutions that isnt ChatGPT or Gemini and so on. )
• the LLM is not trained on copyrighted data(non-public domain) and not Paying the artists or not ask the original creator to train on their work.(Local LLMS partially solve this,and this requires specific LLMS too.)
• People did not use AI mindlessly to write Code for you(well i think this requires the user to use their brain)

and so on…
and AI should stay as a “TOOL”, not a full replacement for human work like most sane people do.
edit 1:
i forgot to mention AI is a big contributer to the AI crisis.

The Datacenters didnt drain like 3 oceans and half of the power grid

Do a little research and look at the actual numbers - yes, it could grow to become a problem, no - AI data centers aren’t anywhere near that kind of problem yet. At the moment, after over a year of hype and growth, AI datacenters use less electricity than Bitcoin miners (which, in my opinion, is too damn much electricity for Bitcoin, but it doesn’t seem to set the news on fire the way AI power usage does.)

not trained on copyrighted data

A lot of really good data is copyrighted - there should be some way to cycle that benefit back to the people who made it in the first place. Bernie’s soverign wealth fund idea isn’t a bad one…

People did not use AI mindlessly

Good luck with that one.

Do a little research and look at the actual numbers - yes, it could grow to become a problem, no - AI data centers aren’t anywhere near that kind of problem yet. At the moment, after over a year of hype and growth, AI datacenters use less electricity than Bitcoin miners (which, in my opinion, is too damn much electricity for Bitcoin, but it doesn’t seem to set the news on fire the way AI power usage does.)

but… but… i saw news about AI causing power grid issues,though i did also hear a power company shut down ai datacenter(s?) to free up electricity used .
i also forgot to add AI causing the ram crisis thing.

there should be some way to cycle that benefit back to the people who made it in the first place.

exactly,also good idea.

Bernie’s soverign wealth fund idea isn’t a bad one…

i think its about making people own the AI??

Bernie’s soverign wealth fund idea isn’t a bad one…

i think its about making people own the AI??

It’s modeled somewhat on the Alaska permanent fund, which is compensating Alaskans with profits from the oil being extracted from their state.

There are unlimited ways to screw it up, but if AI suddenly becomes ridiculously profitable, having 50% of those profits cycled into the general fund could pay for things like UBI…

thats sounds awesome

Well, in part it answers the question “what if I lose my job to AI” - at least you don’t become deadweight in the economy, you’d still have income to spend on housing, food and whatever else.

at least you don’t become deadweight in the economy

In theory, yes.

Reality: we already have shit welfare programs and I doubt UBI will fix it. I also doubt we’ll even get to a point of UBI in my remaining career time. At least not without a lot of blood.

The present as is is pretty bad, I’d hope we can fix that before theorycrafting the future. economists 100 years prior theorycrafted 15 hour work weeks, and look how far we’ve come.