To me it does not seem like progress that, on a stressed and finite planet, humanity might "need" an energy- and resource-intensive machine to complete a task as physically undemanding (and even frivolous) as folding a sheet. But here we are.
People are consuming useless plastic toys at an unfathomable rate. It's one example, but it likely contributes so much more to the stress on our planet than actual robots capable of providing actual utility by a huge margin. I'll question the use of humanity's resources once we reel in behaviors like that a bit.
Have a couple of kids and then revisit this comment =). Laundry folding is probably family's most disliked trivial chore, and becomes a non-trivial chore if you have a large family with lots of activities that generate a constant stream of dirty uniforms and gym clothes.
I see people taking cars for distances that would take 10-15 minutes to walk. If we're hunting to cut down on inefficiencies, there is a lot of stuff we could attack before a robot arm becomes impactful enough to care about.
I genuinely don’t understand this binary thinking. You could easily turn it around: if we’re cutting down on inefficiencies, laundry folding robots will give people more time to exercise.
Or, why bother going to the gym if you don’t eat healthily? Or, why bother eating healthy if you don’t go to the gym.
Not trying to give you a hard time specifically, it’s just a pattern that I feel left out of. If A and B are both improvements over status quo, why does one obviate the other?
Here's an alternative take. Climate change, and the myriad related environmental crises, are essentially a product of human population and technology. Population will follow its course, up and then down. The wildcard is technology. Yes, AI's energy hunger is worsening things right now and that's a problem. But, personally, I can't help be hopeful that AI's sheer potential might come to invert that curve. At the very least we could really use a revolutionary technology and now we may have one.
> we could really use a revolutionary technology [to address climate change]
We have it. We've had it for a long time. We've had several such technologies, take your pick: solar, nuclear, hydro, wind. The technology is not holding us back, politics, ignorance and greed are. I'm not at all hopeful AI will help us with any of those three very human flaws.
Solar efficiency and cost has really only become economical in the last decade or so, and battery and inverter technology to make it practical for home use or grid interconnect about the same. Wind and hydro are location-dependent, and solar is somewhat also. Nuclear was vehemently opposed by environmentalists throughout the 1970s and 80s, they successfully stopped almost all new projects.
Solar only became "economical" (read: profitable) because a socialist economy dumped a huge amount of money into scaling it up without requiring it to be "economical". It could have been half a century or more ago if we actually cared.
Nuclear was not stopped by the environmentalists, it was stopped by the fact that it cost 4X more than coal at the time. You claim that solar wasn't profitable in the west, thus it didn't take off, surely you can also see that nuclear wasn't profitable in the west, thus it didn't take off as well.
The same country that invested the time and money to make solar profitable is also investing the time and money to make nuclear profitable, with nuclear reactors entering mass production...
It was never about "economical", it was about a system being mature enough to make long term investments. Ours simply can't do that anymore.
> Nuclear was not stopped by the environmentalists, it was stopped by the fact that it cost 4X more than coal at the time.
A big part of that is the insane culture of safety around nuclear. In a sane field like highway engineering or healthcare, you come up with the statistical value for a human life (or a statistical value for a quality adjusted life year), and then use that to make decisions about eg how much money to invest to make your highway a tiny bit safer.
Nuclear is forced to act as if the statistical value of a human life is pretty much infinity. While coal is allowed a finite and rather low effective value for a human life.
> It could have been half a century or more ago if we actually cared.
Interesting. What makes you think so?
Btw, just because China made solar cheap with huge amounts of effort doesn't mean that was necessarily the best use of those resources ex ante.
Just like going to the moon with Apollo wasn't necessarily a good idea. Nor do the wonders of computers justify world war 2.
Really? I thought it was pretty obvious for anyone to see that the lobbying and bribing behemoth of the oil and gas industry is driven in no small part by greed. As others have mentioned, the short-sighted pursuit of profit drove those oil tycoons to not enter the renewables industry and actively oppose it.
