Does anyone really understand what we're dealing with here? I dabbled with machine learning a couple of years ago, but became disillusioned by the amount of energy the AI industry is using. You could cite instances where AI does good, like pattern recognition of cancer cells, but overall I tend to agree with the analysis that it will just make us better at doing all the harmful things we already do at an ever accelerating pace.
Interesting that John Wild mentions Hugo de Garis, who I haven't heard about for at least 15 years. He was trying to develop AI before the current wave, and was convinced that there would be gigadeaths due to wars between people who wanted AI and those that didn't. A very odd character indeed!
I'm not sure about the mycelium idea. I can't imagine how that relationship would work or more importantly, how it could be controlled. In a recent interview with Zak Stein, he warned about AI agents with human like voices, and how we can be fooled that there is a consciousness behind it with the traits that we associate with humans, such as empathy, collaboration and kindness, where really whatever 'intentions' the AI might have, they are in no way in tune with our well being.
Really interesting to hear about Cosmism which I wasn't aware of. Those Silicon Valley futurists do indeed need therapy!
Fantastic as ever! These questions link with this book' Blood In The Machine:: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech' by Brian Merchant, which traces the current stratergies of Big Tech back to the the first Industrialists of the fibre and weaving communities here in Britain. We understood long ago the appropriate levels of technology, in relation to an interconnected Web of life. The Luddites, or the communities of England at that time that fought the industrialist with such force and coordination that a force of 10,000 soldiers was raised to break their power. The factories were reestablished and fortified, each with their own garrison.
Lest there be any doubt, the whole edifice of the present world order is built upon the dispossession and murder of the people.
The mycelial network is the mycelial network, the soil is the soil, there is no computer that will ever approach the intelligence of Gaia. As with any addiction, it cannot be ameliorated, there is life after the Internet.
Wonderful talk here. I would imagine that there are plenty of tech people who are more enlightened than those discussed here who imagine that God does not yet exist, and are hoping to beat death and bring their parents back to life! It is easy to imagine that people who are obsessed with building things and engineering things are so focused on the physical world, and the concept of themselves as something purely physical, but one is certainly very tempted to say “My goodness, what little boys we are dealing with here.” Particularly when you consider that some of them are very wealthy and have as much time on their hands as they would like to spend educating themselves, you would think that more of them would have had their eyes opened to what ancient cultures have known for a long time, which relates so closely to these obsessions of theirs. They may be smart, but they are not wise.
The idea of beating death emerges from a limited awareness of reality and an overconcentration on things we can see and touch. Does a caterpillar try to avoid becoming a butterfly? Our death is merely a stage in life. Ancient cultures speak of right action in this world in order to both keep their ancestors alive and not to offend them. They recognize that they are not “dead”. The philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine co-authored a book, called The Web of Belief which we could roughly compare to the interconnectedness of things. The meaning of statements involves a context wider than their mere expression. Many people have the mistaken view that they are capable of changing their beliefs, but that doesn’t happen because our beliefs are interconnected. They are not discrete units that we can take out and replace. Additionally, beliefs are a state of mind we are not in control of the way we may think. They happen to us. They emerge. Learning new things is not the same as changing our beliefs. And changing our minds is something else. We can no more change our beliefs than we can decide to believe that we don’t exist or that we are taller than we are or like cigarettes when we don’t like them. They change, but not because we decide they should.
Our death as a stage, rather than an end, means that it is futile to attempt to prolong this stage in life, which is connected to prior and future stages. Not only that, but there is too much focus here on the self as well: imagine a strand of mycelium wanting to leave the group and go off on its own.
Is your belief that you cannot change your beliefs outside of your control because you're influenced by a web of beliefs? Isn't that self-referential? I happen to know that conversations like this one, involving both emotional statements but also concrete facts, change 'beliefs' or opinions. I know because about 16 years ago I went from the 'belief' that nuclear power was the worst thing possible to accepting it as a possible contender for a clean energy future - especially with the arrival of breeder reactors that eat most of the nuclear waste. (The final stuff is about only 10% of the size - and only radioactive for 300 years. 1 golf ball of waste = 1 whole human life of energy supply.) So I was a pro-nuclear activist in Australia - where it is illegal and unpopular.
