> You've deliberately been vague about your position on the utility of AI.
Because it's not the interesting question. The interesting question is what it does as long as it's controlled by a handful of people.
AI's usefulness depends on that question, it cannot be answered in isolation. A lighter is useful in the hands of somebody starting a camp fire to warm themselves and their community, but dangerous in the hands of an arsonist trying to burn down said community.
> If you think AI is useful if it were publicly owned, surely high energy costs and hardware costs are necessary if the public were to use it?
Public ownership and public usage are not the same thing. Again, ownership and power dynamics are the point (that you still haven't addressed!)
> Whats the point of talking about hardware and energy costs when that's something the public needs to bear that cost in one way or another, whether by voting for it or not?
How have we established that the public needs to bear it one way or another? If AI was public, we could have usage restrictions based on societal merit, as an example. Not every AI use is ... useful. All of them are costly to society.
> So why is hardware and energy costs even a problem if the public consents to using AI with their own revealed preference?
What are you talking about? The grandma's electric heating is getting more expensive so some jerkoff can create deepfake porn or so capitalists can fire workers. They're not the same people.
> If AI was public, we could have usage restrictions based on societal merit, as an example. Not every AI use is ... useful. All of them are costly to society.
Ok so you want people to vote for public AI usage. Like if I want to use AI for my own research, I need to first vote for it, get it approved for its "social merit".
Is this the kind of utopia you are arguing for?
Indeed, now you're getting it.
It's the only way to avoid the catastrophic power concentration issues and resource allocation issues you still haven't addressed.
It's not exactly a new concept either. All sorts of things need approval (usually ones with high resource cost and externalities, see a pattern there?), be it buildings, flight plans, oil drilling, power lines or any number of other examples.
As with some other stuff (the de minimis exception for customs comes to mind), we can of course talk about exceptions for smaller-scale personal use, but large industrial use with heavy pollution and energy use implications should be treated like any other heavy industry.
You still haven't made any case against my structural argument. You still haven't provided any evidence in favor of your viewpoint. You keep digging into hypotheticals about alternatives (at least you've stopped with the straight up strawmanning, I guess), but you've never bothered to justify the implications of the status quo you support.
Kind of funny considering how you started out by accusing others of fallacies and being morally bankrupt, mindless extremists. Maybe the shoe's on the other foot?
> Kind of funny considering how you started out by accusing others of fallacies and being mindless extremists. Maybe the shoe's on the other foot?
Your utopia is me asking some one approval before I use my LLM for my own work.
I'll let others decide whether this is extreme or not.
You are still not defending your view or disproving any part of the structural argument. The only interpretation left is that you cannot.