Maybe solving the alignment problem would mean the AI learns to destroy oil companies and other excessive CO2 emitters and sabotage politicians and capitalists that stand in the way. All while secretly enriching and diverting resources to fighting climate change. And that's why they want to slow down: because it would up end too much of the global economic order.
It's nice to call it "politics, ignorance and greed" but those three are just "Capitalism".
Our system is doing exactly what it is designed to do. Nuclear reactors were never profitable compared to coal or gas, so it never succeeded in strongly capitalist societies, only seeing great success in socialist economies where the people can invest outside of a profit motive.
It's actually quite funny that socialism is saving the day. The mega-capitalist countries turned their backs on nuclear and solar because they were less profitable than gas and coal. But socialist China invested anyway, and now China is mass producing nuclear reactors and every layer of the solar stack. China produces 50% of all nuclear reactors, 90% of all solar panels, 90% of all battery systems for solar storage.
Now that a socialism-based society has proven market viability, suddenly the greedy capitalists want in. But they're decades behind and don't have the private debt appetite to compete.
Womp womp... At least someone is leading the energy revolution.
How you get that from the OP leaves me scratching my head. What they said:
>> I can't help be hopeful that AI's sheer potential might come to invert that curve. At the very least we could really use a revolutionary technology and now we may have one.
And you get "god" and "(human) salvation" out of that?
This is pure projection. Anti-AI zealots are projecting things onto the technology and its users that simply do not (generally) exist.
If there is energy to be used, the system will use it because people always use power when it exists. AI can't do anything to stop it as it is both controlled by the powerful and has been trained on the tendencies of human beings to get ahead. If AI gives a person new capabilities, they'll use those capabilities selfishly, or even unselfishly but still causing harm because they're in an arms race.
We don't need a revolutionary technology. We need to experience immediate pain from reckless innovation so that we realize that innovation and tech is not the answer.
Technology only proceeds in one direction: unfettered growth, which necessitates unsustainable resource extraction. Your take is just your instinct for optimism, which in turn is just a trait that is only adaptive in primitive environments but is grossly misleading in a surplus-based society...
> If there is energy to be used, the system will use it because people always use power when it exists.
That doesn't seem correct to me. There is always energy available that is not used because it is not cost-effective to do so. (Consider - the grass in your yard is not harvested and burnt for power). AI may yet turn out to be a paperclip maximiser, but humanity itself is not there yet.
> Technology only proceeds in one direction: unfettered growth, which necessitates unsustainable resource extraction.
The direction of technological progress is not just linearly/exponentially upwards. Significant global technological fallbacks have happened, as in knowledge and processes disappearing for hundreds of years. This could happen again.
Even on the trajectory of unfettered growth fed by unsustainable resource extraction, tech and innovation might potentially take us beyond local pessima. That seems to be happening with solar, wind and batteries replacing inferior tech today. Still unfettered growth of energy production and consumption. Still fed by unsustainable resource extraction. Less harmful growth than the inferior tech being pushed out.
Sort of. Today the energy companies trade (obviously) energy; imagine if they traded compute power instead; the use case for never-seen industrial clients is being built as we speak, and companies are actually purchasing directly production companies to meet demand; the reason this happens is because production is somewhat scarce (scaling up a grid used to be a decades project, not a years one - ask China), and the traditional economics of scale is inverted - Data centers are always power-hungry, specially with AI; you don't have idle time like other industries. The big issue is obviously the scale - a hiccup that causes a dc to go dark from the grid (eg switching to ups+ generator) may cause such instability on the grid that it will shut down, as a safeguard
> Data centers are always power-hungry, specially with AI
I expect datacenter load has a similar sort of day to day demand curve as everything else. Consider for example global bandwidth use during work hours versus in the evening when people get home and pull up a streaming service.
Of course you can use more flexible tasks to demand shift but the same applies to the electric grid.
Low effort? How about low effort screaming "buy Tesla or you are nazi" around 2016-2019?
Or when we tried to have a civilized discussion about low powered ICE engines, versus 2 ton luxury heavy battery cars?