THEN a few years ago I finally gave in to the fact that renewables had COLLAPSED in cost. A renewable grid is now not only possible, but cheaper than coal. And that's WITHOUT costing in the fact of coal's $5 TRILLION a year global health impact - let alone climate change! All my old concerns about the cost to Overbuild renewables across a wide geographic area were moot. So, in the fact of this new SCIENTIFIC AND ECONOMIC DATA - I changed my mind again. Tell me - wasn't the whole point of the enlightenment to learn how to use the empirical method to eliminate the noise of 'beliefs' as much as we can? And did I change my mind because other people had "BELIEFS" or data? Do you not "believe" in science? Or truth? Or reality? However hard these things might be to ascertain?
You misunderstand me, and no, it is not self-referential. I'm not saying people's beliefs don't change. They clearly do. But we cannot simply change them at will, and this is important. Even if we want to believe something that we find ourselves not in agreement with, we cannot simply believe that thing. We can say those words, but it will not be genuine belief. Belief is a state of mind, it is not just words we say. And saying things, in the sense of me telling my son for example that "your song is the most beautiful song I have ever heard" does not necessarily cause our beliefs to change. Our beliefs change when we become convinced of something new ("new" can be defined in various ways here but I hope you know what I mean). We see, hear, read, or even figure out all on our own, something that strikes us in a certain way, and a belief that is new for us can be the result. But we can't just will it to be so. This is so because when we believe something, part of our state of mind includes the notion of having been convinced, or of having had some evidence, whatever it may be, however good or bad it may be, that pushes us over the edge into "believing that..."
You say you changed your mind after hearing/reading new information. But that wasn't a choice you made, was it? You simply realized that, armed with this new information, you had a new appreciation for X and also a new belief that X. And no, on the Enlightenment question. Beliefs are not "noise." Not all beliefs are true, but the Enlightenment was not about always being right, it was about using reason to arrive at what we call truths, rather than relying for example on an old book, or a saying or proverb, and arguing from the book's imagined authority on a subject, rather than actually finding evidence and reasons that we could test, contemplate, understand, etc. Beliefs, as a state of mind, are fully open to being false. We have both true and false beliefs, but if we are honest with ourselves, we will not say "I believe in X" where we actually don't feel this way.
Hi Mark - there's a lot I agree with here - something else I feel I can't quite define where we might still disagree - but sadly I'm a bit too busy right now to get out a philosophy or psychology text book to work through stuff and try and figure out what fine hair-splitting my belief system wants to do now. But I'll note a few things:-
YES - our psychologies are wired for cognitive bias because uncertainty is the worst feeling for humans. We don't LIKE our worldviews being challenged. It's part of what makes Doomer echo-chambers like Rachel Donald's podcast here so popular - we LIKE echo-chambers that confirm our worst fears if we're Doomers. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/doomers/ We LIKE utopian techno-optimist visions of Star Trek or what have you if we're wanting a better life. We LIKE being told we are right, and our worldview is correct.
YES - we are in a web of beliefs. One of them is in authorities - and I am particularly aware of this myself because I am NOT an energy or technology expert - but have a Social Sciences background. I 'believe' certain peer-reviewed papers I read. But I recognise patterns in them and realise when people Rachel might interview have totally missed those 'rules for renewables' etc.
YES - we cannot change our heartfelt beliefs "at will". I don't think I was trying to say we can just talk ourselves into something. It's more than one can be wired to be Open. I have a high degree of Openness (in the OCEAN personality scheme.) However, in the Myers-Briggs scheme I'm also an ENFJ - so that's kind of the passionate, Feeling, Judging sort of person you would find completely opposite to being 'Open' to the truth! (Not that Myers-Briggs is that scientific. Even the wiki admits it uses our propensity to BELIEVE nice things about ourselves. See the wiki! It's named after "The Greatest Showman"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect )
Either way on the personality front - I'm curious. I want to know more. But it's in all sorts of random directions at once - whatever my latest 'blogging emergency' happens to be. And I'm open to REAL data. To the scientific method. A friend gave me a climate denier book in the late 1980's - and not having read any other science stuff on it - I was a bit of a denier back then. Then in the 2000's I started to realise I had been hoodwinked with clever half-truths. REAL data changed my mind.
