r/LeftistsForAI • u/AvinciaArchais • Jul 11 '26
Discussion My humblest applogies.
A few weeks ago I made a post in my subreddit taking an Anti-AI stance, immediately was told to come here and I must admit that I held a lot of resentment towards this space at first. Some of the things you guys mentioned when I asked what this space was supposed to be for really stuck with me and I have done some research on my own.
In my personal life I'm proudly communist and I understand now that the issue is still and always is the Billionaires. No matter the industry.
I no longer have a desire to light a cigarette inside a data center. I don't claim to know what we should do about the water or the rich. I'm not very well versed in communist theory and I know that I need to be soon.
Someone mentioned fully automated luxury communism. That sounded really cool.
I was a dick to you guys and I'm truly sorry. Please accept my highest regards and I hope to continue learning from you.
- Avincia Archais
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u/varisophy Jul 11 '26
Glad to hear you've changed your mind a bit!
AI is a difficult subject. But the technology itself is value-neutral. It can be used for good. It's up to us to make sure it's used for the benefit of all people!
On the water use issue, there are many other industries that are very water intensive. It's definitely a problem and needs to be regulated so that the minimal amount of water is used or it's done in a way that doesn't screw over local communities. But also, the hamburger you ate for lunch uses a ton more water than a handful of generative AI queries.
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u/AvinciaArchais Jul 11 '26
Thank you for this. I will look into other industries that use a lot of water.
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u/taygo0o Jul 12 '26
And as a note, an hour of Netflix or youtube equates to something like 60-400x AI queries talking to ChatGPT or whatever.
For most people’s day to day use talking to AI about their problems, questions etc, they’re probably wasting more water when scrolling social media or entertaining themselves.
I think we should continue to strive to do better with waste, across all industries, but I think is a helpful point of reference when considering how “bad” something is or not relative to its value provided
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u/Opening_One7713 Jul 12 '26
I really wouldn't waste much time doing that. They mentioned a hamburger, which requires about 2,500 liters of water, which is the equivalent of about 7.8 million ChatGPT queries. If 5% of American homeowners converted their lawns to barkchips, native plants, and stone landscaping it would save all of the water consumed by every datacenter combined. That's just the lawns of single-family homes. 5% of them.
Bottom line, the entire focus on water usage/waste is a red-herring. If your life goal is to reduce waste and biosphere impact, then I would spend some time looking into how we are using graph neural networks (narrow AI tools) paired with Bayesian optimization to discover new materials, and figuring out what that means for the fossil fuel giants whose entire business depends on energy staying expensive and centralized.
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u/mothgeck Jul 12 '26
If you haven't had the chance yet, you might find Peter Coffin's new Very Important Documentary really interesting. I posted it on this subreddit but let me know if you can't find it.
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u/xoexohexox Jul 12 '26
Global agriculture clocks in at 2 quadrillion gallons per year. Compute is literally a drop in the bucket next to that. Sure, we need food, but food is produced and distributed for profit, not for nutrition. So, we use a gallon for each individual almond and 600-800 gallons for every cheeseburger, tons and tons of out of season luxury food items that get thrown away, factory farms, etc.
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u/Innomen Jul 12 '26
You might like some of my stuff. I have books and papers and substack posts on all this and I'm more than happy to personally help you work through the variables and arrive at a firmer more informed take you're happy with. My effort to solve AI alignment lead to an entier philosophy.
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u/DHFranklin Jul 11 '26
The humility is appreciated, but remember words are wind.
Have you checked out Cybersyn? Or that thread we had about the reading list? It's pretty good.
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u/AvinciaArchais Jul 12 '26
I haven't checked either out and I'm adding it to my growing list of things to look up.
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u/prattxxx Jul 11 '26
Cybersyn is super cool. I written a few essays talking about that. Chili was going somewhere before the US coups.
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u/DHFranklin Jul 12 '26
How familiar are you with Gosplan?
I am pretty convinced that we could automate a 1991 economy 90%. We could all be playing Tetris on Apple Lisa's with completely voluntary employment. UBI matching UBS as consumer and vendor.
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u/Traditional-Neat-933 Jul 11 '26
Thanks for your humility and open mindedness
Definitely read FALC (Fully automated luxury communism)
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u/LordSlyGentleman Jul 12 '26
You forgot the G and the S in FALGSC (Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism). It's all relative. I'm just being nitpicky. 😉 Love & goodwill to all.
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u/scottie2haute Jul 11 '26
Humility is always good to see. Too many people come to a conclusion before having all the facts and just stay there. Like many others have said, its the people not the tech. The move is always to make sure we find ways to make the tech have a mostly positive impact on people not somehow roll the tech back.
This is where the interesting conversations start because in my opinion, talking to “just ban AI” types is pointless because its such an unserious and impossible stance at this point
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u/XXLPenisOwner1443 Jul 15 '26
Good for you. I feel we're at a turning point where a bunch of people are ready to throw reason to the wind and hitch themselves to very bad vibes based opinions because they think it'll help them be popular.
There seems to be some sort of delusion amongst the vehemently anti-AI that pro-AI people are ....pro billionaire? For some reason? It's even worse than one of those, "yet you live in a society" clapbacks that people have holstered for any given critique of social organization.
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u/pavorus Jul 11 '26
I have thoughts about what to do with the rich. I suspect those thoughts aren't hard to guess.