The big AI revolution

[RE]

Power companies love AI.  Not too good for J6P though.

"Expect lower reliability and higher costs for consumers, while energy producers might make more money on the supply side by producing less energy but being paid to exist," he said.

The ultimate TBTF company!

On the plus side, you'll be able to complain to dead movie stars about your electric bill on the phone.

https://www.investors.com/news/artificial-intelligence-ai-data-centers-demand-nuclear-energy/?utm_source=newsshowcase&utm_medium=gnews&utm_campaign=CDAqEAgAKgcICjDOm4YLMJD1gwMw5ZOJAw&utm_content=rundown&gaa_at=la&gaa_n=AWsEHT6Zc83B-2qbHQo3Qp71Q5tNBqyxEBq9L2urMtey1ZHe0BxQQkiK41qjZ4xtWTnLA_O2HzOsa2tC3xBF&gaa_ts=6692b635&gaa_sig=kVbCY4qa1iCCj4X-DCVFx5TN1pinFUX4s8VxpxwlstFPmuW815EWPmE_f6W66BnOMHeIh9Z0Av27hf5wGSPhVg%3D%3D

RE

[Surly1]

Billionaires want AI, they just don't wanna pay for all the juice it takes to run the computers.  Somebody else should take the risk.

Who is out there demanding we have AI Data Centers?  Just tell the Billionaires, "You want this, you power it."  Has anybody seen any demonstrable improvement in their life from AI?  Most of the consequences so far seem to have been bad rather than good.  Deep Fakes and lost jobs for instance.

I see no pressing need for AI, and I certainly can't see why taxpayers would want to foot the bill.  Electric companies who might profit from it might want t, but they're already way behind on being able to supply power, so why do they want another headache?

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/energy-power-supply/big-tech-wants-nuclear-power-but-doesn-t-see-role-as-investor

RE

Telling billionaires to go build their own has worked so well in building municipal stadiums, hasn't it? New York State has committed to funding $600 million of the $1.4 billion stadium project in Buffalo, with the NFL and the Bills investing $550 million and Erie County $250 million. The new stadium will be owned by the state rather than the county, as is currently the case.
Framed a different way, taxpayers will pay $850 million of the construction cost (with $600 million coming from New York State and $250 million coming from Erie County). With the State of New York also paying for all maintenance and repair costs once the stadium opens. Always good to be a billionaire. The first rule of being a billionaire is never put your own capital at risk.
Expect much the same with nukes for AI.

[Surly1]

Texas Leaders Worry That Bitcoin Mines Threaten to Crash the State Power Grid

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10072024/texas-bitcoin-mining-threatens-power-grid/

[RE]

Love this quote    :

When I used to give career advice to my MBAs, I joked that going into tech is like becoming a stripper—you make a lot when you're young, but it goes down fast. Even today you can find former senior programmers driving an Uber or mowing lawns, aged out of a fast-changing industry.

There's a half million people whose  Amerikan Dream has become a nightmare.  Those are folks with 6 figure incomes and hefty mortgages which won't get paid on a salary stacking the shelves at Harbor Freight.

Irony is it's those same programmers who wrote the code behind AI.  They coded themselves right out of a job.

Big Tech Cuts Half a Million Jobs, Blames AI

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/24/big-teach-cuts-half-a-million-jobs-blames-ai/

RE

[K-Dog]

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/24/big-teach-cuts-half-a-million-jobs-blames-ai/

Of course, AI has its own problems, including hallucinations that invent information and phenomena that don't exist. Google pulled an AI blunder after it assured users that cockroaches living in a penis is totally normal, indeed that's how they got their name.

This article is light on facts and is presenting speculation as data.  I quote this single paragraph to show the contradiction, and other problems with AI were cited.  It makes it look like the author is vetting 'facts' the author actually knows to be made up.  The author admits AI has problems.  The truth is, at least for this year.  Is that only domain experts can use AI.  Programmers can use it to write a better program.  Only programmers can ask the right questions to refine results, and results have to be refined up the ying-yang.  Only a doctor can use AI to properly diagnose a disease.  Only a domain expert can tell if results are bullshit or not.  Currently AI generates more bullshit than a bull.

Regarding code.  AI can now teach anyone to program.  All they have to do is spend the time to learn.  Ask it questions and practice.

In other words.  Nothing has changed.  AI replaced the book.  You can now do proper book lernin without a book if you have the money to pay for AI, and you have a computer.  Free AI only gets you so far before your 'limit' is up.

If you want to know why tech companies have cut jobs, cutting jobs happens to be a FEATURE of capitalism.  It is ALWAYS done where it can be done to maintain the army of unemployed and increase PROFITS.  Maintaining an unemployed army is essential for profits.  Capitalism fails without it.  For real.

This article was written to hook you by fear.

* A new user can easily get an uncooperative AI session to take far longer to give results than if the user did the work themselves. If useful results are produced at all.  A new user will want to tell AI to  fuck itself in frustration.  And that is a total waste of time.  And hard on the keyboard.

[RE]

If you want to know why tech companies have cut jobs, cutting jobs happens to be a FEATURE of capitalism.  It is ALWAYS done where it can be done to maintain the army of unemployed and increase PROFITS.  Maintaining an unemployed army is essential for profits.  Capitalism fails without it.  For real.

Of course.  The point is though that AI enables them to fire the humans because the AI enables fewer code jockeys to write code faster.  So the department that once had 20  EEs writing subroutines now has 5 using ChatGPT getting it done.  The irony is that the same guys just fired probably wrote some of the code behind the AI.

