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I am an AI sceptic

2024-11-21

After initial curiosity, I am an AI sceptic and I don't use it myself.

Moreso, I talk about my reservations with colleagues and such. Maybe not surprisingly, I'm met with raised eyebrows and puzzled looks more often than not.

The two main reservations I have are easy to explain but both do have far-reaching consequences.

First: Energy Use. LLMs are insanely power-hungry both to train and to use. The energy spent to answer the most mundane queries from the general population is unjustifyable. It's not that I think the energy should be spent elsewhere, I argue that it shouldn't be spent at all. This would slow the climate catastrophy and would flatten the current slope of our inevitable technological decline — to give us more time to return to sustainability before it is the only way to live.

Second: Loss of skill. Critical and analytical thinking, reasoning and deduction will be essential in the decades ahead of us to stay alive as a species during global degrowth. Outsourcing these mental skills to a “machine” that will simply seize to exist early on during the degrowth process due to its energy-hunger feels like assisting the suicide of our own species.

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