6 ms·
There has not been such a thing as an "Obscene Energy Denand" for half a century, especially not for something that has a chance to turn out to be the most impa
by Phiwise_ 3y ago
There has not been such a thing as an "Obscene Energy Denand" for half a century, especially not for something that has a chance to turn out to be the most impactful labor-saving technology since the electromechanical computer. The US has the blueprint [1] to step-increase electrical generation at a lower bound of five times, with zero environmental impact, and continue growing for many generations longer than the world population is expected to increase, sitting on the shelf collecting dust for whenever it decides to use it.
In light of this, articles with this sort of headline are just scaremongering nonsense. McCarthy didn't tolerate this intentional ignorance [2], so we shouldn't, either.
[1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1212086 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1212086
[2] http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/progress/nuclear-faq.html http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/progress/nuclear-faq.html
- willj 3y agoI’d argue Bitcoin is Obscene Energy Demand.
- epolanski 3y agoAt least ChatGPT is writing essays. Whereas Ethereum has clearly shown that you can have a safe chain without this craziness. But from reddit to Bitcoin talk to Bitcoin core development, there's a handful of people that control everything and want the status quo preserved.
- zzzeek 3y agoit's plagarizing other people's essays
- Phiwise_ 3y agoWhere are the copyright lawsuits, then?
- neglesaks 3y agoYou've missed New York Times having sued OAI and Microsoft recently, and joined by several others?
- freedomben 3y agoIANAL and I haven't dug deeply into the lawsuits, but my understanding is that using deliberate prompt engineering, they were able to get it to reproduce copyrighted material verbatim from its training set. That is obviously a problem, just as it would be if a human read the article and then reproduced part of it verbatim without attribution, but it's a very different argument than a blanket "everything AI generates is plagiarism"
- Phiwise_ 3y agoPrecisely. These headline repetitions as arguments do get tiring after a while.
- zzzeek 3y agohumans can have original ideas, since they possess reasoning ability, whereas large language models cannot, since they have none
- Phiwise_ 3y agoIt doesn't? That's great! Why didn't you say so? And, of course, you have proof of that?
- zzzeek 3y agoI'd suggest Chomsky for this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat... of course there are others who disagree with him but they're wrong of course
- sandspar 3y agoIt's plagiarizing essays in the same way that I'm plagiarizing dinosaur breath by using the same air molecules.
- foobar_______ 3y agoYeah if I had to stack rank 'obscene' energy consumption technologies, Bitcoin would be number 1 and AI would be pretty low on the list.
- Phiwise_ 3y agoIf obscene means "I dislike demand for X personally", then sure. But if the actually useful definition of "demand for X will unavoidably collapse society" is used, then you need to actually read the second link.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoBitcoin is especially obscene because it counteracts efficiency gains. If a new Bitcoin miner that is 10x more efficient for hash rate comes out, Bitcoin won’t use 10x less energy, instead the difficulty will get 10x harder so it continues using similar amounts of energy. With AI, on the other hand, efficiencies help. Of someone comes up with AI hardware that does inference or training 10x more efficiently, people will incorporate that and the energy usage for the same amount of work will decrease.
- Mistletoe 3y agoYou are fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose of the difficult mining in Bitcoin. It is to keep the currency scarce and difficult to obtain. If it didn’t scale with increases in technology all the Bitcoin would quickly be mined and you’d have money printing like the fiat money we are trying to escape.
- cyanydeez 3y agowhen did mental math turn into labor?
- perihelions 3y agoI was just reading the other day about the history of x-ray crystallography, and how the Fourier transforms that were the domain of the supercomputers of the 1940's-1950's were, prior to that, months-long labors of human calculators [0]. It's a provocative history! I wonder what aspects of present life will seem, in hindsight, to have been "Sisyphean" labors—once they're no longer needed. [0] https://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/2008/01/00/sc5015/ https://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/2008/01/00/sc5015/ ("Busting out of crystallography's Sisyphean prison: from pencil and paper to structure solving at the press of a button[...]")
- Phiwise_ 3y agoThis is exactly correct, and only a tiny fraction of the immense amount of hand calculation and clerical work computers replaced in short order. (Well, long order, actually. Short order once the technology ripened on its like fifth iteration)
- sheeshkebab 3y agoWhat labor did the current AI save yet? All I see so far is billions or even trillions in capex for stuff that barely works…
- Phiwise_ 3y agoThe value equivalent of that was invested into computation technology long before even a half-MIPS machine was produced. Its funders had the foresight to look beyond the present day.
- freedomben 3y agoI just wrote a blog post and need a graphic to go with it. My options are: 1. Spend hours and $ hiring a graphic designer to make one 2. Spend hours learning/doing it myself 3. Spend time searching the internet looking for images that aren't copyrighted, or spend time finding an image I like and spend time and $ figuring out how to pay/license it 4. Spend a few seconds prompting AI
- apsurd 3y agoor not add fluff images to your blog post. I know this comes off snarky but it's been decades now and we've got to be the change we want to see in the world. "business person at the office" banner image is completely useless.
