33
Is it really OK to not be completely against AI in the case of China’s development of it when China is a relatively non-internationalist socialist hegemon? (hexbear.net)
submitted 22 hours ago by to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
39 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I’m very much a luddite when it comes to AI, I’m unequivocally against its usage and development. The social and environmental costs AI incurs and proposes to incur are overwhelming. The celebration of AI with Chinese characteristics is often justified by the idea that AI can be useful, and the reason why it’s OK to be vehemently against it otherwise but support it when it’s being implemented by China is because AI can only be a force for evil within the capitalist framework. I agree with the latter point obviously but find it hard to accept that China driving AI advancement is a good thing for the world.

I don’t want to have a debate about whether China is a revisionist state, but I think we can all agree that China has refused to take the role of the Soviet Union in exporting socialism to the world. What happens when it exports AI to countries world over that very much operate within a capitalist framework while China does nothing to advance world wide socialism?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 6 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

AI also has at least one obvious economic utility right now. It significantly improves productivity for software engineers. I'd say that with the latest crop of LLMs you can about double the productive output of an experienced developer without sacrificing quality (and literally 50x it if you only care about features getting delivered).

The questions are:

  • Does it cause stupid lay-off games or a productivity boost?
  • Does it cause a slide-back to fossil fuels or accelerate renewables?
  • Is it used for non-productive brainrot?

You can guess how those three questions are answered by USA and China.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 14 hours ago*

    I very skeptical that any productive gains were had. There's massive amounts of cherry picking of data, marketing campaigns, misleading metrics, complete disregard for technical debt, and groupthink mania that suppresses critical voices.

    I'm inclined to believe LLMs suck for any and all coding and you'd be better off without them, especially due to them being inherently unreliable, but even if they were marginally useful in specific situations, the overall negative effect in trying to leverage the chatbots for all the things are going to be disastrous and ruin many a codebase. It's completely up in the air if any organization will be able to use a coding chatbot responsibly only in situations where it has utility (if it has any) without suffering the negative effects of using it when not called for. Even if someone figures out the perfect use cases without falling into the trap of overusing it, it might still not make economic sense to actually use it due to the cost.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 5 points 17 hours ago (1 child)

    It significantly improves productivity for software engineers.

    Not really. It can write code, but writing code is not actually that much of the job (would that it were).

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 3 points 15 hours ago

    It also allows you to very quickly iterate on rough drafts of ideas for research. Or review your code for bugs/vulnerabilities. It helps you remember a specific term from a distant corner of computer science you've forgotten. I'd say it absolutely does cut a significant percentage of your work time (approaching 50% nowadays), and it can pretend to replace you for 95% of your job if you don't care about the quality of code or architecture or maintainability.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent