AI can speed up a lot of the manual labour needed to bring even an almost dead, 10-year-old device back to life. My Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (oxygen, MSM8953) was dead. With AI help and my own knowledge, I ported/rewrote the missing drivers, and it now runs Nura (postmarketOS) with working camera, torch, SIM, phone calls and SMS. Only the loudspeaker is still broken.
Everything is up for anyone who wants to install it, or to understand the changes and manually write the patches for mainline: https://github.com/sv1sjp/mi-max2-oxygen-msm8953-nura-drivers Testing, feedback and PRs welcome.
They have given five reasons for not using AI:-
Of these, the first is a result of using fossil fuels, the second and third are a result of capitalism, and the fourth is only a problem if you believe in the whole ‘intellectual property’ charade. Only the fifth is an actual issue with AI, and that can be solved by either mandating human review, or marking AI-generated code as such and letting users use or exclude it.
You are forgetting that basically everything is de-facto capitalism. If you use this in Christiania, you step out to Denmark and suddenly you are no longer ethical because you are contributing to capitalism.
Oh, and you are forgetting 6: can only be trained by data harvesting corporations. Open weight != open source.
I wouldn’t go that far. The majority mode of production of the world today is capitalism. But that doesn’t mean ‘everything’ is capitalism. Neither does it mean that the majority mode of production of the world will be capitalism tomorrow.
The same applies to energy production from fossil fuels. In fact, there the transition (to renewables) is far more visible.
Did you miss a connecting statement? What is Christiania?
What is the problem here? The data-harvesting part or the corporations part?
I said basically.
Wanna bet? I close my eyes, sleep, wake up sometime (hopefully) then check.
Intentional anarcho-communistic commune somewhere in the middle of Denmark. Denmark is fine with it because it’s making tourist money. It’s like a cool fact, like “did you know there’s a place where people avoid using money”. Obviously, they go out sometimes. Apart from that, stuff done there that is only “ethical outside of capitalism” isn’t ethical for the outside world. If someone does vibecoding there and considers it ethical for some reason but not outside (like the de facto lack of enforcement for intellectual property because it’s no longer needed), people outside still can’t use the work ethically. From what I’ve heard, they aren’t even really good with computers there, and I am not aware of any attempts to make their own.
Both? Some people don’t want data harvesting yet it’s done. The CEO gets capital, so do investment companies and maybe some client companies.
EDIT: even if the electricity is sourced “ethically” (no), the compute itself is attributing to climate change.
Ah, so there are alternatives.
If you can sleep as long as Rip van Winkle, you might see it change.
(Obviously the error margins are huge, but I expect capitalism to stop being the majority economic system in the world in about thirty years. Emphasis on the ‘about’.)
Okay, so mentally children. Expect nothing significant from them.
I don’t think data harvesting per se is going away. Even in an ideal world, the state would need to collect a lot of data about people to efficiently allocate resources (i.e. budget correctly). As for corporations, the CEO getting capital, and so on, those are results of capitalism.
Just that.
There is no true life within a false life.
The philosopher Theodor Adorno sums it up quite well.
Slavery, for example, wasn’t solved by handing slaves over to nicer owners, but by ending it.
In a similar way, it’s not possible to improve the world by using exploitative tools, you can’t improve something while destroying it.
For example, not using text generators because of the fossil fuels that this will burn is a good point. Just because it could use electricity from sustainable sources, does not mean it won’t hurt humanity to use it.
Just because it could be better does not mean it is.
I decided to not have a car, because while those can be made to hurt the planet less, they do hurt the planet a lot. And there’s already public transport. Even electric cars aren’t better than taking the train. And I live in a place where this works quite well, so I do that.
I can do better now, not in the future when LLMs might (or might not) better.
I don’t buy products that will quickly be trash just because the companies could build bettee products. We have a choice.
(Footnote: Adorno wrote that sentence looking at the fascist terror in Europe in the 40s. What he is saying, basically: You can’t do the right thing when you live in a system that punishes that. Try to start a protest against cruel Nazis and you’re dead. You can’t further understanding among nations under those circumstances.)
Sorry for the wall of text, having lots of thoughts.
The philosophers only interpret the world in diverse ways. The point, however, is to
change itmake old phones usable.I just hear “Let’s exploit others, it’s the fault of capitalism, not the fault of those driving exploitation”.
That’s not how you make the world a better place.
You make the world a better place with the tools you have in this world. If you wait for perfect tools, you will get nowhere.
In the case of AI, your choices are over whether and which models you use. Your choice has zero impact on what others do with it. Let us take OP’s case. Their choices are (1) run an AI for some time to make an older phone model usable for some more years, and (2) don’t, and have a bunch of people buy newer phones. In this case, option 1 is clearly the better choice, in terms of energy and water use, economics, etc.
You create a false dichotomy.
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