Farvel Big Tech

TL; DR I fully agree with @minimalparts : don't stop what you are doing; if you are not doing a BS-job, you will be highly relevant in the future because once the system implodes (and it will), your skills will be invaluable.

The only narrative we get is that "humankind will beat nature thanks to technology".

So all powers in place are waiting for the "next big thing" that will save their absurd model.

We are squeezing our dying economy to pursue the road of AI. But let's face it: how AI would help with cleaning oceans? How would it help with climate change? How will it reduce our carbon footprint? How will it solve our social issues?

AI won't save us. At best, it will accelerate our downfall and make it obvious to the eyes of the world how absurd our society is. Even the US, the mother of neoliberalism, is leaving this model in the person of Trump. So we already have plenty evidences. /2

My not so humble opinion is that this AI hype is just a side-effect of a deeper societal root cause: the absurdity of our economy.

We are all about growth, GDP and efficiency; and we pursue them regardless of their social-ecological effects: "Is this growth really useful? Do we live better?"

We have countless evidence our planet cannot sustain our model, that our species is not living better: obesity, young people like me see no positive future, drugs usage in US is spiking crazy...

And even if you play "the game" of neoliberalists and take their single lens: economy; you can still see their actions are hurting the economy on the long run, occidentals own something like 170 billions dollars of investment in South America, and yet we know the risk of savannisation of the Amazon Forest will impact their investment: https://financetransformation.earth/redirecting-flows/chapter-6/

So our society is not sustainable: not ecologically, certainly not socially, and even not economically.

We are exposed to absurdity, everyday of our life. /1

@tanyakaroli @minimalparts When you truly understand the transformer model and the GPT architecture, it is so easy to see how it is not "smart", and certainly not "resonating".

I wanted to react on the "We don't need tech that can halfway simulate what we are already good at." exactly because I believe that's not what it has been created for: Machine Learning has been created precisely to find way of "capturing" correlations in problems too large for the state of the art, so we can model, predict, classify etc... some phenomenon better.

In my opinion, this is super useful for one thing: fundamental research (e.g. genetics, climate science, etc.)

It is also easy to see how frenzy is this AI hype, because we already have papers showing we could investigate new architecture bringing us closer to the human brain in terms of energy efficiency https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02528 and yet we are just buying new shiny GPUs burning our planet faster and making our economy even more dependent of a single US company.

In face of that, there is a clear question that comes to mind: why? /0