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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#431

Post by kragen »

> I think it’s remarkable that what was until recently sci-fi fantasy has become a mainstream view in Silicon Valley.

I wonder if Tom Phillips isn't very familiar with the history of Silicon Valley, because this is the most unremarkable thing. 60 years ago personal computers were sci-fi fantasy, and 50 years ago they were a mainstream view in Silicon Valley. 50 years ago usable GUIs were sci-fi fantasy, and 40 years ago they were a mainstream view in Silicon Valley. 40 years ago a global computer network used by almost everyone was sci-fi fantasy, and 30 years ago it was a mainstream view in Silicon Valley. 30 years ago always-internet-connected wearable computing devices were sci-fi fantasy, and 20 years ago they were a mainstream view in Silicon Valley. 20 years ago renewable energy cheaper than coal was a sci-fi fantasy, and 10 years ago it was a mainstream view in Silicon Valley.

There were a lot of other sci-fi fantasies that didn't pan out, of course, or at least haven't panned out yet, so this isn't a sign that AGI will definitely happen. Xanadu, the Information Superhighway, graphical programming, virtual reality, freedom, world peace, energy too cheap to meter, the full automation of production, flying cars, and so on. But the entire point of Silicon Valley is that it's a machine for turning sci-fi fantasies into the realities of everyday life.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#432

Post by AndrewKemendo »

tharne wrote: post #416
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of which have to do with AI or AGI. Nestle is and has been 10000x worse for global water security than all other companies and countries combined because nobody in the value chain cares about someone else’s aquifer. It’s a social-economic problem of externalities being ignored , which transcends any narrow technological use case. What you describe has been true for all exported manufacturing forever.

Is the argument being made here, "Everybody's doing it"? God help us.

No it’s a red herring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring)

It’s a fundamentally flawed argument

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#433

Post by ares623 »

Marha01 wrote: post #395
jimbokun wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to being hard, we should ask if something is useful or if the benefits outweigh the harms. It's hard to see benefits from AI systems, AGI or otherwise. It doesn't seem to produce anything that improves human happiness or general well being.

I think you just lack imagination. I can imagine a lot of benefits of AGI or near-AGI systems.

I agree. The benefits are just not well distributed.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#434

Post by hn_acc1 »

derektank wrote: post #238
abathur wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agriculture feeds people, Simon. It's fair to be critical of how the ag industry uses that water, but a significant fraction of that activity is effectively essential. If you're going to minimize people's concern like this, at least compare it to discretionary uses we could ~live without. The data's about 20 years old, but for example https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2... suggests we were us…

The vast majority of water in agriculture goes to satisfy our taste buds, not nourish our bodies. Feed crops like alalfa consume huge amounts of water in the desert southwest but the desert climate makes it a great place to grow and people have an insatiable demand for cattle products. We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat. Instead, we let people make purchasing decisions…

Ask people which they'd rather have: -no more meat and a little better AI -keep their meat and AI doesn't improve from where it is today..

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#435

Post by mellosouls »

random3 wrote: post #267
mellosouls wrote: post #63

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…

The lay misconception and wrongly attributed revolutions, discoveries, inventions is so common it has a name - Stigler’s law of eponymy. You confound the AI product with the AI revolution.

You confound my point with some other of your own misreading.

To repeat: The claim of the article is clearly incorrect. It's precisely the AGI "fantasists" that have engineered the incredible technological landscape we now live in.

