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1/
I’ve gotten quite a few messages from disabled people who benefit from AI in the same way I do but feel unable to admit to it because they are scared of backlash.
I will start by saying I understand concerns about AI, they are real. AI is energy intensive, data centres use water, a resource that is already scarce in many places, and the companies behind these products are unethical in so many ways.
@kristiedegaris the most interesting part of this thread to me is that there are sections of society who see air travel as essential.
@coolandnormal I would argue that their situation or what they have been indoctrinated into are responsible for that, we are all products of our environments. I was really sold travel as an essential part of personal growth etc. It took a lot of reading and unlearning to see something different.
@kristiedegaris I was certainly told this was important. Travel for a proper education and a well rounded upbringing and all that. It was never realistically in the budget for my class though. No one I know ever started.
@kristiedegaris the perception of what constitutes normal travel probably plays into it a lot too.
People here travel to Melbourne and Adelaide for medical specialists. Both about as far from here as London to Paris. It's a bus, it goes once in the morning and once in the afternoon on weekdays.
@coolandnormal I managed to do some travelling and honestly I never loved it, it was oversold and I was doing it wrong anyway. It was so shallow too. Now that I have things I am specifically interested in like ancient stone sites, I long for it a bit more, but also lots to see where I am.
@kristiedegaris the anti-ai stuff is a massive reactionary movement, this feels like how gamergate felt
its important to remember people doing things takes water and other resources too (often more than AI for many tasks it does)
on top of that, capitalists dumped entire cities worth of power into crypto. It is not like overall energy usage is indicative of anything other than capitalism collapsing
@RosethornRanger I agree. I am quite surprised by the speed and force of the reaction. When I looked into AI energy and water usage when I first started using it about a year ago, I was pretty shocked to learn just how energy and resource intensive our daily lives are. So I feel energy must be directed to systemic change, not just focused on one thing.
@RosethornRanger If I'm being honest, I suspect collapse will come before any major change.
@kristiedegaris which is why I'm going full force on a commune, if things are to collapse at least I will have a place to re-build local environment from
@RosethornRanger It's a solid plan, and I share the dream.
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But something feels off in how this debate is being handled. We live inside unethical systems constantly. That is our baseline as humans in the 21st century.
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The aviation industry is a good example It is hugely environmentally destructive, and bound to inequality (only 10 - 11% of the world's population takes a flight in any given year, with only about 2 - 4% traveling internationally annually. Despite high passenger numbers, an estimated 80% of the global population has never flown in an airplane!) and yet we don’t generally judge people for flying. In fact travel has come to be seen as so essential that we don’t really put limits on it at all
4/
I’m sure you would all agree however that there are ways to be an ethical user of this incredibly unethical industry? I think AI should be treated the same way.
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Collapsing all AI use into one immoral category doesn’t make sense to me. Frivolously chatting to it all day, repeatedly generating images for fun, or asking it to write your book is not the same as asking AI to help navigate the labour and bureaucracy of disability, or the pressures of other forms of inequality.
6/
For me the distinction is between creative and functional work. I don’t want AI to be part of the process of my creative work, but AI being involved in the functional work of managing my disability frees up space for the creative work which feels integral to my happy existence as a human being.
@kristiedegaris a thousand times this.
Which is what makes me so incredibly angry about the snake oil peddlers.
AI is fantastic at the boring stuff as all computers are. They're fantastic at bureaucracy and memory and speed.
They have no soul and are not actually life, incapable of joy or meaning.
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Agreeing:
We should be focusing on these benefits to humanity instead of trying to strip mine humanity into labor and consumption.
7/
For a bit of context, a return flight from Scotland to Spain uses roughly the same amount of energy as hundreds of thousands of substantial text only AI interactions. That’s a lifetime’s worth of pretty heavy AI use. Something, somewhere in our thinking has gotten skewed. This is not to advocate for, or excuse excessive AI use, it's to ask that judgement is proportional and accurate.
