It is not work we want, it is income. We need to break the mentality that we are not entitled a living unless we convince “higher ups” that we are doing a useful job. We are at 20-30% of workers declaring their jobs to be useless.

The useful production work is still being done, using less human labor. It should be accessible as easily as it is produced. As automation progresses, “tax the rich” becomes an increasingly obvious thing to push for.

the discussion should have been had before it was unleashed onto the public

I try to not be too bitter about the fact that every time in the past 20 years I have tried to start this discussion, I was met with denial that such a tech would one day exist. Especially in the “creative” fields of writing and drawing. It was impossible to have that debate before. And even today, it is hard. People are still in denial about what these existing system do today.

If those now losing work as text and image workers were retrained as IT security people or AI prompt inventors before such tech was introduced, brilliant!

Or better yet, were allowed a premature retirement, or a part-time basic income, or a share of the company that replaced them.

We really need to imagine the post-labor world, otherwise we become the architect of our own prison.

I might not be hired as a translator

Everything in automation has the same effect: human work becomes obsolete.

Most of the time is work that nobody likes, like elevator operator or copying books by hand. Sometimes is work that someone likes, like knitting or distributing newspaper by bike.

LLMs and stuff like that is nothing new in that regard. Although today LLMs are not an actual replacement of a professional translator.

First I want to say I appreciate the constructive tone. As a pragmatist, inclusive anarchist, I feel it is important we manage to make room for as many opinons and tastes as possible in a solarpunk utopia.

First, the technical advice:

Guess I’ll find out what it could do for me and calculate the corresponding computing power (do you have a site where I can look up numbers like this?)

You have several ways to do that but ne aware that this is a VERY fast moving target. Progress is made every week, sometimes by a factor of x2. You will find benchmarks online (mostly on reddit’s Locallama community) stating how many tokens per second a given model produces on a given GPU. (e.g. currently a RTX4090 produces ~100 toks/sec for the Mistral-7B model). A token is a unit of language in LLMs, count ~1.5 tokens per english word.

Even if I am a harsh critic of closed system, you could still test your application through the public openai models (ChatGPT) and see how much data you need to generate. To companies that use the ChatGPT model intensively, they charge $2 per million tokens. It is likely a higher bound of the cost of electricity it would cost an optimized system to run an equivalent system locally.

Now to the general criticism of AI: maybe it will surprise you, but I agree with your sentiment. Current capitalism + AI gives us unemployement and enshitification of Internet. As an AI researcher tweeted a while ago “We have workable solution for AI alignment, but we have yet to solve corporate alignment” (alignment is the field that studies the ethics safeguards of AI, or how to ‘align’ ethical assumptions of humans with those of a model).

This is why I am promoting uses of AI that are non-capitalist. They are also called open-source. Open source is actually the most successful example of a non-capitalist anarchist movement.

Researchers who have spent their lives dreaming of AGI did not do so in the hope of improving Amazon’s recommendation system or putting people out of work. We did so in the hope that humanity could be freed from labor.

If you remain under the paradigm of a regular capitalist work organization, AI is indeed a bad thing: it create unemployment and makes capital more profitable without the need to retribute workers. If you see further than this paradigm, however, it gives a possibility to not need mandatory work to receive manudfactured goods and earn a right to live.

I really wish humanity has the wisdom to go towards that utopia without needing a revolution but maybe it is unavoidable. It would be a waste though that instead of rebelling against our now obsolete masters, we rebel against the very tool that can bring us liberation from work.

370W is quite a bit of electricity and that could scale up as people run more computational heavy AI or want shorter runtimes. 500-1000W PSUs are common. For reference, a raspberry pi 4 consumes 2.5-4W under a normal load. The average American home consumes 30-50kWh per day which works out to ~1-2kW per day. So 370W accounts for 19% to 37% of an average American’s electricity consumption.

We need to be careful with the eco-modernist perspectives on AI since we’re already seeing an increased demand for power which is one of the main growth-related issues impacting climate change. AI certainly has a place, especially for medical research. However there are also many talented human artists who are looking for work. Meanwhile, image generation drives work efficiency which is far from essential.

Critically appraising the accelerationism around AI by no means makes one a luddite. I say this as someone deeply entrenched in tech.

The important spec for being able to run good model is the VRAM. Yours with 6GB is a bit in the low range but I guess it could run a 7B model qith heavy quantization?

i am wary of how it gets used by companies

Me too, that’s why I feel it is important that people use these models without relying on companies.

One issue here is that that’s 300W more than would have otherwise been consumed with the addition of solar panels what would not have needed to be produced. The net is quite carbon intensive.

yea