The reason I am "anti-AI" is not because I think LLMs being bad at what they do, nor because I'm afraid they'll take my job. I use CC to accelerate my own work (it's improved by leaps and bounds though I still find I have to keep it on a short leash because it doesn't always think things through enough). It's also a great research tool (search on steroids). It's excellent at summarizing long documents, editing and proofreading, etc. I use it for all those things. It's useful.
The reason I am anti-AI is because I believe it poses a net-negative to society overall. Not because it is inherently bad, but because of the way it is being infused into society by large corps (and eventually governments). Yes, it makes me, and other developers, more productive. And it can more quickly solve certain problems that were time consuming or laborious to solve. And it might lead to new and greater scientific and technological advances.
But those gains do not outweigh all of the negatives: concentration of power and capital into an increasingly small group, the eventual loss of untold millions of jobs (with, as of yet, not even a shred of indication of what might be replace them), the loss of skills in the next generations who are delegating much of their critical thinking (or thinking period), to ChatGPT; the loss of trust in society now that any believable video can be easily generated; the concentration of power in the the control of information if everyone is getting their info from LLMs instead of the open internet (and ultimately, potentially the death of the open internet); the explosion in energy consumption by data centers which exacerbates rather than mitigates global warming; and plenty more.
AI might allow us to find better technological solutions to world hunger, poverty, mental health, water shortages, climate change, and war. But none of those problems are technological problems; technology only plays a small part. And the really important part is being negatively exacerbated by the "AI arms race". That's why I, who was my whole life a technological optimist, am no longer hopeful for the future. I wish I was.
This. The only thing AI will do, at the societal level, if it truly succeeds, is insanely amplify the power imbalance we already suffer under. Thinking that the benefits of AI will be "democratic" is staggeringly naïve.
It's obvious that AI, if it succeeds, will be primarily used to make people, even as physical beings, redundant.
From TFA:
> the more people get fired, the more political pressure there will be to vote for those who will guarantee a certain degree of protection
This is daydreaming. Just look at the US. "Political pressure" is not a thing.
There will be war.