Accidental Tech Podcast677: I Accept the Battery Cost
https://atp.fm/677
If you really don’t like AI, we have some bad news for you.
Machiel@atpfm I know.. im sick and tired of AI everywhere and all the talk about it.. but I get it’s here to stay
John Siracusa@vmachiel Many people do think about it, including me! And we all should.
Colman Reilly@Colman So will you, and everyone else, eventually—for better AND for worse. (See also: electricity, automobiles, modern agriculture, manufactured goods of all kinds, etc.)
@siracusa radioactive nostrums, cocaine* in your soft drinks, nfts …
(* I’d look up the correct details but I’d have to wade through too much slop.)
@siracusa i do not like the comparison with electricity etc i must say.. those provide huge benefits for everyone. AI uses so much power and stolen material to provide benefits for a relatively small group of the population. Electricity made us all beter and more equal, AI is making it worse.
@vmachiel I think your opinion of electricity would have been very similar to your opinion of AI had you lived during its dawn! Electricity initially "provided benefits for a relatively small group of the population" while its generation poisoned the air and polluted the water, all of which affected the masses way more than the elites. Oh, and eventually…climate change.
@siracusa but adding AI on top of our current energy needs is just irresponsible. At this point. Even without AI we are damaging the planet beyond repair. We are burning to planet to generate fake narratives.
Plus we didn’t steal everyone’s stuff to make electricity. And electricity doesn’t lie.
AI is a curiousity, not a necessity for a decent life like electricity is. You want to use it, but the whole ethical justification is flimsy. And AI is not inevitable
@vmachiel Electricity was also initially seen as "a curiosity, not a necessity." It was also not seen by everyone as "inevitable." Hindsight is 20/20.
As for "stealing," we have many precedents, both good and bad, in this area, from the printing press to player pianos to VCRs to fonts to APIs. Sometimes we come up with a pretty OK system, and sometimes we end up making things worse. But the basic questions of ownership and compensation in the face of new tech is very old and recurring.
@vmachiel And as for the environmental impact of AI's energy usage, despite the fact that it is somewhat overblown as a percentage of total human energy use, it surely will be a short-term problem. And I'd argue that crypto mining (a much more clearcut case of harm with little practical use) shows we are not good at dealing with things like this. But advances in *other* tech (renewable energy) does give me some hope.
@siracusa I just wish we spend those energy gains on useful stuff, not making fake videos to mislead boomers 🙁
@vmachiel Oh, and as for things stolen for electricity specifically, we stole a ton stuff for the resources used to generate power: people’s land, resources, freedom, and lives!
@siracusa all this is true.. and it doesn’t excuse anything about AI imo. Just because it was true for electricity, doesn’t mean we should just plow ahead with AI…
@vmachiel Like electricity, AI will (eventually) live or die based on the ratio of its usefulness to its harm. Crypto mining lives on because it’s useful for crime and blackmail and speculation, but it seems like it will never reach the mass market in the way that, say, smartphones have.
I think AI is already more useful than crypto, and it also has a much better use-to-harm ratio. Your opinion depends on your own estimate of those use and harm values.
Niek van de Pas@siracusa @vmachiel I think the issue with this line of thinking is that the usefulness of AI comes mostly to rich software dudes in the global North (that’s all of us in this conversation) while the harms disproportionately go to those in the global South.
As long as the harms don’t come for us, we won’t care, and when they do, it will be too late.
Steve Wilkinson (cgWerks)
Secundus@vmachiel @siracusa AI is already tremendously useful for a large number of people. Yes, there are many concrete and hypothetical drawbacks, but even if none of the promised upsides ever materialize and even if models never improve beyond today’s level – it is still immensely useful. Collapsing all of that into “useless” is simply not true.
@siracusa @vmachiel Energy usage is also often overstated. Nobody is arguing that AI does not consume energy, or that aggregate demand does not add up. But this has to be evaluated in relation to the use and that it is spread across hundreds of millions of users. When broken down per individual and compared with what a typical Western European or American uses energy for, AI usage is negligible.
@secundus
I would be interested in references if you have them. I’ve been having a hell of a time finding numbers on this stuff.
I would be interested in references if you have them. I’ve been having a hell of a time finding numbers on this stuff.
@niekvdpas As far as is known, AI companies do not publish detailed data, so there are more or less plausible guesstimates. Andy Masley (see link) has written several solid articles on the topic. Granted, he is just another person on the internet, but I find his argument reasonably convincing. This is not about specific numbers, but about a rough estimate of the order of magnitude of LLM energy consumption and how that compares to overall personal energy use
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about
@niekvdpas To give an even vaguer answer. A fairly limited LLM can be run reasonably well on my four-year-old laptop. A much more capable model can be run on a machine, such as a Mac Studio. This does consume energy, but not very much. Especially given that typical LLM use does not imply sustained full-load operation.
Compared to these examples, optimized hardware or software, scale, better utilization, etc. will be more efficient.
@siracusa @vmachiel I'd counter-argue that.
The monetary system is more important than AI and touches nearly everything more deeply. If energy use can fix that, it will be well worth it, and 'crypto' energy use pales in comparison to the energy use to 'back up' the USD.
Also, Bitcoin mining has become one of the most competitive energy users, so much of it has shifted to using wasted energy, or even destructive energy (and other things) by-products. It is also driving renewables adoption.
@vmachiel @siracusa I disagree about 'burning the planet to the ground' but even if so, the solution is to find better ways to produce energy, not try to reduce technological advancement in hopes to save some energy use. That becomes a losing battle either way.
I also don't think AI is just a curiosity. Over-hyped? Yeah. But, it's a technological leap that is here to stay.
Magnus Ahltorp@cgWerks @vmachiel @siracusa Almost everything that you’re labelling ”energy-use” is ”fossil-fuel-use”. That it has, according to you, ”tracked human prosperity” doesn’t mean that it can do that forever.
Human prosperity will end very soon if we don’t stop putting this much CO2 per year into the atmosphere. Fossil fuel use is still going up. New energy extraction methods will help a bit, but will not be enough by themselves.
@cgWerks @ahltorp @siracusa Ok I’m sorry but “I don’t buy the CO2 thesis” is nuts. We are putting way too much CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the air leading to an average temp increase and more extreme weather. That is what is happening.
We are destroying eco systems that we all rely on, and if we don’t change, the consequences for the human race will be disastrous.
@vmachiel @ahltorp @siracusa This reminds me a bit of the last decades of calories and nutrition, or how genetics drive our health outcomes.
Superficial understanding of an extremely complex system, promoted as scientific fact (some times used towards political or money ends).
I'm not sure we even know if CO2 drives or follows yet. The models are extremely simplistic with massive error bars.
There seems to be some warming. We probably play some role. That's about it.
@vmachiel @siracusa Not ”buy[ing] the CO2 thesis” is just #climatedenialism.
Going back and looking at older posts, it’s apparent that @cgWerks is also a supporter of current US Republican policies and a proponent of Intelligent Design.
So, goodbye.