If you disagree, it would be useful to frame your argument in a clearer and less condescending fashion.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#436

Post by kragen »

buu700 wrote: post #430
kragen wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data center cooling towers have to use fresh rather than salt water, but they don't care about bacterial contamination or toxic traces of arsenic, antimony, and fluorine. Agriculture also has to use fresh rather than salt water. I can't think of any circumstances where water that was usable for agriculture wouldn't also be usable for cooling data centers—except when the farmer owns the water and the data center opera…

Not to mention that this is likely a very short-term debate. Modern AI/ML/compute has been a huge boost to fusion R&D, and tons of AI/tech capital is flowing into companies like Helion and CFS. Necessity is the mother of invention and all. It may be a valid criticism today, but no one will be complaining about AI's environmental impact after those first few plants go live and mass production begins within the next de…

I'm skeptical about that. Helion in particular might work (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlNfP3iywvI) but all the other fusion-energy companies' plans are to convert fusion energy to thermal energy and then convert the thermal energy to electrical energy in the usual way, using steam engines. That's never going to be cheaper than thermal energy powering steam engines, because thermal energy powering steam engines is part of it.

But solar energy is.

Helion's strategy is to directly convert the hot plasma's expansion into electrical energy by, basically, pushing against a powerful magnetic field. This is potentially higher efficiency than steam engines (because it's working at a higher temperature) and potentially higher power density and reliability. So it could at least theoretically get to be cheaper than steam engines. But I think it's more likely to be far more expensive for the next several decades.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#437

Post by hn_acc1 »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #387
jtr1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly, there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology.

> the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology Especially since so many anti-crypto people immediately pivoted to anti-AI. That sudden shift in priorities makes it hard to take them seriously.

I didn't pivot - I'm still strongly anti-crypto and pretty strongly anti-AI.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#438

Post by MangoToupe »

asdfman123 wrote: post #346
lordleft wrote: post #59

The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.

I'm an atheist too. I grew up in the church, rejected it in my teens. The problem with organized religion was the "organized" part -- the centralized, inflexible human authority. I'm increasingly convinced that spirituality is a vital part of the human experience and we should embrace it, not reject it. If you try to banish basic human impulses, they just resurface in worse, unexpected forms somewhere else. We all ne…

> The problem with organized religion was the "organized" part

What on earth is "unorganized" religion? How is such a concept distinct from the concepts of "worldview" or "ideology"? When people use the term, I assume automatically they're referring to abrahamic faiths—especially in contrast to "atheism".

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#439

Post by hombre_fatal »

throwup238 wrote: post #400
derektank wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of water in agriculture goes to satisfy our taste buds, not nourish our bodies. Feed crops like alalfa consume huge amounts of water in the desert southwest but the desert climate makes it a great place to grow and people have an insatiable demand for cattle products. We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat. Instead, we let people make purchasing decisions…

> We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat. If you look at the data for animals, that’s not really true. See [1] especially page 22 but the short of it is that the vast majority of water used for animals is “green water” used for animal feed - that’s rainwater that isn’t captured but goes into the soil. Most of the plants used for animal feed don’t use irrigation agriculture…

That paper makes the opposite argument than you thought it made. Even from a freshwater perspective it’s more water-efficient to get calories/protein/fat directly from crops than from animal products.

Since you like their work, the authors of your paper answered that question more generally here https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8 where they conclude "The water footprint of any animal product is larger than the water footprint of crop products with equivalent nutritional value".

You make some often debunked claims, like we'd have to plant more crops to feed humans directly if we stopped eating meat.

This shouldn't make intuitive sense to you since animals eat feed grown on good cropland (98% of the water footprint of animal ag) that we could eat directly, and we lose 95% of the calories when we route crops through animals.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#440

Post by hn_acc1 »

roywiggins wrote: post #118
bee_rider wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We definitely shouldn’t worry about bankrupting golf courses, they are not really useful in any way that wouldn’t be better served by just having a park or wilderness. Beef, I guess, is a popular type of food. I’m under the impression that most of us would be better off eating less meat, maybe we could tax water until beef became a special occasion meal.

I'm saying that if you taxed water enough for datacenters to notice, beef would probably become uneconomical to produce at all. Maybe a good idea! But the reason datacenters would keep operating and beef production wouldn't is that datacenters produce way more utility per gallon.

If it only applies to beef, fine. If it's ALL agriculture...

I can live without another datacenter - I get very little utility from "one more" - but I have to eat, generally every day..

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