That will be fake because she’s not saying what I want to hear!

Also, you’ll notice that I specifically mentioned electrical energy. Electrical power is almost universally measured in watts, the product of voltage and current, not joules per second (even if that’s the same thing). So going from instantaneous power measurements to energy accumulated over time, it’s not crazy to use the term “watt second” the way one would use “kilowatt hour”… Even if that’s also called a “Joule”

I generally get skeptical when people go out of their way to use weird units. I don’t disagree with the message, just the way it’s conveyed whether it’s this or giving the price in Zimbabwean dollars (outside of Zimbabwe, of course). If something is weird, one should ask why. And I wish this headline didn’t make things weird leading people to ask why.

@[email protected] spoke for me perfectly. When you make things weird, I have to start by assuming malice or incompetence - both of which should be red flags.

No doubt AI is sucking a lot of electricity and that presents loads of problems to consider. But instead of (for example) 5 seconds being converted to an hour running a microwave (because who even does that?) how about 3 minutes being about as much as a typical American home uses in a day? Or something like that?

But they don’t use that either in the context of real-world electricity usage. Maybe in the middle school classroom setting, when you can make up the numbers you work with, but when I’m trying to quantify how much energy something uses at home I multiply how many watts it uses by now many hours it’s running. Divide that by 1000 for kilowatt-hours, and multiply by $.11 to know the cost to do it at home. If I need to do a multiplication/division of 3.6 million when nobody else is, something’s not right.

Similarly, a meter is a standard unit for length, but we don’t use it when measuring the distance to different galaxies because light-years are more practical at that scale. If you start using meters you’d get some funny looks, just as I’m feeling for joules instead of kilowatt-hours. But you know, “almost a kilowatt-hour” makes for a pretty boring headline.

Ok, but when it comes to electrical energy nobody uses “watt seconds” in the real world. Devices use hundreds of watts, and run for minutes and hours. Dividing by 3.6 million isn’t exactly easy mental math to get the unit (kWh) we all see on our electric bills.

Thank you for the conversion. We have a common unit for electrical energy already, and megajoules is not it. Trying to make it sound like a bigger number by changing the unit only muddies the waters and honestly makes me slightly less sympathetic to the issue.

To whose detriment?

Ehhh, I kinda get it. I like humanity; it’s pretty neat. I don’t like slurs denigrating certain groups of humans. I don’t like AI being pushed to replace human things and being personified in its own way. This is one of the rare times that a slur is used against a non-human AND was simply declared to be intended as a slur from the beginning, rather than having some history driving it.

To your point about the motivation being important: what of the motivation do you see as a problem? I see a resistance to AI replacing important characteristics of humanity. That’s a pretty good one, I’d say.

My understanding is that it was a word created to have a similar usage/meaning to the n-word, but towards not-actually-sentient computers. It was never used against any class of people, to my knowledge.