Comment by spaceman_2020
4 days ago
I constantly wonder what is the societal benefits of AI
It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument
4 days ago
I constantly wonder what is the societal benefits of AI
It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument
AI is great at producing low value content. That low value content replaces the high value but high cost one.
That is horrifying and destroys jobs, removes expertise from the world, and makes our lives worse.
I do not see how AI could be a net positive either.
Wait, there's a law that says exactly that about money! Bad money always drives out good money (because the good money gets hoarded). AI as fake money, a funny coincidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
> It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument
agree, given that we have a natural tendency to believe what we read - or only comprehend what we believe [1].
[1] https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/gilbe...
You can at the local level.
I thought this piece was realistic and hopeful:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/ai-open-ai-anthrop...
I can't control how the world uses AI, but my family and friends have been using it to start new businesses, finally resolve some long-term medical mysteries, and plan trips they wouldn't have otherwise.
It's called "go to a doctor".
Easier said than done. Not easy to access or pay for specialists in the US and they don't always communicate with each other well to coordinate care, especially for non life-threatening issues.
I live in an area with three world-class hospitals, still had to wait 16 months to follow-up with a hematologist about bloodwork.
If we aren't going to fix overregulation, undersupply, and insurance, AI is the best the bottom 80% can do for a lot of medical queries too complex for the time and attention they are allotted with the doctor. I see that as a positive.
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Why would your lack of innovation and imagination be an argument against? Aren't you just proving that your intellectual output is low value and replaceable by AI?
Even worse, you are probably lying, you can think of pro-AI arguments but you refuse to give them assent because of bad motivated reasoning?
You are double bad.
I find it to be a useful tool for summarizing things, creating examples, and as a tutor for explaining a topic using analogies. Plus it can generate and iterate on code snippets.
Like, I personally find python pandas documentation unusable because they don't come with examples next to the function definition. (historically at least, maybe they have changed)
So I was left flailing, trying to cobble something together that was even capable of running without error, much less emitting the output I wanted.
Now that an LLM has badly-memorized 80% of the documentation and can generate 3 different attempts in 5 seconds, I'm free to focus on the actual problem I am working on rather than guessing at syntax for something I use less than once a week.
So I see at least the ability to have a on-demand tutor or sounding board, at any time of day, for pennies, to be a boon for anyone who wants to learn a bit or try reaching for something just outside of their current understanding.
Sure, its very useful. I’m not denying its utility.
I just wonder if the utility merits the resources allocated to it
Societal use. Cigarettes were cool too.
AI is like when some fella named Nobel synthesized dynamite. He sure did have good intentions as it relates to safety for workers doing dangerous jobs.
There is your “pro” argument.
The “con” argument would be all the other ways dynamite has been twisted and used since.
This AI stuff is neither good or bad, it is a tool. The people using it are either good or bad.
AI is like nuclear weapons research. It killed a horrific number of people in unimaginably gruesome ways, and it rendered parts of the environment utterly uninhabitable for generations but we got mumble mumble fission power out of it so it's impossible to say if nuking live humans was a bad thing.
A nuclear bomb is just a tool, the people who use them are good or bad.
Sometimes tools in and of themselves are bad. They exist exclusively to do bad things and cause only damage, and on scales that are literally impossible for regular people to imagine. The consequences of using the tool are only bad, and last decades if not centuries.
There are no "peaceful" uses for nuclear bombs. We tried, and every proposal failed because they're nuclear goddamn bombs and the literal fallout ruins the environment for generations in fun and unpredictable ways.
A screwdriver or a hammer are tools that are morally ambivalent. The People Grinder 9000 is not, nor is the Copyright Launderer 2000.5 or the IP Theft Machine. Tools designed explicitly to do bad things are in and of themselves bad
“drunk driving kills a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so it’s impossible to say whether it’s bad or not”
> “drunk driving kills a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so it’s impossible to say whether it’s bad or not”
No, no that doesn't work. Nobody thinks that.
"Drunk people who do it think that!"
You framed your comment as a 3rd party, not the idiot driving drunk, the above 'argument' doesn't hold water.
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Products need to be sold
Ads needed to sell products
Social media sells lots of ads around content
Content is expensive because you need to revenue share with the people that make it
AI makes content for free
Ad sales margin goes up
Tech companies make most of their money selling ads around content and they needed a way to increase margin so they created a content making machine.
You just end up creating a doom loop where everyone is using the same tools to create similar content and eventually, no one really cares about the content because all of it is the same
I’ve already seen this in my own behavior where anything even remotely AI-generated makes me tune out completely
We have a demographic collapse looming in the horizon in most developed countries. If we find a way to use 1 human instead of 2 to produce the same amount of intellectual work in 10-20 years as we do today, that's a huge societal benefit.
I think if I had to find any defence for AI, it's that it provides an efficient way to create things that don't matter, but which society desperately tries to pretend are important somehow.
Meaningless corporate presentations, most documents used for hiring and job searching, content on business sites that probably doesn't need to be there, etc. AI at least speeds that up given society's reluctance to get rid of it altogether.
I guess it can also be used to speed up rote work that doesn't really feel engaging but needs to be anyway, or as a Google equivalent for people that don't know the terminology needed to find information about a topic.
But at the end of the day, AI is basically the very definition of the lowest common denominator. Or maybe the most average one.
So, if you're not particularly interested in something, know nothing about how it works or have no talent for it whatsoever, AI is almost like magic. If you do know how it works, then it's often laughably bad.
It’s creating this weird flatness everywhere where people are using it to create things that don’t matter (LinkedIn posts, dull corporate presentations). But because everyone is also using it for the exact same purposes, the same things now matter even less
LinkedIn posts never really mattered. But because everyone is now using broadly the same tools and prompts to create LinkedIn posts, the posts matter even less now
>what is the societal benefits of AI
it will hopefully eviscerate the petite bourgeoisie and the bohemians.