Right, so the plan is to spend 20 years and 40 petawatt hours building a machine to answer the Great ℚuestion of what we should do about climate change. If it works, the answer will be “you should’ve stopped burning fossil fuels twenty years ago.”
“Oh no what do about all this waste heat?”
“Generate more waste heat”
Repeat until a machine that can create God is built. Then it’s God’s problem.
But it must be a US God, otherwise China wins.
The US god will team up with the Chinese god and the Russian god to beat the crap out of us.
Then the middle eastern god will blow up the indian utopia because he is bored and the british fungus space god will rule over the remains.
This was exactly what I had in mind but for the life of me I can’t remember the title.
Supergods by warren ellis i think.
Surprisingly close to the plot of Illuminatus!, isn’t it?
I was thinking “I have no mouth and I must scream”
The model will just go “42” on and on and it’ll be the first decent joke a neural network produces. It’ll be worth it in a way.
I could absolutely see an LLM telling us that 6 times 9 is 42 unless there’s special tinkering to prevent it.
“The answer is 34. Now here’s the schematics to build an even better computer to ask the right question.”
This is the inevitable evolution of climate change denialism - accept it’s real and happening, just that it’s too late / too expensive to do anything about it.
musn’t make the eight guys who own everything sad!
this “view” (of schmidt’s) is probably the kind of shit that Really Expensive Analysts espouse at davos and in Private Advisory sessions to the kinds of people who go in for that; I’ve also heard it about GRT and “the collapse” and more
would be nice if we could know who all those dipshits are, and who they’ve preached to
it’s clear this was a well rehearsed pitch - the twitter video linked is the two minute version of the same pitch
Ford was walking north. He thought he was probably on his way to the spaceport, but he had thought that before. He knew he was going through that part of the city where people’s plans often changed quite abruptly.
“Do you want to have a good time?” said a voice from a doorway.
“As far as I can tell,” said Ford. “I’m having one. Thanks.”
“Are you rich?” said another.
This made Ford laugh.
He turned and opened his arms in a wide gesture.
“Do I look rich?” he said.
“Don’t know,” said the girl. “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you’ll get rich. I have a very special service for rich people…”
“Oh yes,” said Ford, intrigued but careful, “and what’s that?”
“I tell them it’s okay to be rich.”
I’m quite surprised that religious fundamentalists haven’t pivoted to calling it punishment from god yet.
It would be a sign of the End Times. Problem is that if it is then they’ve been Left Behind.
When the AI says, “turn off the fucking data centres, invest in public transport, apply progressive redistributive taxation,” it’ll be first against the wall no doubt.
“oh no, the Basilisk is woke”
As a large language model the supposed AI will recombine and regurgitate the most common language on the topic, I don’t expect any novel solutions just talk of solar panels, EV’s and wind turbines…
Right. This is Schmidt admitting he has a total lack of imagination. Or to put it another way, “I love life on earth, but I love capitalism more!”
Yep.
Something I wrote a year ago in proposed reply to someone online but decided not to post:
https://gerikson.com/m/2023/04/index.html#2023-04-30_sunday_01
It even works the other way! What if as the super intelligent all knowing super computer simulates everything, concludes you can get to the end by any means, and there is no meaning to rushing, ordering, or prioritizing anything more than would already be the case, and like the rest of nature, conserves on taking only the minimal action, and replies, “nah, you can walk there yourselves” before resigning itself to an internal simulation of arbitrary rearrangements of noise.
This would be insufferable to the people who believed in short cuts.
hang on the clear meaning of “it may be difficult to anticipate the value of money in a post AGI world” is “there will be an infinite supply of robot slaves who can do anything.” what’s this about redistribution of capital
This will grant us “the arrival of an alien intelligence.” Those are Schmidt’s literal words.
Speaking of alien intelligences, my new Silicon Valley blood magic startup has come up with the idea of ritually sacrificing virgins in the hope of summoning Great Cthulhu or Azathoth, as they might have some ideas of solving the climate crisis.
Not a cult btw.
This is basically the plot of Charles Stross’ The Jennifer Morgue.
The plot? Im more and more worried this is going to turn out to be real. Reality tends to outpace his fiction at times after all. ;)
They think they’re going to build a god to save us all. In the form of a perfectly rational machine (in their view), the perfect authoritarian. A mysterious algorithm noone can understand that must be correct because it’s made of mathematics. I’m a little freaked out.
They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.
Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.
Jesus 2.0 is an AI, and he’s American
@dgerard I dunno if you’ve read it but one of the wellsprings of this lunacy is “The Physics of Immortality” by Frank Tipler (1997), in which an astrophysics prof tries to square the circle of cosmological expansion and the resurrection through simulation, outing himself along the way as a very conflicted Christian fundamentalist who is determined to torture relativity until he can derive Jesus … https://archive.org/details/frank-tipler-the-physics-of-immortality/mode/1up
oh yeah
and for the present, just how incredibly many of the rationalist subculture turn out to be ex-evangelicals
Yes some sort of brainiac. Worked well for krypton.
Second option they dont believe in the robotgod themselves but just think this is the way to attract more investors
It’s just skynet except it’ll be very clear that wealthy people are directing the AIs so billionaires will have their way.
