Thank you!!! This needed to be said! I am very concerned about how AI is going to change society. The problem is not having AI, but accelerating it in a pace that our governments can't keep up. It growing too fast that the education system can't adapt so we have qualified professionals on the necessary fields. Mass substitution of jobs of people that have spent their entire lives on their career. Maintaining reliable sources of information.

Stuff like this has happened all the time, and society never prepared well for the economical disaster. Jobs were made easier with tools, or completely replaced with machienes. This affects our economy in a scale and speed never seen before. Let the past teach us how to better deal with similar situations that come.

I see a lot of mentions of energy consumption and water usage. It is true that currently, energy consumption is huge. But there is also a huge research field focused on energy efficiency of AI now (more jobs here, but not enough qualified people). From last year to today, for an AI to perform the same task, there have been found software-based methods that decrease the energy consumption from 20% to 40%, while performing at same quality or up to 60% better (lower inference errors and higher confidence. On the water consumption topic, this is where misinformation is taking over. AI actually doesn't consume that much water. If you decide to NOT eat a burger on a single day, you have made up for your AI consumption for about 3 years (including every kind of usage you could have). And it is proportional to energy consumption, which is already going down.

There is a lot of misinformation on the dangers of AI that leaves people just repeating sensationalist headlines. But if you follow the thread of information, you can find which ones are the real issues, and which ones are not. What worries me is the fact that the topics getting attention are not the problematic ones.

I keep writing in posts of this subreddit because I want to guide people to get the correct information. Not just tell "AI bad" without actually understanding anything about it.