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AI Is Too Big to Fail

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Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#61

Post by miningape »

elzbardico wrote: post #31

I still have the hope that the AI bubble will leave as a side effect a massive build-out of energy infrastructure: Nuclear, Solar and Natural Gas. In my book, prosperity and progress is measured in Terajoules. If you have free, clean and abundant energy, you have industry, jobs, every fucking thing a healthy economy should want or need to have. And on the other side, I think the Chinese are deluding themselves on rob…

China (or rather the CCP) have their hands are tied by 3 opposing forces 1. Birthrates 2. Revolt 3. Economic collapse

For example, if they try to increase the birthrate by liberalising the economy, reducing social control measures (e.g. hukou), etc. it will give the people the tools to rise up. But it would potentially fix the economy long term.

On the other hand, if they try to crack down on freedom to ensure their own power and economic survival - it will collapse the birthrate even further and/or cause revolt.

Lastly, if they do nothing the economy will collapse under the weight of the one child policy.

Robots would be the perfect solution - birthrates can collapse, they can maintain economic control - and their "workforce" will never decrease. It's of course a pipe-dream.

This line of thinking is of course similar to how the US requires the forever growth of the services economy which drives the need/hope for AI to solve that problem.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#62

Post by mcv »

Yoric wrote: post #46
lm28469 wrote: post #9

Those who don't learn from... whatever, these clowns have it coming

I think that the sentence is "Those who don't learn from history are condemned to send everyone else to the bread lines while they retire on their private luxury islands."

Or maybe that's exactly what they learned from history.

Maybe we should learn from some revolutionary history, then.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#63

Post by Yoric »

Eh, I was just discussing this article on LinkedIn.

Even one wasn't _that_ cynical about AI, but yeah, this is clearly one possible reading of the events. I'm in no hurry to live in the future that it entails, though.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#64

Post by elzbardico »

cantor_S_drug wrote: post #54
elzbardico wrote: post #31

I still have the hope that the AI bubble will leave as a side effect a massive build-out of energy infrastructure: Nuclear, Solar and Natural Gas. In my book, prosperity and progress is measured in Terajoules. If you have free, clean and abundant energy, you have industry, jobs, every fucking thing a healthy economy should want or need to have. And on the other side, I think the Chinese are deluding themselves on rob…

Imagine robots doing chemistry or biology experiments 24x7. There is so much potential. We don't need grad students to waste their precious time.

A lot of lab work that could be automated have already been.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#66

Post by Jackpillar »

elzbardico wrote: post #37
Fernicia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did the HackerNews comment section turn into this? Low quality, aggressive, fervently anti-establishment.

That's one negative quality that Hacker News always had to me, compared to older hacker spaces such as newsgroups and Slashdot: The Petit bourgeois conformism and materialism. People always drunk the Venture Capital pseudo-libertarian cool-aid with too much enthusiasm here. Being anti-establishment should not be viewed as a sin, unless in extreme cases.

100%. I work in tech and frequent this sub daily but it is morally and politically neutered to a fault. It is the enlightened centrist utopia.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#67

Post by wrs »

jcranmer wrote: post #41

The idea that the Republicans are going to bail out AI and pay for it with massive tax raises on the plebs is just utter bonkers, if for no other reason than they're currently utterly incapable of getting any legislation passed, let alone one so deeply unpopular as that.

What? Did you miss the BBB? They’ll pass any legislation they’re told to.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#68

Post by quantumspandex »

jhallenworld wrote: post #43

>~75–80% of S&P 500 gains Dot com bust was 50% of S&P / 80% on Nasdaq... we survived it.. For Nvidia: all it will take is for one smart grad student to find a better training algorithm to destroy 75% of their value. Why I think a better algorithm is out there: Total installed GPU Tflops = 4 billion. Tflops of human brain = 1 million

Computation on human brain is on a totally different substrate than silicon. It's in memory and highly error prone.

It's questionable a mere algorithm would get us there without a fundamental change in computer architecture. (in terms of Intelligence / W)

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#69

Post by jhallenworld »

adidoit wrote: post #48
jhallenworld wrote: post #43

>~75–80% of S&P 500 gains Dot com bust was 50% of S&P / 80% on Nasdaq... we survived it.. For Nvidia: all it will take is for one smart grad student to find a better training algorithm to destroy 75% of their value. Why I think a better algorithm is out there: Total installed GPU Tflops = 4 billion. Tflops of human brain = 1 million

Is that true? I was under the impression that one reason NVIDIA is so entrenched is that their GPUs are highly flexible. Versus the ASIC offerings of other specialized players are more focused on transformers remaining the dominant architecture.

Maybe the better algorithm will be able to run on GPUs.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#70

Post by seanmcdirmid »

miningape wrote: post #61
elzbardico wrote: post #31

I still have the hope that the AI bubble will leave as a side effect a massive build-out of energy infrastructure: Nuclear, Solar and Natural Gas. In my book, prosperity and progress is measured in Terajoules. If you have free, clean and abundant energy, you have industry, jobs, every fucking thing a healthy economy should want or need to have. And on the other side, I think the Chinese are deluding themselves on rob…

China (or rather the CCP) have their hands are tied by 3 opposing forces 1. Birthrates 2. Revolt 3. Economic collapse For example, if they try to increase the birthrate by liberalising the economy, reducing social control measures (e.g. hukou), etc. it will give the people the tools to rise up. But it would potentially fix the economy long term. On the other hand, if they try to crack down on freedom to ensure their…

This is a really bad analysis:

China's birthrate has fallen like it has in other richer countries because people have become rich and the amount of time and money needed to raise a kid is expensive. Becoming even richer won't help things at all.

Freedom has little to do with the birthrate, you could even say a crackdown on liberalization that has occurred would make china poorer and therefore the birthrate would go up.

China just wants to be rich, robots are one way to do that with the demographics that happen in rich economies.

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