Unfortunately I don’t think caution is a virtue that is rewarding in most circumstances to most people. New tools need to be extensively and rigorously tested before being used.
I don’t even think it’s a individualism/capitalism thing unfortunately. I’ve been in cultures/societies that are not either and both still use these tools to further their goals. It’s just power at the end of the day.
It’s like the nuclear bomb. It doesn’t really matter what the underlying economic system of US or USSR were, they still used it to further their goals.
I think the insidiousness is in the power of the tool. For most people it’s just too powerful to not use. I can be an excellent photographer or artist and not make a dime if I don’t engage in social media.
For me that’s the sad thing. Self-hosted small models have been extremely useful to me to perform selective tasks that completely changed how things work. It’s allowed me to manage my research and information processing so much better. But I also know most people don’t put any limiters on it and use it for anything and everything.
I think you’re in a way conflating two problems. One is policy and private investment in AI and the other is personal LLM use.
The first is stupid irrespective of the underlying economic system. They’re literally using environmental resources that are scarce and our taxes to fund these unnecessary data centers.
The second is something different. I think of it as being able to hire someone to do something for you. You could hire someone to do your homework for you which would be really stupid because it’s essential you do that. Most people didn’t do it not because they had restraint but because it cost too much. With LLMs you just reduced the cost.
I honestly think if the public subsidization of LLMs stopped and policy made them actually pay taxes and environmental regulation fines or for mitigation measures, we would see the actual cost and most frivolous use will stop.
It’ll probably be limited to institutional use and helping doctors summarize notes etc.
The other aspect is probably correct safe guard for the tool. You don’t need to ban calculators for ever. You just need to ban them at stages of education where the students need to practice the underlying operations to learn, i.e. probably up to the end of high school.