I think the point remains, though, that making it harder to ensure a young child is sitting next to their guardian benefits _no one_. Having learned over the last year what flying with a 2 year old is like, an increase in the amount of toddlers who fly without sitting next to their parents is just going to be a nightmare for the kids, the parents, the other passengers, and the crew. No one should want this, in my opinion. Besides, the parents have the leverage in this situation I think, in the form of feral toddlers hell bent on maximizing chaos (and I mean that lovingly and empathetically, but still vaguely as a threat lol)
One can believe that all people are deserving of love and friendship regardless of who they are or what they've done, and simultaneously believe that replacing social interaction with AI is generally a net harm for any/everyone. No one is bad because they want social stimulation from an AI, but I think it reinforces damaging norms that will leave us all worse off.
> but even just the tought of becoming... irrelevant is depressing
In my opinion, there can exist no AI, person, tool, ultra-sentient omniscient being, etc. that would ever render you irrelevant. Your existence, experiences, and perception of reality are all literally irreplaceable, and (again, just my opinion) inherently meaningful. I don't think anyone's value comes from their ability to perform any particular feat to any particular degree of skill. I only say this because I had similar feelings of anxiety when considering the idea of becoming "irrelevant", and I've seen many others say similar things, but I think that fear is largely a product of misunderstanding what makes our lives meaningful.
I completely agree. I have many, many friends who are commercial illustrators, and many of them are very anti-AI now due to popularity of DALLE. They feel that they've been cheated out of a job. I'm an artist and a software engineer, though, so I'm in the same boat of having had my output used to train LLMs. But the outrage, at least in the conversations I've had, seems to always be rooted in a fear about economic insecurity if these models take their jobs. To me, this doesn't mean the issue is that we should expect our output to not be used to train models, but that we should expect our governments to support us in the event that large swathes of professionals find their jobs suddenly far less profitable.
And professional musicians in a previous century felt cheated out of a job by the phonograph. Time and tech change. Such is life. Painters hated photography when it was invented. Jobs are distroy and new ones made by tech. No one is crying about the typest in typing pools loosing jobs to word processor. Its just artists turn this time.
You're not wrong, but the heartlessness of that sentiment is striking. Real people get hurt. That in the long run we'll adapt as a society doesn't mean we should just write off those whose lives are ruined in the now.
Yet we tell the coal miners to go take job retraining because photovoltaic are a better power source than burning carbon. It suck for people being replaced but is better for the whole. Should we subsidise buggy whip manufactures because they were obsoleted. No one is well served by trying to fight the tides.
> Yet we tell the coal miners to go take job retraining because photovoltaic are a better power source than burning carbon.
Do we?
Last I checked (after decades in the mining industry from driving haul paks to geophysical exploration to selling global mineral intelligence software to Standard & Poor) :
Coal mining skills easily transfer to Lithium mining (etc).
Fitters and turners still fit and turn, belt splicers still splice belts, industrial electricians still pull wire and lace looms, mechanics are still required and will easily adapt to EV heavy machines as they've been working on those since the 1970s (electric shovels, ship loaders, etc).
Could you outline some things that coal miners do that aren't applicable to rare earth mining?
That's addressing a different point than I was making. I'm not saying that we need to keep old professions around or that we shouldn't adapt to changing times.
I'm saying that speaking about the people who are harmed when things change as if they don't matter is heartless.
We need to have empathy for them, and to help them where we can, not to talk about them and treat them like obsolete machinery. They're people, not machines.
That would require some kind of profit sharing agreement from the companies that benefit from replacing employees to redistribute to society, which frankly I cannot ever seen happening.
I'm interpreting "brainstorming" to be any kind of general noodling on an issue to try to find new/novel/interesting solutions. In that case, I think every significant moment of true inspiration I had (of which there have been like, maybe 3 ever), they were always the result of seemingly random, completely unrelated things popping into my mind that, for whatever reason, clicked perfectly into the problem I was mulling over. To me, this means that manufacturing "true" inspiration doesn't require a tool that can deviate from "standard" human thinking patterns. I think it just means that you would want a tool that helps expose you to as many new and unknown fields/concepts/ideas in as little time as possible. So I think in that way LLMs are an amazing tool for helping one to brainstorm.
There has got to be an option for a fleece-like material that doesn't involve significant pollution or significant animal suffering. At some point, fleece has just gotta be phased out if we can't produce it without enormous downsides.
Not sure if you count insects into your moral calculus, but silk farming only involves caterpillars and mulberry trees. It's warmer, softer, lighter, and way less smelly than plastic, so it doesn't need as much washing, so less environmental impact. I can wear a silk t-shirt for about a week before it gets smelly, most of the time, whereas plastic shirts sometimes need to be washed twice after a single wearing to get the smell out!
The fibers are stronger than polyester, so if you get a thick silk fabric, it will last a lifetime. Unfortunately, it's absurdly expensive, so even though the total cost of ownership isn't terrible if you get a thick fabric because it will last forever, it's a ton of money up front. Additionally, most places sell super thin silk to keep the price down, which means it doesn't last, so you have to shop around and find the good thick stuff.
I love silkliving.com's 100% silk line, which even includes a fleece hoodie! I'm not associated with them other than as a satisfied customer that paid full price.
The show Clarkson's Farm on Amazon shows some sheep farming. It looks absolutely humane. Sheep grow wool, get sheared when it gets too hot. The sheep are not killed in the process. If you are worried about also tangentially supporting meat, I am sure there are some no kill wool farms that do not sell their lambs or sheep for slaughter.
Livestock are also necessary for regenerative farms that do not require outside sources of fertilizer. Hardline veganism requires petrochemical fertilizer.
If I understand correctly, cow hides are largely a by-product of beef production, and reducing leather use would not have an effect on animal suffering.
Apple stopped using leather and was criticised for environmental damage at least in the short-to-medium term (underutilisation of existing materials, new demand for plastics and synthetics).
