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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

#541

Post by jonahx »

> and exploits and traumatises data workers to make sure ChatGPT doesn’t generate outputs like child sexual abuse material and hate speech or encourage users to self-harm.

It's hard to take this seriously, especially with the inflated language.

They're essentially doing moderation. It's a job that's been done and needed on internet platforms of all stripes for at least 30 years. Sure, it can been unpleasant work. If it's "traumatizing" you, you shouldn't be doing it. Acting like this is some novel and horrific phenomenon springing from the quixotic pursuit of AGI is ridiculous. It would be needed even if no one believed AGI was possible.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#542

Post by mlhpdx »

pixl97 wrote: post #409
lkjdsklf wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because it doesn’t leave the cycle doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. Where it comes back down matters and as climate change makes wet places wetter and dry places drier, that means it’s less distributed That said, the water issue is overblown. Most of the water calculation comes from power generation (which uses a ton) and is non-potable water. The potable water consumed is not zero, but it’s like 15% or something…

>The big issue is power and the fact that most of it comes from fossil fuels This has almost zero to do with the data centers themselves and instead the politicians we vote in. Simply put we need more 'clean' power generation any way you go about it. Economic growth and production is based on ones ability to produce power. We've been coasting on increasing efficiency for a long time, but we've been in need of larger…

Is it more of a pricing problem? If data centers paid the same for water as I do they’d be far more efficient with it. Likewise for power. Giving sweet deals to these things based on promises of jobs and tax revenue seems a bad idea at this point.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#543

Post by [deleted] »

t43562 wrote: post #519
hamdingers wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, we've used it, you are creating a strawman argument There exists a class of "ai-skeptic" who proudly proclaim they have never and will never use AI. Examples are not hard to find, though I see them more on reddit/instagram/bluesky than I do on HN. If that does not describe you then my comment is not about you.

The strawman side of it is that one can pick on some extremist and "beat them up" publicly as if that settled something but it doesn't.

[deleted]

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#544

Post by kjkjadksj »

notahacker wrote: post #53
simonw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I think a data center produces a heck of a lot more economic and human value in a year - for a lot more people - than the same amount of water used for farming or golf.

you can make a strong argument for the greater necessity of farming for survival, but not for golf...

God forbid the public has an amenity.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#545

Post by squeaky-clean »

didibus wrote: post #468
Aransentin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone. This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity. What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

Aren't Californian almonds like 80% of the world's production? Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT ? I ask legitimately, I think that would already make it more apples to apples. Also if you ask me personally, I'd rather have almonds than cloud AI compute. Imagine a future 100 years from now, we killed the almonds, never to be enjoyed ever again by future generations... Or people don't have clou…

> Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT

You've misread it. It's not compared to AI datacenters, it's every type of datacenter, for all types of computing.

In the future scenario you've laid out it wouldn't be cloud AI compute. You wouldn't be able to use HN or send email or pay with a credit card or play video games or stream video.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#546

Post by kjkjadksj »

simonw wrote: post #158
turtlesdown11 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your context is a little lacking. Golf courses almost universally have retention ponds/wells/etc at the facility and recycle their water. Only 14% use municipal water systems to draw water. https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2...

"Presented by the USGA" (the United States Golf Association) gave me a wry chuckle there. That said, here are the relevant numbers from that 2012 article in full: > Most 18-hole golf facilities utilize surface waters (ponds, lakes) or on-site irrigation wells. Approximately 14 percent of golf facilities use water from a public municipal source and approximately 12 percent use recycled water as a source for irrigation…

It depends on the region. In dryer regions most golf courses are already on greywater system. Irrigation mainly targets fairways, teeboxes, and greens, while the rough is allowed to go to hell in the dryer months.

Some golf courses also are designed to spread floodwater and protect surrounding development. Golf is sort of a happy bonus on top of that.

Private courses are usually far better irrigated than their public counterparts where even the fairway is liable to be left to dry out.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#547

Post by pixl97 »

mikemarsh wrote: post #510
pixl97 wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The implied answer is of course, one is water falling from the sky and one is a machine. Lets say you're in a room a good distance from the window. Suddenly you hear what sounds like thunder and rain falling. From a distance it appears that it's raining outside. Is the rain real? Or is it simulated on a screen well enough you can't tell? You have input output devices just like a computer. They don't see reality, the…

So how do we get from "machines may get really good at faking things to human perception" to "machines themselves can have human-like (or 'better') perception"? The question is so-called consciousness arising out of machines, not machines deceiving human consciousness. Even then, that deception still doesn't prove equivalency of simulated and real things, unless we're adopting an extreme and self-contradictory subjec…

People seem to way overcomplicate consciousness, especially in machines.

Where does a running video game exist? It's a simulation in the hardware. Where is the consciousness in a human brain, again it's electrical signals in our brain.

At the end of the day a system is what it does. Once it starts simulating the human mind in ways that appear human then we're at the point of saying a plane has to flap its wings or it's not flying.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#548

Post by [deleted] »

rao-v wrote: post #396
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…

I mean it's even simpler. Almonds are entirely non essential (many other more water efficient nuts) to the food supply and in California consume more water than the entire industrial sector, and a bit more than all residential usage (~5 million acre-feet of water). Add a datacenter tax of 3x to water sold to datacenters and use it to improve water infrastructure all around. Water is absolutely a non-issue medium term…

[deleted]

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#549

Post by tmsh »

I believe in AGI because I believe you can estimate where a line is going by its slope. Is there not a way to evaluate the resilience of a rate of change? Like the variance of that rate of change? If so you could almost prove with greater and greater certainty that we will get there.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#550

Post by pastel8739 »

simonw wrote: post #521
simonw wrote: post #12

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…

Update on the update: I asked Andy Masley (author of this piece https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake ) about the potable water issue and he dug into it, here's his initial take about it not being a big deal: https://bsky.app/profile/andymasley.bsky.social/post/3m5mqce... Key quote: > If any region has a lot of freshwater and little potable water, the best way to make potable water more availab…

This feels like it makes a lot of assumptions:

1. That just because a region doesn’t have enough potable water to support humans and data centers, it also doesn’t have enough potable water to support the humans alone.

2. That the temporary increase in water prices due to the new demand of the data centers will provide enough revenue to upgrade its facilities

3. Even given enough revenue to upgrade its facilities, that the utility will choose to upgrade its facilities and increase demand

4. That the downsides of a temporary increase in water prices while new facilities are built is acceptable and will not cause suffering

5. Even after new facilities are built, that the cost of those facilities will be low enough and the increase in supply large enough that water prices for humans will be lower than they were originally, even with a large and wealthy new buyer on the market.

It doesn’t feel like a very strong argument to me.

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