one water please
one water please
this is the fucking root of every fucking “will technology kill us?!” statement.
The tech won’t do shit, the goddamn assholes owning it will.
Mostly the AIs are built and controlled by public companies. Anthropic’s ownership is secret, but about 10% is owned by Google, and about 10% by Amazon. For OpenAI, 1/4 is owned by Microsoft, 1/4 is owned by their non-profit arm in some bullshit scheme, 1/4 is the employees (presumably including CEO, etc), and the remaining bits are early investors. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, nVidia, Oracle, and other public companies are owned by regular investors, pension funds, investment banks, etc.
Billionaires are part of the problem, but so are pension funds, investment banks, and regular investors who own a bit of stock in their 401(k)s.
This isn’t billionaires using their private money on private projects to fuck up the world like some kind of mad Bond villain. They’re not breaking any laws. They’re not doing anything in secret. They’re not doing it in order to kill people, or to try to take over the world.
This is the whole system where these companies are following the laws and trying to generate profits for their investors. Killing all the billionaires would be easy and satisfying, but it wouldn’t fix the problem, because the problem is a systemic one.
If it were Doctor Evil hiding in a cave, working on a doomsday machine, you’d need to send in Austin Powers to stop him. When it’s regular public companies doing it, you can stop it by just changing a law. The US system is so fucked up that it may be impossible to do that. But, in say France it’s probably much more likely that someone can just pass a simple law saying “you can’t do that”.
The death of the empire won’t be a loud bang but a boring ever after. Nothing to do, nothing to distract you from all these memories of what you have done. The worst thing for a worker to happen is nothing at all. If nothing happens at all, nobody needs you, nobody employs you, how do you spend your time? How do you justify your own existence?
To a worker, the worst that could happen is literally nothing at all. As long as anything happens, and i mean anything, there’s business to be made and work to be done. As some poet put it: “Do not go easy into this silent night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do not go easy into this silent night.”
And that is why Trump starts this war; Because if all was perfect, and everybody had everything they need, the economy would come to a screeching halt. To ensure that things continue to be done, and business to be made, windows must be broken repeatedly (planned obsolescence), and buildings need to be smashed, so they can continue to be rebuilt, in a never-ending cycle.
AI systems themselves don’t inherently require large amounts of water. The water use comes from data center cooling design choices. Closed-loop liquid cooling systems can minimize water consumption, and large bodies of water like lakes, rivers, or the sea can serve as effective heat sinks.
So, high water usage is not a technical necessity of AI. It’s just cheaper and easier to ignore mother nature. Especially when you are in a race against the other AI companies.
If the US had not given up on saving the climate, laws for environmental protection could have helped.
That’s the next terminator movie right there. I remember reading that James Cameron had trouble writing the next movie because it would be too close to reality.
Dude take a hint from “Don’t look up”, and do exactly that. Have it be about corrupt politicians, corporations, a planet that is dying,…
If you really wanna be a hero to the masses, inspire them with a message that’ll unite the people against all this shit.
Make it a message about ditching big tech, about voting against corporate interests,…
But of course that’s not gonna happen.