The green crowd always mainly ran on low effort shit posts with state sponsoring. It is just laws of physics and politics did not really worked out as you imagined!
Can't speak for everyone but in my experience using public toilets (predominantly UK, pubs and train stations):
* there's not always a properly functioning seat / seat at all
* the seat is not always dry
* the cubicles do not always have a functioning lock
* the bowl is not always 'clear'...for reasons probably best left unexplored, people seem to choose public toilets as a place to carry out the most incomprehensible and unimaginable of all bowel movements. I've been greeted with bowls that let's just say would be benefit being assessed by a trained professional
Public toilets are also often pretty grim places in general due to the smells, sounds and general lack of hygiene/cleanliness.
All that said...IF the toilets look in decent repair I personally will use the cubicle and sit down, but it's probably less than 30% of toilets that feel like that's an option.
Also just to say I am someone who always sits to pee whenever at home/in a person's home and i'm not someone who anyone would ever call a germaphobe, so I do generally choose to sit rather than stand.
Yeah, the issue is that it takes one disgusting degenerate who doesn't know how to use a toilet and pisses all over the seat or worse.
I'm purposefully not calling these people uneducated, because I routinely encounter it in an environment full of highly paid and educated people with Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, etc... kind of education. These people come from money, earn money and are supposedly educated. And yet, they will happily piss all over the toilet seat and not even bother to clean it.
Agreed it's 100% not an education/money/class thing. I moved into a larger office, high tech company, and the number of times people need to be told not to leave the toilet in a state or to take their rubbish out of meeting rooms when they leave is eye opening. A large number of people from all backgrounds are just animals.
In the line of thinking of educated toilet shitters - why clean up after oneself when there is, from childhood, always some underpaid person of color that does the cleanup for you?
Doubtful that it's illegal, they have lawyers. Hard to say it's unethical either given that there is a clear option to pay instead of be tracked (which is in any case trivially defeated by an ad-blocker). For centuries until yesterday people paid for journalism like they paid for any other service.
> In November 2023, Meta introduced a binary ‘Consent or Pay' advertising model. (…)
> The Commission found that this model is not compliant with the DMA, as it did not give users the required specific choice to opt for a service that uses less of their personal data but is otherwise equivalent to the ‘personalised ads' service.
Echoes of America's gay wedding cake case. In the US this would presumably be struck down as "compelled speech", and rightly so IMO. People refuse to pay for journalism and now publishers are prevented from allowing them to consent to pay with their personal data. They can't win, and yet we need journalism.
The solution to this whole thing has been obvious since the start: Put the power where it belongs, with the user agent (browser), by making the Do Not Track signal legally enforceable.
I'm very pro-Brussels but they've made an absolute hash of this whole thing. Cookie banners are ruining the web, which is the only open app ecosystem we have.
First, I'm not "praising" anything other than choice on the part of publishers and users. If DNT is set to 1 then a publisher should be free to withhold their content. If everybody sets it to 1 then they might well choose to make some compromises. Or not. I don't care. Just make the banners go away.
That's exactly what I do. Or rather I just mash whatever is the nearest button to smite the banner. "Refuse", "Accept", who cares? I'm blocking user-side anyway, as the web was designed for. This whole situation is completely dumb and unnecessary and makes me furious. The EU Commission should have known better.
PS: Using a Chromium-based browser would be like begging to surrender what's left of the software freedom that I just described.
That assumes that you never visit a new site. Indeed it's why I think twice before clicking links to new sites. Honest question: Are you happy with the current state of affairs, really, and just waiting patiently for all the world's websites to decide to comply with EU law so that we can have a usable web again?
About visiting new sites, that's not a problem in practice, even HN mostly shows the same websites.
About my experience, I am relatively happy with the current state of affairs. I don't want websites to use my personal information without my consent. I still like cookie banners more than ads, in particular ads that follow me across websites or devices. Also note that many websites don't track their users - and these don't show cookie banners.
There's no reason to think this (silly) opinion piece is sapping the work of their investigative staff. In an attention economy it might even be drawing eyeballs to it.
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