> Yes, and where do you suppose experienced developers come from?
Almost every time I hear this argument, I realize that people are not actually complaining about AI, but about how modern capitalism is going to use AI.
Don't get me wrong, it will take huge social upheaval to replace the current economic system.
But at least it's an honest assessment -- criticizing the humans that are using AI to replace workers, instead of criticizing AI itself -- even if you fear biting the hands that feed you.
> criticizing the humans that are using AI to replace workers, instead of criticizing AI itself
I think you misunderstand OP's point. An employer saying "we only hire experienced developers [therefore worries about inexperienced developers being misled by AI are unlikely to manifest]" doesn't seem to realize that the AI is what makes inexperienced developers. In particular, using the AI to learn the craft will not allow prospective developers to learn the fundamentals that will help them understand when the AI is being unhelpful.
It's not so much to do with roles currently being performed by humans instead being performed by AI. It's that the experienced humans (engineers, doctors, lawyers, researchers, etc.) who can benefit the most from AI will eventually retire and the inexperienced humans who don't benefit much from AI will be shit outta luck because the adults in the room didn't think they'd need an actual education.
Actually, there are two main problems with AI:
1. How it's gonna be used and how it'll be a detriment to quality and knowledge.
2. How AI models are trained with a great disregard to consent, ethics, and licenses.
... smells very similar to tobacco/soda industry. Both created faux-research institutes to further their causes.
I would say the huge environmental cost is a third problem.
Data centers account for like 2% of global energy demand now. I’m not sure if we can really say that AI, which represents a fraction of that, constitutes a huge environmental problem.
An nVIDIA H200 uses around 2.3x more power (700W) when compared to a Xeon 6748P (300W). You generally put 8 of these cards into a single server, which adds up to 5.6KW, just for GPUs. With losses and other support equipment, that server uses ~6.1KW at full load. Which is around 8.5x more when compared to a CPU only server (assuming 700W or so at full load).
Considering HPC is half CPU and half GPU (more like 66% CPU and 33% GPU but I'm being charitable here), I expect an average power draw of 3.6KW in a cluster. Moreover, most of these clusters run targeted jobs. Prototyping/trial runs use much limited resources.
On the other hand, AI farms use all these GPUs at full power almost 24/7, both for training new models and inference. Before you asking, if you have a GPU farm which you do training, having inference focused cards doesn't make sense, because you can divide nVIDIA cards with MIG, so you can put aside some training cards, divide these cards to 6-7 and run inference on them, resulting ~45 virtual cards for inference per server, again at ~6.1KW load.
So, yes, AI's power load profile is different.
Data centres in general are an issue that contribute to climbing emissions, two percent globally is not trivial .. and it's "additional" over demand of a decade and more ago past, another sign we are globally increasing demand.
Emissions aside, locally many data centres (and associated bit mining and AI clusters) are a significant local issue due to local demand on local water and local energy supplies.
> How AI models are trained with a great disregard to consent, ethics, and licenses.
You must be joking. Consumer models' primary source of training data seems to be the legal preambles from BDSM manuals.
> Almost every time I hear this argument, I realize that people are not actually complaining about AI, but about how modern capitalism is going to use AI.
This was pretty consistently my and many others viewpoint since 2023. We were assured many times over that this time it would be different. I found this unconvincing.
> I realize that people are not actually complaining about AI, but about how modern capitalism is going to use AI.
Something very similar can be said about the issue of guns in America. We live in a profoundly sick society where the airwaves fill our ears with fear, envy and hatred. The easy availability of guns might not have been a problem if it didn't intersect with a zero-sum economy.
Couple that with the unavailability of community and social supports and you have a a recipe for disaster.