What I would be interested in is why someone would reject that? Like a Trump voter who hates climate science? I've tried and tried with some of them - and it's just amazingly frustrating!
You seem to have plenty of time on your hands! I think you are over-thinking this, and going in directions you don't need to go in here, for example, you seem to be confusing emotions with beliefs. Emotions can certainly influence beliefs, just like information, facts, lies, etc., can. I'm glad you see that we cannot change beliefs at will and that they are much more than words we say or things we tell ourselves or others.
As for Trumpers or climate deniers, I think the main thing is poor education combined with one's personal environment. A lack of practice and training in how to read, write, analyze and construct arguments leads to sloppy thinking, and I doubt the schools of any major developed nation are strong in this subject, often called critical thinking. It's been given a name only because proper education ended years ago. It used to simply be part of one's education in a good school, but now that we are being molded into worker bees for the billionaires, education is something else today. We don't value or respect wisdom. Additionally of course, if you're raised in a household and community where people don't think much, where they try to get by on shortcuts to thinking ("he's black, she's a Jew, he's a Lefty, she doesn't go to church, he's always reading, they don't like sports, he doesn't support our troops...") it doesn't help. Peer pressure, community pressure, is alive and well. And then you have those who might be reasonably well educated and are often quite thoughtful, but who for one reason or another, are wed to political parties, or pride in their country, and perhaps a lust for money and status, who put their minds on hold whenever it comes to subjects that, through reasonable thought, would lead them into a direction that would conflict with their politics or their view on taxes for the wealthy, and they suddenly become a different type of person. So I agree, speaking to these types of people can be frustrating because they walk and talk like people but then suddenly turn into robots depending on the topic of conversation. Thinking goes out the window, and a script begins to be read instead. This needs a better upbringing, and a very different society from what we have created now, is my view on the solution. We've come too far from being a thoughtful society for there to be any quick fixes.
By the way, I don't agree that Planet Critical is doomerist at all. It is thoughtful, aware, honest and intelligent. Doomer implies exaggeration or having a tendency towards negative or hopeless thinking, and I don't see that at all here. There is a big difference between seeing clearly and not talking BS, and being a doomer, or a closed-minded denier.
For those interested in exploring the ideologies inspiring AGI development further, be sure to check out Timnit Gebru's research on what she calls the “TESCREAL bundle” of “transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism”. Her latest paper: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636/11599 and website with more resources: https://www.dair-institute.org/tescreal/
There have been quite a few films based on the idea of maverick industrialists pursuing their dream of world domination on the back of their commercial empires. This is clearly not just fantasy. It is very much individualism taken to its logical conclusion supported by a system that takes no account of the human costs, be they environmental, emotional or existential. I feel there is a destructive anger underlying the neoliberal approach. An anger fed by a deep rooted fear of not been seen as exceptional or maybe not seen at all. Fostered in the cradle of privilege its slaves, bereft of an emotional connection to others that isn't dependent on status, are thrust into a savage world of sink or swim where their lack of emotional connection enables this dismissal of human cost.
We so need stories of coming together, the valuing of each other - whoever we are, describing the richness of the warp and weft of our imperfect lives and the excitement of what that imperfection can lead to. The imperfection of reproduction is what leads to the constant development of our world untrammelled by the limitations of the human mind and constantly moulded by the environment which determines which variation will survive.
The environment - the biosphere - is all about life and living. It wants to survive. This is the true meaning of 'survival of the fittest'. What AI's engineers have not sussed is that the biosphere is not just a hugely complex system that can me mimicked with sufficient computerisation but has a crucial element of randomness. This is perhaps the kryptonite of tech valley.
Thanks, Rachel, for this thought-provoking - if rather gut-wrenching - episode!
Yes AI enabled internet searches will use nearly 30 times as much energy as normal internet searches, and training a new AI models requires the energy used in about 5 car lifetimes. Water use is also high - at about half a litre for 5 to 50 queries per Chat Gpt question session.
