If this isn’t the most cynical message forum then I don’t know what is.
Oh, gotcha. So crypto mining is bad, because he can’t make money off of it. But AI is just fine, because he can make tons of money off of it. I understand now. Makes perfect sense.
640MW should be enough for anyone.
I have to admit, this one took me a minute 🙂
Wait, is that a random number, or the actual scale of the power draw we’re talking about?
'Cause that’s fuck-all when we’re talking about industrial level power draw.
I originally had MW but changed it to be more in line with the supposed original quote.
That should be enough to worry anybody.
From the guy who said 640Kb is enough for anyone…
Ah, okay, thanks Bill 👍
Said a guy banging a Russian ballet dancer while married.
Should we really listen to a guy like that?
Depends on how the person he’s married to feels about it. I don’t know how they define their relationship.
She divorced him
I mean his life, who cares.
He was on flights to Epstein’s Island. Everyone should care
Bill Gates says the massive power draw required for AI processing is nothing to worry about as AI will ultimately identify ways to help cut power consumption and drive the transition to sustainable energy.
The final solution the AI comes up with: Cut the power of the poor, euthanize the old and weak.
how about euthanize the entire planet? Just put us out of our fucking misery already goddamn
And make paperclips.
I hate that they decided to have Morpheus hold up a battery instead of a processor because some empty suit thought audiences were too stupid to get it.
Dead wrong. AI is not as reliable as their makers would like to believe. AI is more likely to adopt all the flaws of humanity than make anything “better.” A subjective term.
It’s a text generator. All these people, were they to live in Antiquity, would jump ship to ship trying to visit every oracle and prophet in the Mediterranean asking questions about universe and seeking deep meaning in short texts of the Chinese fortune cookie kind.
If it were actually AI I might have some faith.
This isn’t a neural net processor, not a learning computer. It’s a fucking mechanical Turk. A bad one.
What he’s talking about isn’t capable of deriving new ideas. It’s just going to spit out shit it’s seen already.
The library of Babel is just as likely to give us the answers he’s talking about. More likely maybe because it’s at least already written down.
I wonder if all this is to burn enough energy to make ignorant people believe that we have AI. And then use that AI as a justification of the existing order of things, the same way “civil contract” is. That it’s not really technical, but rather a very big and expensive propaganda campaign for abolishing democracies.
Bill Gates shouldn’t worry about people wanting to make a tent from his skin.
So if we light the planet on fire to fuel the AI, the AI will then tell us how to put the fire out.
Okay sure, but how about we just… don’t do any of that?
I wish to live in a world where the media doesn’t consist of articles about how some rich or famous person says or thinks something.
There may be others reasons to interview Bill Gates about AI than the fact that he’s rich and famous.
oh okay
And that’s why he’s so rich.
Well as long as Bill says it’s cool, I guess I don’t have to form my own opinion
We should at least hear what Ja Rule has to say
Ah yes, classic tech solutionism.
“No need to be frugal, the tech will evolve and fix the causes of climate change!”
We need a solution right now, not in a decade, dumb ass. So frugality is the answer.
To quote the post more specifically:
Even as our species destroys its only home, we assume that the solutions to climate change must lie in technology, without stopping to examine the role that this very attitude has played in the crisis.
This is so deeply ingrained in our social consciousness that, when there is a new impressive technology, we assume that it must be here to solve one of our big problems. As the AI hype quickens the pace of our ecological devastation, we’re so dazzled by the technology that there is actual debate in supposedly serious publications as to whether AI is going to save us from climate change, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary.
This screams FAITH (Filthy Assumptions Instead of THinking) from a distance, on multiple levels:
- Assuming that the current machine learning development will lead to artificial general intelligence. Will it?
- Assuming that said AGI would appear in time to reduce power consumption. Will it?
- Assuming that lowering the future power consumption will be enough to address issues caused by the current power consumption. Will it?
- Assuming that addressing issues from a distant future means that the whole process won’t cause harm for people in a nearer future. Will it?
Furthermore, Gates in the quote is being disingenuous:
“Let’s not go overboard on this,” he said. “Datacenters are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to the energy load] but probably only 2 to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” Gates said.
The answer addresses something far, far more specific than the main issue.
If I may, here’s my alternative solution for the problem, in the same style as Gates’:
Kill everyone between the North Pole and the Equator.
What do you mean, it would kill 85% people in the world? Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? Nobody that I know personally lives there, so Not My Problem®. (Just keep Japan, I need my anime to watch.)
…I’m being clearly sarcastic to deliver a point here - it’s trivially easy to underestimate issues affecting humankind, and problems associated with their solutions, if you are not directly affected by either. Gates is some billionaire bubbled around rich people; this sort of problem will affect the poor first, as the rich can simply throw enough money into their problems to make them go away.
