This article is one of the most down-to-earth, realistic observations on technology I’ve ever read. Utterly striking as well.
Go Read This Article.
Agreed, stop scrolling the comments and go read it random reader.
I used to get so excited by tech advances but now I’ve gotten to the point where its still cool and a fascinating application of science… but this stuff is legitimately existential. The author raises great points around it.
Eh it’s not that great.
One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power.
Fossil fuel-burning plants, whether that’s natural gas, coal, or oil, produce even less. There’s no way to ramp up nuclear capacity in the time it will take to supply these millions of chips, so much, if not all, of that extra power demand is going to come from carbon-emitting sources.
If you ignore the two fastest growing methods of power generation, which coincidentally are also carbon free, cheap and scalable, the future does indeed look bleak. But solar and wind do exist…
The rest is purely a policy rant. Yes, if productivity increases we need some way of distributing the gains from said productivity increase fairly across the population. But jumping to the conclusion that, since this is a challenge to be solved, the increase in productivity is bad, is just stupid.
This article is a regurgitation of every tech article since the microchip. There is literally nothing new here. Tech makes labor obsolete. Tech never considers the ramifications of tech.
These things have been known since the beginning of tech.
What about the climate impact? You didn’t even address that. That’s the worst part of the AI boom, were already way in the red for climate change, and this is going to accelerate the problem rather than slowing or stopping (let alone reversing it)
That’s a very solvable problem though, AI can easily be run off green energy and a lot of the new data centers being built are utilizing it, tons are popping up in Seattle with its abundance of hydro energy. Compare that to meat production or transportation via combustion which have a much harder transition and this seems way less of an existential problem then the author makes it out to be.
Also most of the energy needed is for the training which can be done at any time, so it can be run on off peak hours. It can also absorb surpluses from solar energy in the middle of the day which can put strain on the grid.
This is all assuming it’s done right, which it may not and could exasperate the ditch were already in, but the technology itself isn’t inherently bad.
The tech that exists so far haven’t had the potential to replace every job on earth, that’s the real difference for me.
haven’t had the potential to replace every job on earth, that’s the real difference for me.
This really doesn’t either tbh. But that’s certainly what they’re selling.