If just 10% of global google searches use Ai it will be the same as consuming as much water as a city of 2.5 million people daily! And that's just Ai internet searches - not even the Ai that's going to run robots!
So why is Ai worth it? Because when we stick it in future robots their labour will be SO cheap we can set them to fixing everything. Invasive pests, reforesting areas, cleaning up rubbish, building more robots to build more solar and wind farms to power more robots - on and on it goes. Cleaning up mining sites from the iron ore we extracted for the robots - everything.
10 minutes.
From Rethink X - the people that present Precision Fermentation.
When those amazingly cheap AI robots are doing all the work, will the billionaires let the rest of us go out and play? Or will they have no need to keep us around using up resources that they could take to further glorify themselves?
In other AI news - AI may teach us to VALUE nature more, because AI has just confirmed that elephants have individual names for each other. The AI knows - and USED THEIR NAMES to call them! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02420-w
AI keeps designing ways to avoid critical minerals or make better tech.
EG: MAGNESTS that avoid rare earths. Designed in 3 months. (200 times faster than normal lab procedures). AI has already done this in other areas “showcasing that artificial intelligence can be a powerful ally in the battle against climate change.” Popular Mechanics – June 2024
Microsoft AI designed a new lithium battery that uses 70% LESS lithium, and it did this in just weeks, not the YEARS it would have taken a lab. “The new battery material came out of a collaboration using Microsoft’s Azure Quantum Elements to winnow 32 million potential inorganic materials to 18 promising candidates that could be used in battery development in just 80 hours. Most importantly, this work breaks ground for a new way of speeding up solutions for urgent sustainability, pharmaceutical and other challenges while giving a glimpse of the advances that will become possible with quantum computing.” January 2024
What I learned from this interview is that AI uses a lot of energy but it’s powered mainly by testosterone.
Does anyone really understand what we're dealing with here? I dabbled with machine learning a couple of years ago, but became disillusioned by the amount of energy the AI industry is using. You could cite instances where AI does good, like pattern recognition of cancer cells, but overall I tend to agree with the analysis that it will just make us better at doing all the harmful things we already do at an ever accelerating pace.
Interesting that John Wild mentions Hugo de Garis, who I haven't heard about for at least 15 years. He was trying to develop AI before the current wave, and was convinced that there would be gigadeaths due to wars between people who wanted AI and those that didn't. A very odd character indeed!
I'm not sure about the mycelium idea. I can't imagine how that relationship would work or more importantly, how it could be controlled. In a recent interview with Zak Stein, he warned about AI agents with human like voices, and how we can be fooled that there is a consciousness behind it with the traits that we associate with humans, such as empathy, collaboration and kindness, where really whatever 'intentions' the AI might have, they are in no way in tune with our well being.
Really interesting to hear about Cosmism which I wasn't aware of. Those Silicon Valley futurists do indeed need therapy!
As I just posted above, AI is doing amazing things for our understanding of the environment (Elephants recognise and call each other by individual names!) and to improve our Energy Transition Kit - eg: magnets that don't use rare earths, lithium batteries that use 70% less lithium, etc. https://open.substack.com/pub/platformenterprise/p/reimagining-ai-john-wild?r=kv4v7&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=59730471
Fantastic as ever! These questions link with this book' Blood In The Machine:: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech' by Brian Merchant, which traces the current stratergies of Big Tech back to the the first Industrialists of the fibre and weaving communities here in Britain. We understood long ago the appropriate levels of technology, in relation to an interconnected Web of life. The Luddites, or the communities of England at that time that fought the industrialist with such force and coordination that a force of 10,000 soldiers was raised to break their power. The factories were reestablished and fortified, each with their own garrison.
Lest there be any doubt, the whole edifice of the present world order is built upon the dispossession and murder of the people.
The mycelial network is the mycelial network, the soil is the soil, there is no computer that will ever approach the intelligence of Gaia. As with any addiction, it cannot be ameliorated, there is life after the Internet.
!!! Thank you !!!
Also for the book recommendation....
