I hope I'm wrong on this, but I've been there (seeing friends turn out to be bastards).
IMHO, if by feeling empowered by this magic shortcut a person crosses the line, it was never a question of ethics, but "too much work". People didn't cross it before because it was just not as easy to cross as it is now.
AI decision making is often (if not always...) opaque. But there is a clear decision chain here. Who built it? Who deployed it? Who did (or did not) assess the risks of doing so, even knowing there's often the risk of emergent behavior? etc etc.
"Ah but it does not have personhood" this is just moving goalposts and shifting responsibility. You wouldn't let your 8 year old drive the family car, no matter how good the hypothetical kid might be at driving.
That is impossible to fund. At some point someone will decide to stop throwing money on the firepit that's the current business model and then hardware prices crash back to earth as 60-70% of the global demand disappears overnight.
The hardware miniaturization gains have finally dried up, though.
I am pretty certain that the current state of the art silicon feature size won't shrink again for at least another decade or two.
It normally takes about a decade to mature a tech which can create a smaller feature size into something commercially viable for mass production scale, and no further improvements have been in the pipeline for that long now.
So it's like the "next piece" indicator while playing Tetris is just blank.
It is more of a regulatory capture byproduct to prop up an artificial token driven Ponzi scheme.
There is a serious alternative to NVIDIA "AI" hardware dropping out of China in February 2027. There is no moat, but a whole lot of unpaid debts in the near future.
I honestly have no expert knowledge about this stuff. What I say is based only on intuition.
- China is heavily, heavily incentivised to enhance their own chip making
- Looking at the rate Chinas has expanded into just about every single other
space, and from quantity to quality, I just think it is impossible that they
don't compete on equal grounds pretty soon.
- I don't buy the insurmountable moat of TSMC
Reminiscent of tank warfare in WW2. The soviet T-34 was not remarkable in any particular way, but the sheer volumes it was produced in made it a very serious enemy to German tanks. As Stalin said "quantity has a quality all of its own".
And that is incredibly unfortunate to their business strategy.
But... food for thought: people are good at detecting slop, because it looks like slop. If it does not, people won't detect it. So there is a confirmation bias, where the "obvious slop" looks obvious, but the "better slop" goes by undetected.
1. I would argue that human directed and edited "better slop" is just... average content. Which leads to my next point.
2. LLMs have raised the floor of digital content creation ("democratized content creation"). Before lots of things would have not been created due to lack of knowledge, interest, motivation. Now the baseline for making something is a 10 word prompt. Personally I think it's a huge loss. Yes, we will get 5% "diamonds in the rough" who would have never approached a field due to gatekeeping, discrimination, whatever. Will that outweigh the other 95% of lazy creators flooding every field with around average content? I'm not convinced. There is a cost to that flood.
uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock is the only way YouTube is even remotely watchable these days. Even still, it's not really worth it. I frequently find it better to spend my time doing anything else.
Oh absolutely - we banned “casual” YouTube use at home 5 years ago and we don’t regret it one bit. Still use it when looking up a concrete video on a specific topic or when a web page directs me to a tutorial or something there, but don’t use it for regular “entertainment” (I’m bored, let’s hit YouTube).
Some people can’t seem to live without YouTube though.
IMHO, if by feeling empowered by this magic shortcut a person crosses the line, it was never a question of ethics, but "too much work". People didn't cross it before because it was just not as easy to cross as it is now.
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