Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of people who I don’t trust. And it will do all of this while consuming truly shocking amounts of energy.
Not only do I think these things will happen, I think the Altmans of the world would eagerly agree that they will happen. They just think it will be interesting / profitable for them. It won’t be for us.
And we, the engineers, are in a unique position. Unlike people in any other industry, we can affect the trajectory of AI. My skepticism (and unwillingness to aid in the advancement of AI) might slow things down a billionth of a percent. Maybe if there are more of me, things will slow down enough that we can find some sort of effective safeguards on this stuff before it’s out of hand.
So I’ll keep being skeptical, until it’s over.
I'm tired. I'm tired of developers/techies not realizing their active role in creating a net negative in the world. And acting like they are powerless and blameless for it. My past self is not innocent in this; but I'm actively trying to make progress as I make a concerted effort to challenge people to think about it whenever I can.
After countless of times that the tech industry (and developers specifically) have gone from taking an interesting technical challenge that quickly require some sort of ethical or moral tradeoff which ends up absolutely shaping the fabric of society for the worse.
Creating powerful search engines to feed information to all who want it; but we'll need to violate your privacy in an irreversible way to feed the engine. Connecting the world with social media; while stealing your information and mass exposing you to malicious manipulation. Hard problems to solve without the ethical tradeoff? Sure. But every other technical challenge was also hard and solved, why can't we also focus on the social problems?
I'm tired of the word "progress" being used without a qualifier of what kind of progress and at the cost of what. Technical progress at the cost of societal regression is still seen as progress. And I'm just tired of it.
Every time that "AI skeptics" are brought up as a topic; the focus is entirely on the technical challenges. They never mention the "skeptics" that are considered that because they aren't skeptical of what AI is and could be capable. I'm skeptical if the tradeoffs being made will benefit society overall; or just a few. Because at literally every previous turn for as long as I've been alive; the impact is a net negative to the total population, without developer questioning their role in it.
I don't have an answer for how to solve this. I don't have an answer on how to stop the incoming shift in destroying countless lives. But I'd like developers to start being honest in their active role in not just accepting this new status quo; but proactively pushing us us in a regressive manner. And our power to push back on this coming wave.
For ai companies, its to get a model which can be better on benchmarks and vibes so that it can be sota and get higher valuation for stakeholders.
For coders, they just want the shit done. Everyone wants the easy way if his objective is to complete a project but for some it is learning and they may not choose the easy way.
Why they want to do it the easy way, mostly as someone whose cousin's and brother's are in this cs field(i am still in high school), they say that if they get x money then the company at least takes a 10x value of work from them. (Of course, it may be figuratively). One must imagine why they should be the one morally bound in case ai goes bonkers.
Also, the best not using ai would probably stop it a little but the ai world moves so fast, its unpredictable, deepseek was unpredicted. I might argue that now its a matter of us vs China in this new arms race of ai. Would that stop if you stop using it? Many people are already hating ai but has that done much to stop it? If that is, you call ai stopping at the moment.
Its paradoxical. But to be Frank, LLM was created for the reason Its excelling at. Its a technological advancement and a moral degradation.
Its already affecting supply chain tbh. And to be frank, I am still using ai to build projects which I just want to experiment with and see if it can really work without getting the domain specific knowledge. Though I also want to learn more and am curious but just don't have much time in high school.
I don't think people cared about privacy and I don't think people would care about it now. And its the same as not using some big social media giant, you can't escape it. The tech giants also made it easier but less private. People chose the easier part and they would still choose the easy part ie llm. So I guess the future is bleak eh? Well the present isn't that great either. Time to just enjoy life while the world burns by the regret of its past actions for 1% shareholder profit. (For shareholders, it was all worth it though, am I right?)
My 0.02$