I watched Nvidia's Computex 2024 keynote and it made my blood run cold

The tragic irony of the kind of misinformed article this is linking is that the server farms that would be running this stuff are fairly efficient. The water is reused and recycled, the heat is often used for other applications. Because wasting fewer resources is cheaper than wasting more resources.

But all those locally-run models on laptop CPUs and desktop GPUs? That's grid power being turned into heat and vented into a home (probably with air conditioning on).

The weird AI panic, driven by an attempt to repurpose the popular anti-crypto arguments whether they matched the new challenges or not, is going to PR this tech into wasting way more energy than it would otherwise by distributing it over billions of computer devices paid by individual users. And nobody is going to notice or care.

I do hate our media landscape sometimes.

Yeah, I think the author misses the point in regard to power consumption. Companies will not buy loads of these and use them in addition to existing hardware. They will buy these to get rid of current hardware. It's not clear (yet) if that will increase, decrease or not affect power consumption.

Every cloud has a silver lining it seems (heheh)

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.

Eh it's not that great.

One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power.

Fossil fuel-burning plants, whether that's natural gas, coal, or oil, produce even less. There's no way to ramp up nuclear capacity in the time it will take to supply these millions of chips, so much, if not all, of that extra power demand is going to come from carbon-emitting sources.

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.

Believe it or not, peak humanity.
It's all downhill from here

Tech is neither good nor bad, but control of tech is a major issue.

You're not wrong. We've reached a point, technologically, where there is little-to-no true innovation left... and what I mean by that is that everything is now built on incredible amounts of work by others who came before. "Standing on the shoulders of giants", as it were. And yet we have a corrupt "patent" system that is exclusively used to steal the work of those giants while at the same time depriving all of humanity of true progress. And why? So that a handful of very rich people can get even more rich.

Innovatin is good if it results in clean water, meds, housing, safe food and goods and services.

It's bad if it means: the most profit for useless shit that people only buy because advertisment made them believe they need it.

Capitalism is a tool. Please let's grow a pair and stop letting it decide how it will be used. It's like pulling the trigger on an ak47 without holding it tight. Do we expect the weapon to know where to shot?

Capitalism is a tool that wants to maximize its profits. Unfortunately it discovered that changing the politics and laws is an easy way to do that, even if it's bad for the people.

Capitalism is per definition not bound to ethics or moral. We need to set rules, even if big corporations made us to believe we shouldn't.

I remember hearing this argument before...about the Internet. Glad that fad went away.

As it has always been, these technologies are being used to push us forward by teams of underpaid unnamed researchers with no interest in profit. Meanwhile you focus on the scammers and capitalists and unload your wallets to them, all while complaining about the lack of progress as measured by the products you see in advertisements.

Luckily, when you get that cancer diagnosis or your child is born with some rare disease, that progress will attend to your needs despite your ignorance if it.

Fun fact the first Mr coffee cost 300 dollars in 1971, which would be more than 2000 dollars today

Improvement is not a scam.

Innovation is a scam created by representing change as improvement when it isn't.

And every time change gets replaced with innovation, it's connected to totalitarian\fascist tendencies, because it makes easier to sell societal change which is clearly not improvement.

A person who seriously affected my life advised "Homo Ludens" by Johan Huizinga, not sure whether because of the part of it about fascism in the 30s.

We need progress, which is harder to do because it takes a paradigm shift on an Individual and social level.

Sometimes it just takes a marginal improvement to the quality of the engineering. But these "what if manual labor but fascade of robots!" gimmicks aren't improvements in engineering. They're an effort to cut corners on quality in pursuit of a higher profit margin.

Even setting aside you believe these aren't just a line up of mechanical turks controlled from a sweetshop in the Philippines, their work product isn't anything approaching good. Its just cheap.

The problem with this approach is that progress here is viewed like a brick wall you build.

You don't get progress from just burning a lot of wood in 1400s. You can get it if that wood is burnt with the goal of, I dunno, making better metal or bricks for some specific mechanism.

Same with our time, how can they expect solutions of problems to be found when they don't understand what they are trying to find?

It's like a cargo cult - "white people had this thing and it could fly and drop cargo, so we must reproduce its shape and we'll be rich", only in this case it's even dumber - nobody has seen the things they are trying to reach anywhere outside of space opera series.

What differentiates IT from most other engineering areas is that most of people doing it solve abstract tasks in abstract environments, defined by social and market demand. They are, sadly, simply a grade below real engineers and scientists for that reason alone.

According to some people (who have never programmed and don't know what AI can do), we will all be able to retire with a lot of money and we'll all write poetry and become painters or make music and have fun. It's not realistic and it won't happen.

The only positive thing that AI can do is detect bad stuff in the human body before a surgery as long as it's validated by a professional. I could throw everything else in the trash as it's meant to replace humans forever.

The issue with "Human jobs will be replaced" is that society still requires humans to have a paying job to survive.

I would love a world where nobody had to do dumb labour anymore, and everyone's needs are still met.

The notion that everyone must earn their own living is going to be a problem soon.

I've been watching people try to deliver the end-to-end Food Making conveyor belt for my entire life. What I've consistently seen delivered are novelties, more prone to creating a giant mess in your mechanical kitchen than producing anything both efficient and edible. The closest I've seen are those microwaved dinners, and they're hardly what I'd call an exciting meal.

But they are cheap to churn out. That's what is ultimately upsetting about this overall trend. Not that we'll be eliminating a chronic demand on human labor, but that we'll be excising any amount of artistry or quality from the menu in order to sell people assembly line TV dinners at 100x markups in pursuit of another percentage point of GDP growth.

As more and more of the agricultural sector falls under the domain of business interests fixated on profits ahead of product, we're going to see the volume and quality of food squeezed down into what a robot can shove through a tube.

@shrugs @rwtwm I think the enterprise crew would be concerned if the Ferengi owned said replicators.

The wealthy ruling class have siphoned off nearly all of the productivity gains since the 70s. AI won’t stop that machine. If half of us die of starvation and half the remaining half die from fighting each other for cake, they don’t care.

It’s more than your average space heater.

Yes, and you leave it on all day at full blast. And you have a dedicated building where there's thousands of them doing the same.

Yes, but they are not gaming devices. They are meant to efficiently compute things. When used for that purpose they use little energy compared to other devices doing the same thing.

I did it because you urged me.

what a dumb future

But without even just the cool space station to just stare at longingly…

THE MORE YOU SAVE

Disagree that all work is valid. That only makes sense in a world with no resource constraints

If I want to compute pi for no reason or drive to the Grand Canyon for lunch, I should be able to do so.

Are you able to explain why?

Anyone with experience in corporate operations will tell you the ROI on process changes is dramatically higher than technology. People invent so many stupid and dangerous ways to "improve" their work area. The worst part is that it just takes a little orchestration to understand their needs and use that creativity to everyone's benefit.

Efficiency??

This is about the total amount of emissions, not the emissions-per-unit-of-compute (or whatever).

lol at tech’s transparency. You have an availability heuristic issue with your thought process. Every other industry has similar critiques. Your media diet is leading you to false conclusions.