You have to separate the technology, from who is controlling it, what resources it is using up and how companies envision utilizing it. People aren't afraid of the technology, they're afraid of Silicon Valley and corporate America.
This is the root of it. The control paired up with the current state of society.
Technological advancements in modern times appear to only benefit very few numbers of individuals. The 1960s excitement was a time when we imagined it would benefit everyone more from it--not necessarily equally, but at least life not getting worse! Now we just see ourselves being replaced and struggling more, with the "lucky" ones in precarious employment.
Whilst wealth inequality is already creeping towards record levels in the West, with potential wars are on the horizon, civil war being encouraged, and tech stocks appearing to be in a bubble alongside P/E ratios of corporate stocks at high levels like we saw before other financial disasters, it's hard for anyone to be excited about the near future.
A lot of our best science and technology emerged from bad intentions--war, accidents, control, private power struggles. A lot of our worst science and technology emerged from good intentions--charity, humanity, heroism, public works. It's a strange world. We have to contend with edge cases, the butterfly effect, and dynamic chaotic systems etc. These are some reasons for the potential "road to hell paved paved with good intentions".
The state of AI is unfortunately tragic to me. I've always loved, learned, used, designed, and then built technology. My life has largely revolved around it, and I'm witnessing another technological revolution. Yet the more I've learned about how humans use and control technology, the more I realized the truth:
Technology =/= progress.
We should all think extremely carefully about what we're contributing to. Progress is inevitable, but as designers, builders and preachers of the latest technologies, we have a small amount of power in society to help ensure resources cannot be secretly utilized against us. This small power is in our choice to use current offerings or encouraging others to, and whether we work for those who with to control us.
An excellent comment much like everything zerosizedweasle wrote here.
However, I can't believe you wrote these:
> A lot of our best science and technology emerged from bad intentions--war, accidents, control, private power struggles.
>A lot of our worst science and technology emerged from good intentions--charity, humanity, heroism, public works.
And then concluded:
> It's a strange world.
I'd suggest to make a conclusion based on a deeper analysts starting with the question "Why?"... Nothing strange about it. For starters, aren't wars always sold with good intentions? As is AI now.
> We should all think extremely carefully about what we're contributing to.
What about to whom you're contributing to?
> Progress is inevitable, but as designers, builders and preachers of the latest technologies, we have a small amount of power.
How true, it's small indeed, for the sake of clarity I'll put it differently:
Don't bring design skills to a political fight - that's definitely not the way to success, big or small.
I don't know if you've seen the movie Elysium. But the premise is that most of humanity lives impoverished filthy existence on Earth, while a tiny class of elite live on a space station in orbit. This is what people in the United States fear about AI. It's why the United States has the greatest rates of AI loathing of all countries in the world. They're afraid of that inequality.
I can get on board with most of that, but part of the issue here is the battle over "what resources it is using up" is focusing on the wrong resource.
Assume unabated growth of AI data centers in the USA: in general, you'll stop being able to afford the electricity to run your AC and your freezer before feeling pain from the extra stress on water supplies.
The water issues in the USA have many causes and do exist, but blaming DCs for them or expecting their absence/removal to fix anything is like blaming climate change on residential driveways and trying to reverse it by planting a few lawns in their place.
I don't have any intuition for how credit works at the scale of an entire economy; I'm willing to just take what you say on faith… but I have to, too.
However, from watching public discussions about money, I think I'm a lot more clued in to how it works than most people. I get the impression most people couldn't even take what you just wrote on faith, the idea that total supply is limited rather than what any given person could get being limited only by their own creditworthiness, which means I think they'd find it really hard to care about credit running out.
It reminds me more of the dot.com bubble than any other. I was in college but also working in the field then and saw that one come and go.
It’s like the dot.com bubble in that yes, there is a lot of “there” there, but there is also a ton of premature hype and speculation. What reminds me most of dot.com is how people are shoehorning AI into everything to ride the hype wave. During dot.com there were cases of boring companies adding .com to their name or opening an online division and seeing their stocks increase 10X in 24 hours.
Everything seems like a bubble to the people who got burned in the dot com era. Hype is automatically attributed to there being money disproportionately flowing to vaporware. That isn’t what I’ve observed. I think a lot of the current AI companies will fail, but I don’t think it’ll be from a failure to deliver a product or generate revenue. I also don’t think there have been valuations or investments that are any more extreme than they have been in the last decade.
Yeah. Right now the combination of high interest rates on my student loans (because the bubble has kept it artificially high) and career prospects make life bleak. It's not enough when the fed lowers rates a bump. All that gets eaten up by the bubble.
I'm in the same boat, well actually much darker, no golden handcuffs, lot of student debt, health problems. I'm losing hope. I'm hoping the AI bubble bursts so that interest rates come down so I can get an interest rate on loans that is affordable. If I don't refinance it is game over. Honestly, I'm not sure I will be able to get through this.
Apparently they've declared a code red, because competition has got so hot. They're definitely going to do ads, but they may have to put it off. They can't afford ads at the moment ironically.
• Nvidia Corporation may be nearing the peak of the Al cycle, with recent deals raising bubble cortcerns.
• NVDA's transactions and strategic investments, including with CoreWeave, Lambda, and OpenAl, could be masking slowing demand.
• Competition is intensifying as AMD, Alphabet, and Broadcom make major Al chip moves, while NVDA's valuation remains historically high amid a long-term growth slowdown.
• Given bubble risks, valuation concerns, and increased competition, there is significant downside potential for NVDA shares despite near-term growth.
