Perhaps I can now, finally, know peace.
What they're calling #AI is inevitable because it's just computers, computing, and computers already exist and are everywhere.
We cannot stop it, unless you have a plan to stop all computing, forever. Meanwhile, AI products are becoming more useful to people all the time.
So, when comes to critique of AI, we have to up our game if we want a future worth living in.
https://redeem-tomorrow.com/the-average-ai-criticism-has-gotten-lazy-and-thats-dangerous
everyone who wants to do this self-righteous finger wagging bullshit about AI’s energy impact needs to explain to what we’re going to do about the hundreds of terawatts of mundane data center energy expenditure that’s ALREADY HAPPENING, orders of magnitude greater than AI
This is a software engineer writing this.
If the future of AI must be stopped on energy grounds, shouldn’t all technologists put down tools and disrupt their nearest data center?
It’s absolutely incoherent.
If a social worker wants to make this argument, a person who builds houses, I think they have a little more standing
But every software professional who keeps going to work pays their rent or mortgage on the back of ENORMOUS energy usage, an entire constellation of devices burning energy, on a rack, in the home, pockets
Deciding we can’t build more data centers because that’s bad for the earth, but accepting existing data centers doing a different category of computing that pays your bills…
It’s a form of denialism
Confronted by the consequences of this legitimately scary, powerful technology, people are twisting themselves into contradictory, epistemic knots
Not realizing that this condemns them to the kids’ table of the discussion
In 2013, lamenting the costs of a data center doesn’t stop GamerGate from happening, nor does declaring Reddit or 4chan is useless technology
@danilo it seems to me that the energy use during actual computation gets all the attention, but I think a lot about the mining and manufacturing required for all types of computing. To me crypto and now AI seem designed to create massive, cyclical demand for manufacturing new compute capacity, reproducing the logic of the oil economy on top of silicon.
The fact that bitcoins are “created” via “mining” was a huge tell, even in 2013.
@supaspoida @danilo I agree on crypto (the proof of work was the point), but not for AI. Mainly because everyone's working to reduce the costs of AI, but also because it's actually doing legitimate work with those resources, providing a service.
If AI is "creating demand" for more computation power, then so is Fortnite and Netflix.
@supaspoida @danilo Fortnite has about 4 million players on average at any given time. When you consider the servers necessary to host those games on top of the computers and GPUs playing the clients, it's pretty significant.
@LouisIngenthron @danilo and there is another kind of mining that is important to consider here, the “data mining” all this computation drives which seeks to turn every human interaction into an opportunity for extraction.
@supaspoida @danilo Or how about the climate costs of endlessly storing spam emails?
@LouisIngenthron @danilo I don’t see Netflix or Fortnite driving the same kind or scale of hardware demand cycles that AI and crypto have. That’s where the mining comes in. It’s easy to forget that all this computation has an entire supply chain reliant on extractive mining, processing, manufacturing, and logistics at global scale.