this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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Technology
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This article is one of the most down-to-earth, realistic observations on technology I've ever read. Utterly striking as well.
Go Read This Article.
Agreed, stop scrolling the comments and go read it random reader.
I used to get so excited by tech advances but now I've gotten to the point where its still cool and a fascinating application of science... but this stuff is legitimately existential. The author raises great points around it.
This ironically(?) made me go read it. Normally I don't.
Thank you.
Come on. Stop reading the comments. Go check the article.
Eh it's not that great.
If you ignore the two fastest growing methods of power generation, which coincidentally are also carbon free, cheap and scalable, the future does indeed look bleak. But solar and wind do exist...
The rest is purely a policy rant. Yes, if productivity increases we need some way of distributing the gains from said productivity increase fairly across the population. But jumping to the conclusion that, since this is a challenge to be solved, the increase in productivity is bad, is just stupid.
This article is a regurgitation of every tech article since the microchip. There is literally nothing new here. Tech makes labor obsolete. Tech never considers the ramifications of tech.
These things have been known since the beginning of tech.
What about the climate impact? You didn't even address that. That's the worst part of the AI boom, were already way in the red for climate change, and this is going to accelerate the problem rather than slowing or stopping (let alone reversing it)
That's a very solvable problem though, AI can easily be run off green energy and a lot of the new data centers being built are utilizing it, tons are popping up in Seattle with its abundance of hydro energy. Compare that to meat production or transportation via combustion which have a much harder transition and this seems way less of an existential problem then the author makes it out to be.
Also most of the energy needed is for the training which can be done at any time, so it can be run on off peak hours. It can also absorb surpluses from solar energy in the middle of the day which can put strain on the grid.
This is all assuming it's done right, which it may not and could exasperate the ditch were already in, but the technology itself isn't inherently bad.
That right there is the problem. I don't trust any tech CEO to do the right thing ever, because historically they haven't. For every single technological advancement since the industrial revolution brought forth by the corporate class, masses of people have had to beat them up and shed blood to get them to stop being assholes for a beat and abuse and murder people a little less.
It doesn't matter if AI is run on green energy as long as other things are still running on fossil fuels. There is a limit to how fast renewables energy sources are built and if the power consumption of AI eats away all of that growth, then the amount of fossil energy doesn't change.
All increases in energy consumption are not green because they force something else to run on fossil energy for longer.
We need to deploy solar and wind at a breakneck pace to replace the fossil fuel usage we already have. Why compound that with a whole new source?
The tech that exists so far haven't had the potential to replace every job on earth, that's the real difference for me.
This really doesn't either tbh. But that's certainly what they're selling.
How do you know what the limits of this technology is? How do you know that they couldn't be able to reach that point in 5-10-20-50-100-1000 years?
Unless you're thinking of the current iteration of the technology and not its future evolutions.
Its future iterations that are definitely not this?
Sure, I don't know.
I'd wager we'll probably reach climate collapse / political crises that throw us off course before a "Westworld-esque" thing is ever possible.
People don't seem to realize that these tech leaders are all just weaponizing your imagination against you (a.k.a. using a sales technique). GPUs and LLMs aren't skynet no matter how much people want to project that onto them.
Nvidia cares maybe even less about the outcome than I do, they'll sell you all the pickaxe you want to buy in the AI gold rush.