Wonderful talk here. I would imagine that there are plenty of tech people who are more enlightened than those discussed here who imagine that God does not yet exist, and are hoping to beat death and bring their parents back to life! It is easy to imagine that people who are obsessed with building things and engineering things are so focused on the physical world, and the concept of themselves as something purely physical, but one is certainly very tempted to say “My goodness, what little boys we are dealing with here.” Particularly when you consider that some of them are very wealthy and have as much time on their hands as they would like to spend educating themselves, you would think that more of them would have had their eyes opened to what ancient cultures have known for a long time, which relates so closely to these obsessions of theirs. They may be smart, but they are not wise.
The idea of beating death emerges from a limited awareness of reality and an overconcentration on things we can see and touch. Does a caterpillar try to avoid becoming a butterfly? Our death is merely a stage in life. Ancient cultures speak of right action in this world in order to both keep their ancestors alive and not to offend them. They recognize that they are not “dead”. The philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine co-authored a book, called The Web of Belief which we could roughly compare to the interconnectedness of things. The meaning of statements involves a context wider than their mere expression. Many people have the mistaken view that they are capable of changing their beliefs, but that doesn’t happen because our beliefs are interconnected. They are not discrete units that we can take out and replace. Additionally, beliefs are a state of mind we are not in control of the way we may think. They happen to us. They emerge. Learning new things is not the same as changing our beliefs. And changing our minds is something else. We can no more change our beliefs than we can decide to believe that we don’t exist or that we are taller than we are or like cigarettes when we don’t like them. They change, but not because we decide they should.
Our death as a stage, rather than an end, means that it is futile to attempt to prolong this stage in life, which is connected to prior and future stages. Not only that, but there is too much focus here on the self as well: imagine a strand of mycelium wanting to leave the group and go off on its own.
Is your belief that you cannot change your beliefs outside of your control because you're influenced by a web of beliefs? Isn't that self-referential? I happen to know that conversations like this one, involving both emotional statements but also concrete facts, change 'beliefs' or opinions. I know because about 16 years ago I went from the 'belief' that nuclear power was the worst thing possible to accepting it as a possible contender for a clean energy future - especially with the arrival of breeder reactors that eat most of the nuclear waste. (The final stuff is about only 10% of the size - and only radioactive for 300 years. 1 golf ball of waste = 1 whole human life of energy supply.) So I was a pro-nuclear activist in Australia - where it is illegal and unpopular.
THEN a few years ago I finally gave in to the fact that renewables had COLLAPSED in cost. A renewable grid is now not only possible, but cheaper than coal. And that's WITHOUT costing in the fact of coal's $5 TRILLION a year global health impact - let alone climate change! All my old concerns about the cost to Overbuild renewables across a wide geographic area were moot. So, in the fact of this new SCIENTIFIC AND ECONOMIC DATA - I changed my mind again. Tell me - wasn't the whole point of the enlightenment to learn how to use the empirical method to eliminate the noise of 'beliefs' as much as we can? And did I change my mind because other people had "BELIEFS" or data? Do you not "believe" in science? Or truth? Or reality? However hard these things might be to ascertain?
You misunderstand me, and no, it is not self-referential. I'm not saying people's beliefs don't change. They clearly do. But we cannot simply change them at will, and this is important. Even if we want to believe something that we find ourselves not in agreement with, we cannot simply believe that thing. We can say those words, but it will not be genuine belief. Belief is a state of mind, it is not just words we say. And saying things, in the sense of me telling my son for example that "your song is the most beautiful song I have ever heard" does not necessarily cause our beliefs to change. Our beliefs change when we become convinced of something new ("new" can be defined in various ways here but I hope you know what I mean). We see, hear, read, or even figure out all on our own, something that strikes us in a certain way, and a belief that is new for us can be the result. But we can't just will it to be so. This is so because when we believe something, part of our state of mind includes the notion of having been convinced, or of having had some evidence, whatever it may be, however good or bad it may be, that pushes us over the edge into "believing that..."
You say you changed your mind after hearing/reading new information. But that wasn't a choice you made, was it? You simply realized that, armed with this new information, you had a new appreciation for X and also a new belief that X. And no, on the Enlightenment question. Beliefs are not "noise." Not all beliefs are true, but the Enlightenment was not about always being right, it was about using reason to arrive at what we call truths, rather than relying for example on an old book, or a saying or proverb, and arguing from the book's imagined authority on a subject, rather than actually finding evidence and reasons that we could test, contemplate, understand, etc. Beliefs, as a state of mind, are fully open to being false. We have both true and false beliefs, but if we are honest with ourselves, we will not say "I believe in X" where we actually don't feel this way.
