This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example.
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
I don't like the general dismissal of environmental concerns around LLM use as "doom-mongering". There was some miscalculation or misunderstanding around data center water usage once, and now this keeps being used as a supposed knock-out argument. Water consumption, however big of an issue it may or may not be, is just one of maybe a hundred ways in which LLM proliferation is amoral and anti-environmental.
The same bugs me about cars. Suddenly, driving cars is cool and modern and unproblematic again, because the market is switching to electric engines. As if fossil fuel consumption was the only thing environmentally problematic about building and driving cars! It's not, not by a long shot.
The environmental impact of LLM use also has to be considered in light of the wasteful ways in which they're being employed in general. Sharing and reusing has gone out of fashion. Millions and millions of LLM-assisted programmers, for instance, or now re-inventing and re-implementing the same things, in the most inefficient way, because that's more profitable to the oligarchs than actually collaborating and building on each other's work.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
Anamon · · focus · HN ↗
The same bugs me about cars. Suddenly, driving cars is cool and modern and unproblematic again, because the market is switching to electric engines. As if fossil fuel consumption was the only thing environmentally problematic about building and driving cars! It's not, not by a long shot.
The environmental impact of LLM use also has to be considered in light of the wasteful ways in which they're being employed in general. Sharing and reusing has gone out of fashion. Millions and millions of LLM-assisted programmers, for instance, or now re-inventing and re-implementing the same things, in the most inefficient way, because that's more profitable to the oligarchs than actually collaborating and building on each other's work.