Yes, it’s a complete schizophrenic meltdown, not dissimilar to the one we’ve seen when the first engines entered production during the industrial revolution. I Googled who Victor Tangermann is and I could swear I tasted the soy through the screen, I had to grab some mouthwash.
Of course it does, especially considering it’s true. The man writes for Futurism and his core output is limited to a few things - critique of AI and associated prominent industry figures (notable hate boner for Elon Musk), aerospace (notable hate boner for SpaceX) and environmentalism. I don’t really know what he’s doing at the publication considering he worships regress, not progress, at least based on a fast skim read of some of his articles. He’s a textbook “sky is falling” yellow journalist who misses the forest for the trees. I have a spoiler for you - much like other technological advancements such as the steam engine, the diesel engine, or automation in general, AI isn’t going anywhere. The opposite is true - it’s actively proliferating in every industry and its use will only grow with time. In fact, the increase in productivity is so enormous that the companies involved in building the backbone of LLM’s are perfectly happy, and expected, to operate at a loss so long as they achieve their targets, and their investors know this, have priced this risk in and continue to be undeterred. AI is actively helping us solve all sorts of problems, from science, engineering and medicine to simple everyday tasks, and the fact that the general population has access to such tools so early in their development is actually quite staggering - normally access to new breakthroughs is prohibitively expensive. Nobody, allow me to repeat, nobody who matters in this equation actually cares about the current drawbacks *more* than they care about what the use of AI can provide us with, so progress will continue along the exact same path as with other technological milestones - the scale will grow and efficiency will increase over time until equilibrium is reached. There will be a *technological* solution to environmental grumbles, nobody’s pulling the plug on LLM’s. You can make peace with that or you can shake your fist and shout at clouds. Thinking otherwise is simply myopic and insane, so the phrase “schizophrenic meltdown” is apt. You were preceded by people who chased tractors with pitchforks because they threatened their employment in agriculture. We still have tractors, and we’re better off with them than without them.
