[1053r]

1) Agree that energy use is ethical. In fact, in so much as higher wealth and income is linked at the societal level to better outcomes such as longer life, lower crime, happier lives, etc., and wealth/income are strongly correlated to energy use, especially once we do the accounting for outsourced manufacturing, I'm willing to go so far as to say that in most circumstances, asking a person to lower their energy use is UNETHICAL. We should, of course, attempt to minimize externalities and harm that come from energy use, like pollution, habitat destruction, etc.

Also, just as a thing, not all public blockchains use a ton of energy. Since ETH (the number 2 blockchain) transitioned to proof of stake from proof of work a few years back, it uses practically no energy. Certainly it uses much less than other peer to peer networks, because it processes less data.

2) Agree.

3) Not only is it a good thing to replace jobs or partial jobs with automation, it is the only way that humanity moves forward for the long run! Otherwise, most of us would be dead of childhood diseases and over 90% of the remainder would be working hard manual labor jobs on farms. Certainly we need to practice harm reduction for the job functions and jobs eliminated! But only through automation do we improve materially as a species! (I'm not making a spiritual argument about the value of working on a farm vs a modern life, but material outcomes are much better and improve the more jobs we eliminate!)

4) Many tools have downsides. No tools are in all ways better than the old way of doing things. You learn to live with the bad if it's worth the good.

5) Given the open source nature of many LLMs, the ease with which state of the art LLMs appear to be copied, and the proliferation of various models that have been tuned for various tasks, I would say that LLMS distribute power rather than concentrating it!

In other words, the blog is basically wrong on every count.

[WhyOhWhyQ]

> "Agree that energy use is ethical."

Energy use is clearly neither ethical nor unethical in the abstract.

> "But only through automation do we improve materially as a species!"

Technology is not the only cause of change, and not all changes caused by technology are improvements. I believe the changes caused by LLMs are strict setbacks for humanity as a whole, but we will see.

[kristiandupont]

>Not only is it a good thing to replace jobs or partial jobs with automation, it is the only way that humanity moves forward for the long run!

The fact that this has been true so far doesn't mean it always will be. It seems perfectly possible to me that there is an actual peak, after which human happiness will decline with increased advancements.