HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the “obscene energy demands of AI” with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm???
Maybe it’s just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what’s arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.
The pro-AI comments here remind me of possibly the worst opinion I’ve heard about fossil fuels, which was that we should burn them all now as fast as possible to develop newer technologies to magically solve all the problems generated from burning all the fossil fuels.
Exchange presented without comment:
My prediction: the advance of tech by AI will far surpasse what it consume in energy.
To look at the energy consumption of current model is extremely short sighted. If AI create a new material, a new solar cell, advance fusion reactor is all of humanity that jump forward.
Furthermore new generation of AI accelerators and new algorithms will improve efficiency by order of magnitute, it’s still early days.
For every good thing, come up with a bad.
The material created will be a better poison/virus. The algorithm to keep the fusion tokamak from going boom will be at best 99% correct. The new solar cell? More exotic materials required than the current.
Blind optimism is a vice we cannot afford.
The post you’re responding to doesn’t argue from blind optimism, it argued a reasonably-expected gain in net beneficial effects.
Amazing how they just assume that this new future AI will actually work. Like there were not several AI winters.
or that the existing AI works. Some of the worst social damage is from AI systems deployed in the wild that don’t even do their fucking job properly in the first place, let alone doing it evilly. (Many deployments are both evil and incompetent.)
