Asklemmy

I think generative AI is a great recent example. It's a neat toy, it has some practical applications. The problems that people ascribe to it aren't inherent in the technology, but are simply symptoms of underlying social problems in a capitalist society.

For example, people complain that it takes jobs away, but the whole idea that we have to work for the sake of work is idiotic to begin with. Technology that frees up people from work should create more free time for people to enjoy. The reason that's not happening is because capitalism is not a rational economic system.

Another common argument is that it's very resource intensive and wastes energy. This is true, but there's no reason to believe this won't be optimized. In fact, we've already seen a lot of optimizations happen in just a few years that now make it possible to run models that used to require a data centre to run on a laptop.

However, more fundamentally, wasting energy is once again an aspect of the capitalist system itself. Before AI we saw stuff like crypto, NFTs, and so on. Much of the technology that's developed under capitalism ends up being frivolous or even actively harmful. So, it's not generative AI that's the problem, but the social system that guides allocation of labour and resources.