If you ever listen to more than a couple of Zitron interviews, it's clear that he's not the "reasonable centrist" viewpoint on AI. He's the doom-and-gloom guy.
Maybe there is someone out there positive on AI itself and calling out reasonable objections to some of the extreme things. But that's not Zitron.
There are plenty of doom-and-gloom people to go around. Even if Ed Zitron is wrong about a lot of things, the doom-and-gloom part may still be accurate.
Personally I am way to the left of Ed Zitron, I actually think he isn’t doom and gloom enough.
My personal prediction is that whatever happens the people with all the money will find a way to spin the narrative in their favor and history will judge people like me (and Ed Zitron) as having been wrong.
As someone who's strongly anti-AI, i find Zitron to be absolutely too much pro-AI for my taste. He defends AI that's not LLMs. He barely touches on ecological impacts of AI, and barely mentions the enshittification of things. He's only really against the LLM craze, OpenAI/Anthropic over-evaluation (because Deepseek and local models will do the same for nearly free), and the crazy speculative bubble around datacenters.
If you find him very negative about AI, and i find him very positive about AI, he might just be this reasonable centrist.
There's plenty of arguments to be had. I guess there could be some useful applications of non-LLM AI (eg. translation tools), but quality output is still a concern. Environmental impact is also still a concern. If output is of sufficient quality, who reaps the benefits is a concern ; if not, who pays the price of shittier products is a concern.
Whether LLM or non-LLM tech, the question of surveillance capitalism and how models need to be fed swaths of privacy-invading data (eg. self-driving cars filming everything all the time) is also a concern.
Overall, i think the ecological concern is still the biggest one. We are at the start of a major climate crisis, and any self-preserving measures were already hard fought by industry. I fear that any form of AI investment will lead (because it's already leading) to destroying any hope of saving an inhabitable planet.
Really only large language models require huge swaths of training data and extremely expensive training/inference. Other “AI”, like basic neural networks or something like path finding, is basically free. It’s just an algorithm, a small one that runs on computers.
The term AI is very overloaded. When people say AI, they really mean LLMs. AI like old Siri has basically no cost. It’s not environmentally damaging, as it runs on device. It’s not privacy gore, because it runs on device.
Or take, for example, lane keep assist systems on vehicles. This doesn’t require a huge data center or anything, it’s basic computer vision and a small on-vehicle model.
Yes AI has a “cost”, but for virtually all non-LLM AI the ecological cost is the same as any other application or algorithm. Siri doesn’t burn more energy than instagram.
> This doesn’t require a huge data center or anything, it’s basic computer vision and a small on-vehicle model.
Yes, but it still has a strong ecological impact, and for what benefit? I only ever hear people complaining about electronics/assist in cars, and recalls due to electronic faults is about 50% of car recalls nowadays.
The problem is not that this compute is overall so much compute, it's that it's used to replace "no compute", and that in the ecological lifecycle of electronics production is the biggest problem (not sustained use). A modern car has hundreds of microcontrollers and probably as many sensors… Although some of these features are technically not machine learning, i think it's part of the same problem.
I wish we could have better/safer/cheaper cars over time, that can be more easily maintained. Instead we have shitter and more expensive cars that are less rapairable than ever before.
Well that’s what I’m saying - a basic machine learning system is no more ecological cost than an algorithm. Because it just is an algorithm.
Computerization of cars is orthogonal, it’s not an AI problem. Things like engine control for fuel efficiency isn’t AI, it’s just an algorithm. Cruise control is just an algorithm. The cost is the same as any other software.
Now LLMs DO have a new cost. You really require super computers to run LLMs at scale, that much is true. But that’s very distinct from machine learning, it’s a different beast.
Nobody is complaining about, like, monster AI in The Binding of Isaac and how much ecological impact it has. Because it doesn’t. Well… that’s AI, and 10 years ago that’s the only AI people really talked about. Now AI really means LLMs. The ecological impact is from LLMs.
To play devil's advocate - unless you were to take the position of declaring bankruptcy on the possibility that a complex society of competing actors can agree on climate change - and therefore this being an unsolvable problem that you need AI to solve, as humans can't handle the complexity.
I find a lot of the debate on either climate change or AI collapses if you point out that "we shouldn't do this, we should ALL just do this" is an extremely unrealistic position in an international complex ecosystem of competing actors.
> "we shouldn't do this, we should ALL just do this" is an extremely unrealistic position
No it's not. It's only if people like you are so defeatist about it. Look what happened with CFC gazes, leaded paints and asbestos. Sure we still have more problems to face but some problems are so serious that we can in fact gather consensus.
> an unsolvable problem that you need AI to solve
That is completely wrong on so many level. I understand you're playing the devil's advocate, but do you understand this is a messianic-level delusion that's made up by religious psychopaths so people buy into their products without thinking twice? If you don't have hope, the only rational solution is not to give in to AI, it's to Luigi Mangione or Unabomber your way to a better world. Personally, i choose hope: we can solve this problem (and every other, who strangely have more or less the same culprits).
I don't know - examples of people coordinating where there's cost involved are stunningly rare in the history of society. Coordinating when there's cost and information asymmetry - even more so.
I am probably on the pessimistic end of the spectrum, and personally I don't believe AI can solve it, but I can see that line of reasoning if what you believe the culprit is - is the sheer complexity of the coordination needed.
Maybe there is someone out there positive on AI itself and calling out reasonable objections to some of the extreme things. But that's not Zitron.