- neglesaks 3y agoI agree that the stock business images of smiling guys in suit & tie are cringe as hell at this point. That being said, visual input and aesthetic are deeply intrinsic human things and expecting us to move beyond that is very unrealistic. The best we can do is optimise the IG methodology and/or use open, perpetually royalty free images and clipart for illustration.
- freedomben 3y agoI fully agree there are plenty of blog posts where the image is completely useless at best, misleading at worst, and I react in a very similar manner. But I've found a pretty interesting middle-ground/sweet spot (mainly with less technical audiences) where a nice graphic can really improve attention and retention, especially on a slide deck. For a recent example, I wrote about the importance of passwords for a "security awareness" training (the audience here are people in Pakistan who have only recently started using the internet). To help illustrate/reinforce the idea that if somebody gets your password they can "hack" you, I generated some colorful images of hackers, computer security, and even one with a person being arrested (in that section I was describing the law that could hold them accountable for breach of others personal information if their negligence allowed an adversary to gain access to the system). Personally to me it's fluff, but I ran a small (and not very scientific) A/B test with the first and second group and the version with the graphics was shockingly better at it's goal of raising awareness.
- seeknotfind 3y agoThe same McCarthy who scaremongered communism?
- sandspar 3y agoThe New Yorker needs to sell magazines to the kind of people who read the New Yorker, alas. "Wizard on the hill takes resources from us clerks" is always a good for a few sales.
- lukan 3y ago"with zero environmental impact" I disagree, because 1. I live close to a former Uranium Mining site https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-are-health-and-environmental-impacts-mining-and-enriching-uranium https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-are-health-and-environm... 2. Chernobyl I live in the fallout area and mushrooms and boar meat is still contaminated 37 years later. Over 1000 km away from the plant.
- Phiwise_ 3y ago>Uranium Please google Thorium and Minor Actinide Incineration. >Chernobyl The manifest incompetencies of a literal Communist government are none of the US' concern.
- aunetx 3y agoThe three mile island incident singlehandly shows that US' concern should be correlated to other countries nuclear incidents. Thinking that it only arrived because of "communism" is quite wrong, especially because of the technical capabilities of the USSR.
- Phiwise_ 3y agoI don't see how the largest nuclear non-disaster in world history prompts a comparison between the US and the country that built the people's chandeliers and couches so large that the head of the planned economy had to give a speech declaring them too difficult to move in and dangerous to hang to be tolerated. Oh, and also their actual disaster killed an infinite multiple of people. I'll be happy to compromise with you, though. If you support nuclear in spite of Chernobyl, I'll support the death penalty for any capitalist that oversees a nuclear meltdown not caused by an ICBM despite your lack of knowledge about the history of the USSR, and nature of communism. I might even support burning at the stake or something if that's what it takes to make the obviously correct decision for human progress. McCarthy wrote that link decades after Three Mile and Chernobyl. He wouldn't have done so if he didn't also know what I'm relaying to you now. Received opinion is the least grounded kind. EDIT: Lol I missed what thread this was in. Again, was Three Mile Island a Thorium reactor? We'd all save so much time if questions were directed to Google instead of me.
- aklemm 3y agoA couple years ago I happened to be sitting around a group of energy investors and academics when nuclear energy came up. Their unanimous understanding was that building nuclear plants had become simply too expensive to do either safely or within regulations. Was common knowledge to them it sounded like.
- Phiwise_ 3y agoIndeed, it is practically impossible today. If only there was some way to change a regulation in a day...
- kevmo314 3y agoThat sounds like the story behind SpaceX: Musk being told rockets were too expensive.
- epistasis 3y agoThere are definitely lots of small startups promising to find the cost savings. Or I should say, lessen the variance and uncertainty in building costs, because SMRs are going to be more expensive than large reactors but have smaller financial risk profiles. It remains to be seen if any can deliver. Early indications have all been extremely negative.
- ted_bunny 3y agoSounds like something that ought to be nationalized.
- epistasis 3y agoIn one sense, it already is, in that liability is backed by the US government, there are massive loan programs available for anybody who wants to do construction, and for the first time there are now massive tax credits for energy production thanks to Biden's IRA. However, as for the massive logistics and management problem of actually constructing a nuclear reactor, it's unclear if having government employees would be better. It's clear that the current contractors are terrible, but that's no guarantee that the US gov would be better.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- coldtea 3y ago>especially not for what might turn out to be the most impactful labor-saving technology Not as much "labor-saving" as bureucracy expanding by automating "bullshit jobs" jobs that shouldn't exist in the first place.