Hi Mark - there's a lot I agree with here - something else I feel I can't quite define where we might still disagree - but sadly I'm a bit too busy right now to get out a philosophy or psychology text book to work through stuff and try and figure out what fine hair-splitting my belief system wants to do now. But I'll note a few things:-
YES - our psychologies are wired for cognitive bias because uncertainty is the worst feeling for humans. We don't LIKE our worldviews being challenged. It's part of what makes Doomer echo-chambers like Rachel Donald's podcast here so popular - we LIKE echo-chambers that confirm our worst fears if we're Doomers. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/doomers/ We LIKE utopian techno-optimist visions of Star Trek or what have you if we're wanting a better life. We LIKE being told we are right, and our worldview is correct.
YES - we are in a web of beliefs. One of them is in authorities - and I am particularly aware of this myself because I am NOT an energy or technology expert - but have a Social Sciences background. I 'believe' certain peer-reviewed papers I read. But I recognise patterns in them and realise when people Rachel might interview have totally missed those 'rules for renewables' etc.
YES - we cannot change our heartfelt beliefs "at will". I don't think I was trying to say we can just talk ourselves into something. It's more than one can be wired to be Open. I have a high degree of Openness (in the OCEAN personality scheme.) However, in the Myers-Briggs scheme I'm also an ENFJ - so that's kind of the passionate, Feeling, Judging sort of person you would find completely opposite to being 'Open' to the truth! (Not that Myers-Briggs is that scientific. Even the wiki admits it uses our propensity to BELIEVE nice things about ourselves. See the wiki! It's named after "The Greatest Showman"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect )
Either way on the personality front - I'm curious. I want to know more. But it's in all sorts of random directions at once - whatever my latest 'blogging emergency' happens to be. And I'm open to REAL data. To the scientific method. A friend gave me a climate denier book in the late 1980's - and not having read any other science stuff on it - I was a bit of a denier back then. Then in the 2000's I started to realise I had been hoodwinked with clever half-truths. REAL data changed my mind.
What I would be interested in is why someone would reject that? Like a Trump voter who hates climate science? I've tried and tried with some of them - and it's just amazingly frustrating!
You seem to have plenty of time on your hands! I think you are over-thinking this, and going in directions you don't need to go in here, for example, you seem to be confusing emotions with beliefs. Emotions can certainly influence beliefs, just like information, facts, lies, etc., can. I'm glad you see that we cannot change beliefs at will and that they are much more than words we say or things we tell ourselves or others.
As for Trumpers or climate deniers, I think the main thing is poor education combined with one's personal environment. A lack of practice and training in how to read, write, analyze and construct arguments leads to sloppy thinking, and I doubt the schools of any major developed nation are strong in this subject, often called critical thinking. It's been given a name only because proper education ended years ago. It used to simply be part of one's education in a good school, but now that we are being molded into worker bees for the billionaires, education is something else today. We don't value or respect wisdom. Additionally of course, if you're raised in a household and community where people don't think much, where they try to get by on shortcuts to thinking ("he's black, she's a Jew, he's a Lefty, she doesn't go to church, he's always reading, they don't like sports, he doesn't support our troops...") it doesn't help. Peer pressure, community pressure, is alive and well. And then you have those who might be reasonably well educated and are often quite thoughtful, but who for one reason or another, are wed to political parties, or pride in their country, and perhaps a lust for money and status, who put their minds on hold whenever it comes to subjects that, through reasonable thought, would lead them into a direction that would conflict with their politics or their view on taxes for the wealthy, and they suddenly become a different type of person. So I agree, speaking to these types of people can be frustrating because they walk and talk like people but then suddenly turn into robots depending on the topic of conversation. Thinking goes out the window, and a script begins to be read instead. This needs a better upbringing, and a very different society from what we have created now, is my view on the solution. We've come too far from being a thoughtful society for there to be any quick fixes.