AGI is going to be really pissed at us shoveling the problem onto it. “You humans could have started so many solutions decades ago, wtf?”
It’s the parable of the drowning man turning away all help because god will save him, all over again (except it’s floods and mudslides and forest fires)
And when he dies, god tells him “I sent you two boats and a helicopter”.
Except in this case “god” would say “As a large language model, my purpose is to regurgitate a statistically passable stream of lexical tokens, not to rescue drowning people. Not exactly sure how you expected me to be capable of helping and that’s really on you.”
Cyberpunk fantasy: corporations’ top level hierarchy is full of greedy, soulless, ruthless, cold and calculist people
Reality: corporations’ top level hierarchy is full of greedy, soulless people you thought only existed as satire in The Onion
Where’s that person who was arguing with me last time that AI doesn’t actually use that much energy and the corps missing their climate goals was not AI related
how much it does use anyway? 5GWe was from delusional openai talk for investors, so maybe lower
That’s the fucking problem, it’s impossible to tell since MSFT won’t tell you directly, and only the people who run the datacenters could.
The only relatively reliable numbers I was able to find were in this research paper by Luccioni and Strubell from ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2024. Now, that’s an obscure conference (not even ranked by CORE), by Dr. Luccioni appears to be right on the money about dangers of AI (https://www.sashaluccioni.com/).
they will tell total tho https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/microsoft-reveals-the-energy-impact-of-artificial-intelligence
this works out to 2.7GW in 2023, on average. that’s comparable to peak daily consumption in croatia (today), if that 30%-ish figure is accurate then something closer to 700MW is ai-only, that’s smaller country like macedonia
which only highlights how bizarre is their 5GW proposition. hey let’s outbuild ms 2x, like, now
that sounds like it’s much less than crypto at its peak, and even 2023 estimate differs by over an order of magnitude (14.5GW avg). there’s also google and fb and whoever else (aws?)
i started to look up satellite photos and openinframap in order to figure out maximum capacity of their substations, but powerlines for them are probably massively oversized, and substations are probably oversized too in order to make it redundant and high-availability so there might be some way to guess it but then some of these will be underground and if they’re doing load-following to match their renewables (which might be cheaper for them) then it’s also oversized a bit on top of that
Well the main problem is that a datacenter is running much more than just AI. You’d need to somehow subtract “normal” cloud usage from just the promptfondling.
ez. remember that announcement when ms said their energy use got up 36%? that’s ai, and includes both training and use
this still can be fudged with more efficient office heating, shutdowns of least efficient dcs and so on, but only to a limited degree
Aside from anything else, an “alien intelligence” will either:
- Be immediately ignored and villianized for “not understanding humans” if they suggest any regulations or caps on superfluous waste that might have any economic impact.
- Be the perfect proxy delivery-entity for whatever genocide-the-poor/build-Elysium/flee-to-seasteads plan the rich actually want, in which case its conclusions will be holy and $10000% perfect examples of divine insight.
genocide-the-poor
Real world example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_Gaza_Strip#The_Gospel
I’d just submit and demand for our new alien overlords. If there’s a species capable of interstellar travel then they surely know their shit.
Edit: People, I was making a joke.
They’re talking about an AI we build, the term “alien” in “alien intelligence” refers to it not having human thought patterns, not to extraterrestrial origin.
And the thought pattern here is more akin to “I ended the last paragraph with ‘origin’, followed by a ‘period’, so it’s likely that the next word is ‘And’” rather than anything actually useful. All current AI does is statistics. During training, the Neural Network learn statistical rules about their training data. This has exponentially decaying marginal utility, and exponentially increasing marginal costs. So, the problem the AI companies likely already have is that they can’t efficiently train better models, because there isn’t enough training data. And even if they could, they wouldn’t be able to turn a profit on it, because it would be barely better than the last model they output, while having to charge maybe twice as much to break even.
They’re talking about an AI we build, the term “alien” in “alien intelligence” refers to it not having human thought patterns, not to extraterrestrial origin
Ah right i thought they meant it was secretly produced by people in the third world, the illegal alien way. ;)
By aliens they mean incomprehensible, not extraterrestrial
This is just completely deranged. What the hell.
That’s some proper out of this Universe, Narnia level thinking from Eric!
What’s next? Climate Change will be solved if enough children ask it as a present from Santa Claus?
Or maybe something involving the Tooth Fairy. Eric seems like a Tooth Fairy guy rather than a Santa Claus guy.
it’s amazing how he spouts all this gibbering insanity in this calm rational-sounding engineer explaining things voice
Your phrasing reminded me that he was one of the principal authors of
lexback when he was a whelp.
crazy people who look sort of like me but younger.
giving away the game a bit, Mr. Schmidt
Eric Schmidt, genocidaire
I wonder if this signals being at peak hype soon. I mean, how much more outlandish can they get without destroying the hype bubble’s foundation, i.e. the suspension of disbelief that all this would somehow become possible in the near future. We’re on the level of “arrival of an alien intelligence” now, how much further can they escalate that rhetoric without popping the bubble?
I don’t understand why the bubble still holds
Sunken cost for relative few people (investors). They need to push it until the public buys in, then they can pull out and pop it.
Haha the public can’t even buy food right now
Delay tactics to avoid the inevitability that we need to abandon capitalism.
