Hi, thanks for working on this! Your post provoked some interesting thoughts. I’m interested in this topic from the biodiversity/extinction angle, so I’m not sure if I’d be a good fit. Here are some thoughts I had: I am expecting a lot of damage from support infrastructure—power generation, data centers, transmission lines, and mining before I see direct damage from autonomous robots. This is just because AI is so information-centric right now, although autonomous machines are coming shortly.
I think the most damage would come from the increase in doing work that was too impractical before—things like spraying for pests constantly instead of a few times a year. Fishing constantly. Scanning constantly. So damage from increased disturbance and an increase in activities that were previously not done.
However, this might in some cases look worse but be better, so it seems really important to compare to what it is replacing. For example, if you spray constantly for pests, maybe you use less pesticide overall and keep populations low on your crops, without off-target pesticide drift to surrounding areas causing mass die-offs.
I’m expecting the most increase in AI activities from aerial drones because they are easily built and deployed in a wide variety of environments for a lot of activities. (Rather than androids, vehicles, or factory machine arms).
Something from the information side of things—AI unearthing, deducing, and providing more information to rare species collectors might endanger rare populations of birds/insects/plants/etc as they collect them to death to sell on the black market. Secrecy is their main mode of protection right now.
Hi, thanks for working on this! Your post provoked some interesting thoughts. I’m interested in this topic from the biodiversity/extinction angle, so I’m not sure if I’d be a good fit. Here are some thoughts I had:
I am expecting a lot of damage from support infrastructure—power generation, data centers, transmission lines, and mining before I see direct damage from autonomous robots. This is just because AI is so information-centric right now, although autonomous machines are coming shortly.
I think the most damage would come from the increase in doing work that was too impractical before—things like spraying for pests constantly instead of a few times a year. Fishing constantly. Scanning constantly. So damage from increased disturbance and an increase in activities that were previously not done.
However, this might in some cases look worse but be better, so it seems really important to compare to what it is replacing. For example, if you spray constantly for pests, maybe you use less pesticide overall and keep populations low on your crops, without off-target pesticide drift to surrounding areas causing mass die-offs.
I’m expecting the most increase in AI activities from aerial drones because they are easily built and deployed in a wide variety of environments for a lot of activities. (Rather than androids, vehicles, or factory machine arms).
Something from the information side of things—AI unearthing, deducing, and providing more information to rare species collectors might endanger rare populations of birds/insects/plants/etc as they collect them to death to sell on the black market. Secrecy is their main mode of protection right now.