By the way, I don't agree that Planet Critical is doomerist at all. It is thoughtful, aware, honest and intelligent. Doomer implies exaggeration or having a tendency towards negative or hopeless thinking, and I don't see that at all here. There is a big difference between seeing clearly and not talking BS, and being a doomer, or a closed-minded denier.
For those interested in exploring the ideologies inspiring AGI development further, be sure to check out Timnit Gebru's research on what she calls the “TESCREAL bundle” of “transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism”. Her latest paper: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636/11599 and website with more resources: https://www.dair-institute.org/tescreal/
There have been quite a few films based on the idea of maverick industrialists pursuing their dream of world domination on the back of their commercial empires. This is clearly not just fantasy. It is very much individualism taken to its logical conclusion supported by a system that takes no account of the human costs, be they environmental, emotional or existential. I feel there is a destructive anger underlying the neoliberal approach. An anger fed by a deep rooted fear of not been seen as exceptional or maybe not seen at all. Fostered in the cradle of privilege its slaves, bereft of an emotional connection to others that isn't dependent on status, are thrust into a savage world of sink or swim where their lack of emotional connection enables this dismissal of human cost.
We so need stories of coming together, the valuing of each other - whoever we are, describing the richness of the warp and weft of our imperfect lives and the excitement of what that imperfection can lead to. The imperfection of reproduction is what leads to the constant development of our world untrammelled by the limitations of the human mind and constantly moulded by the environment which determines which variation will survive.
The environment - the biosphere - is all about life and living. It wants to survive. This is the true meaning of 'survival of the fittest'. What AI's engineers have not sussed is that the biosphere is not just a hugely complex system that can me mimicked with sufficient computerisation but has a crucial element of randomness. This is perhaps the kryptonite of tech valley.
Thanks, Rachel, for this thought-provoking - if rather gut-wrenching - episode!
Yes AI enabled internet searches will use nearly 30 times as much energy as normal internet searches, and training a new AI models requires the energy used in about 5 car lifetimes. Water use is also high - at about half a litre for 5 to 50 queries per Chat Gpt question session.
If just 10% of global google searches use Ai it will be the same as consuming as much water as a city of 2.5 million people daily! And that's just Ai internet searches - not even the Ai that's going to run robots!
https://dailyai.com/2024/06/googles-search-engine-experience-sge-threatens-to-scale-ais-environmental-impacts/
So why is Ai worth it? Because when we stick it in future robots their labour will be SO cheap we can set them to fixing everything. Invasive pests, reforesting areas, cleaning up rubbish, building more robots to build more solar and wind farms to power more robots - on and on it goes. Cleaning up mining sites from the iron ore we extracted for the robots - everything.
10 minutes.
From Rethink X - the people that present Precision Fermentation.
Watch. Learn. Promote.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT6WfUZp8es
When those amazingly cheap AI robots are doing all the work, will the billionaires let the rest of us go out and play? Or will they have no need to keep us around using up resources that they could take to further glorify themselves?
In other AI news - AI may teach us to VALUE nature more, because AI has just confirmed that elephants have individual names for each other. The AI knows - and USED THEIR NAMES to call them! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02420-w
AI keeps designing ways to avoid critical minerals or make better tech.
EG: MAGNESTS that avoid rare earths. Designed in 3 months. (200 times faster than normal lab procedures). AI has already done this in other areas “showcasing that artificial intelligence can be a powerful ally in the battle against climate change.” Popular Mechanics – June 2024
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a61147476/ai-developed-magnet-free-of-rare-earth-metals/
Microsoft AI designed a new lithium battery that uses 70% LESS lithium, and it did this in just weeks, not the YEARS it would have taken a lab. “The new battery material came out of a collaboration using Microsoft’s Azure Quantum Elements to winnow 32 million potential inorganic materials to 18 promising candidates that could be used in battery development in just 80 hours. Most importantly, this work breaks ground for a new way of speeding up solutions for urgent sustainability, pharmaceutical and other challenges while giving a glimpse of the advances that will become possible with quantum computing.” January 2024
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/how-ai-and-hpc-are-speeding-up-scientific-discovery/
Mass AI use is unsustainable on its face.