261–270 of 683 posts
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I have some idea of what the way forward is going to look like but I don't want to accelerate the development of such a dangerous technology so I haven't told anyone about it. The people working on AI are very smart and they will solve the associated challenges soon enough. The problem of how to slow down the development of these technologies- a political problem- is much more pressing right now.
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I make use of AI in my farming operation. Now what?
Yeah, but the AI you use in your farming operation is running on that tiny little box behind the buddy seat.
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Just because there are worse abuses elsewhere doesn't mean datacenters should get a pass. Golf and datacenters should have to pay for their externalities. And if that means both are uneconomical in arid parts of the country then that's better than bankrupting the public and the environment.
From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/inside-the-dat... > I asked the farmer if he had noticed any environmental effects from living next to the data centers. The impact on the water supply, he told me, was negligible. "Honestly, we probably use more water than they do," he said. (Training a state-of-the-art A.I. requires less water than is used on a square mile of farmland in a year.) Power is a differe…
Water is used in modern datacenters for evaporative cooling, and the reason it's used is to save energy -- it's typically around 10% more energy efficient overall than normal air conditioning. These datacenters often have a PUE of under 1.1, meaning they're over 90% efficient at using power for compute, and evaporative cooling is one of the reasons they're able to achieve such high efficiency.
If governments wanted to, they could mandate that datacenters use air conditioning instead of evaporative cooling, and water usage would drop to near zero (just enough for the restrooms, watering the plants, etc). But nobody would ever seriously suggest doing this because it would be using more of a valuable resource (electricity / CO2 emissions) to save a small amount of a cheap and relatively plentiful resource (water).
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> IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. I'd love this but it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole. It's not unlike when religious people condemn a book they refuse to read. The merits of the book don't matter, it's symbolic opposition to something broader.
Okay, but a lot of people are calling environmental and content theft arguments "political" in an attempt to make it sound frivolous. It's fine if you think every non-technical criticism against AI is overblown. I use LLMs, but it's perfectly fine to start from a place of whether it's ethical, or even a net good, to use these in the first place. People saying "ignoring all of those arguments, let's just look at the t…
Hmm, so most businesses behave nonsensically, because they estimate future outcomes…
I’m not disputing the conclusion, but this crucial argument doesn’t seem very strong.
Yes! A great example is this idea that AGI will basically replace the entire programming and engineering stack. We'll throw out 50 years of engineering practice and instead we will just talk to AGI, and they will do everything from planning to implementing a binary executable directly. I heard variations of this fantasy for 2 years now, it sounds amazing. Until you actually realize that we built this AI machine out o…
questioning someone in an academic matter further, just revert to the academic literature around psychology and therapy, where someone reflects in a literal way upon what they said. The LLM could easily have responded that it was just a trailing stray comment meant to indicate inquisitiveness rather than deflection. if this were real intelligence, it might take a moment to automatically reflect on why it used the word “weird“ and then let the user know that this might be a point of interest to look into?
While I agree that the current LLM-based approaches won't get us to (sentient) AGI, I think this article is missing a key point: the entire modern AI revolution (while founded on research work esp coming from Google) was fired up by the AGI dreamers at OpenAI with GPT3+ then ChatGPT etc. They were first in industry; they created the field. Even if you don't expect them to get us over the final line, you should give t…
You confound the AI product with the AI revolution.
Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…
> sound scary when presented without context It's not about it being scary, its about it being a gigantic, stupid waste of water, and for what? So that lazy executives and managers can generate their shitty emails they used to have their comms person write for them, so that students can cheat on their homework, or so degens can generate a video of MLK dancing to rap? Because thats the majority of the common usage at…
The only benefit is to the already wealthy owner class that is itching to not have to pay for employees anymore because it impacts their bottom line (payroll is typically the largest expense).
It's not like we are making robots to automate agriculture and manufacturing to move toward a post scarcity, moneyless society, which would have real benefits. No, instead we have AI companies hyping up a product whose purpose (according to them) is so that already wealthy people can hoard more wealth and not have to pay for employees. It's promising to take away a large portion of the only high-paying jobs we have left for the average person without an advanced degree.
Me being able to write software a little faster, without hiring a junior, is a net negative to society rather than a benefit.
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I guess it depends, can you tell the difference between a weather simulation and the actual world?
Can you? You have weather readouts. One set is from a weather simulation - a simulated planet with simulated climate. Another is real recordings from the same place at the same planet, taken by real weather monitoring probes. They have the same starting point, but diverge over time. Which one is real though? Would you be able tell?
The question is can you tell the difference between the rain you see outside your window, and some representation of a simulated environment where the computer says "It's raining here in this simulated environment". The implied answer is of course, one is water falling from the sky and one is a machine.
I always found it funny OpenAI staff tried to delay the release of GPT to the world because they feared the consequences of giving the public such a power. Hearing stuff like this makes it even funnier: > In the pit, [Sutskever] had placed a wooden effigy that he’d commissioned from a local artist, and began a dramatic performance. This effigy, he explained represented a good, aligned AGI that OpenAI had built, only…
Claiming otherwise is overconfident stupidity. Of which there is no shortage of that in AI space.