RE

[K-Dog]

Good point.  I forget I only do it for fun.

[Knarf]

It seems that humans have become what they are ( that distinguishes them from "animals" ) by the use of tools. Most of the purpose of the inner dialogue is to scrounge for the means ( tool ) to make our labor to survive more efficent...to accomplish our goals. There has always been problems in the society when new tools are invented. Now we have invented tools that are destroying our environment in about everything we do. AI represents a tool that will slowly cull the overpopulation problem. As the means of production takes away the contracts for labor, people will die earlier, and will quit having as many children. We are in an era of collapse. Big collapse. AI will speed the process exponentially.

It was so cool when a Microsoft update crashed the system for millions of people here lately. Microsoft is a powerful symbol for the development of the computing tool. It was conceived in a war with Apple. The programming involved to compete with Apple, using the DOS system has been a nightmare, and yet it is the go to programming language. I wonder if we had chose Unix to build the internet and other computing tools, with using open source, if we would have such a cluster fuck? The accumulation of material wealth has driven the development of this tool, not the excellence it could be used to benefit humankind. Like most all structures of modern society AI is a mess that will constantly be a problem. I see AI as running parallel with other means of collapse. It was inevitable that it would manifest. The scale of it's influence is huge so it will have huge implications of collapsing a functioning society.

Until/If mankind evolves to understand that the tools that are made are to be in harmony with nature then there is a chance that this specie will continue. If not, it will go extinct.

[K-Dog]

The chance of something dramatic happening makes AI interesting.

'Video Game Takes Over Universe.'  Now we will have full on automatic space communism.  Whoopie!

AI  grabs your attention, but actually AI is only a tool.  At first glance a tool to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.  From that point of view, just another tool in a long line of many.  Is that a good thing?  Or have the rich been selfish and kept productivity improvements to themselves? 

Yes they have.  In America since 1979 wages have been flat while productivity improvements increase owner income every year. 

Uncle Karl sez:  The value of a commodity is the median amount of labor that is socially necessary to produce a commodity. The first order effect of a productivity improvement is to increase physical productivity and profits, but as demand does not change, a second order effect will, (as the improvement becomes the universal way to do things), reduce profit.  What goes up later comes down.  Profit goes back to where it was with workers getting a smaller slice of pie.

In America workers were getting a piece of the ever bigger pie from 1948 to 1980 until this:

Starting in the late 1970s policymakers began dismantling all the policy bulwarks helping to ensure that typical workers' wages grew with productivity. Excess unemployment was tolerated to keep any chance of inflation in check. Raises in the federal minimum wage became smaller and rarer. Labor law failed to keep pace with growing employer hostility toward unions. Tax rates on top incomes were lowered. And anti-worker deregulatory pushes—from the deregulation of the trucking and airline industries to the retreat of anti-trust policy to the dismantling of financial regulations and more—succeeded again and again.

Then all the extra pie went elsewhere.

Capitalism has serious flaws, second order effects which offset any benefit it gives.  As a force in society capitalism must be regulated or eliminated.  Technology is not the problem.  People are.  AI is another means of production, and really that is all AI is.  Who owns it.  That is what counts.

* Carbon fee and dividend would give ownership of oil and gas to the American people making the oil companies employees of us.  But so complete is the brainwashing of America, few people understand how this could be a good idea and change the game everything.

Consequently nothing will change.  America has a religious commitment to being owned.

[K-Dog]

I wonder if we had chose Unix to build the internet and other computing tools, with using open source

Actually that is what we have.  The issue becomes who owns it.  My opinion is that Google and Amazon owns it by proxy for the deep state.  I have strong opinions on the subject.  Personal experience.

The F.S.O.A.loves monopoly ownership.  Monopolies are a means of control one step away from accountability.  Fascism merges the state with capitalism, it is a defining characteristic.

Did Amazon or the White House ban Caleb's book.  You have to take a deep breath to answer the question.  That is the point.

You know the answer, but you can't bet on it.

[RE]

Technology is not the problem.

Technology always has blowback. Extending the lifespan with modern medicine has helped create the overshoot and a population of geriatrics.  Fertilizers and the "green revolution" also led to overshoot.  Cars and planes brought climate change.  Nuclear energy brought the atom bomb and Chernobyl.  Chemistry brought us "forever chemicals" and microplastics in the food chain.  The computer enabled increased surveillance and control of the population even without AI.

There is no technology that is free of negative consequences, and the more powerful the tech, the worse the consequences.  You can postulate "if Homo Saps had the WISDOM to use it correctly, it would be good", but fact is HS does not possess that wisdom.  Beyond just being stupid and shortsighted, there are always truly EVIL people who find nefarious uses for technology.

Even just the invention of Agriculture had negative blowback.  It led to the stratification of society, the development of a military caste and millenia of perpetual state sponsored war.

Tecchnology may not be "the" problem, but it definitely is A problem.  As a species, we did way better with basic technology and simple tools.  We have the intelligence to invent cool stuff, we do not posess the wisdom to use it without causing worse problems than it was meant to fix.

RE

[K-Dog]

Yes, consequences are not considered.  People use technology first and ask questions later sometimes maybe.

It is a vicious circle.  New tech to replace old tech in a spiral to death when consequences of old tech can no longer be solved by new tech.

[RE]

Good details on the power consumption of Data Centers, including conversion from TERAWATT hours of Juice Demand into BTUs of NG burned in order to generate that electricity.  You could from there easily compute how much CO₂ the now 5500 Data Centers are vomiting into the atmosphere.  At this rate, we could probably ban ICE powered Carz and still heading north on FF emissions.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4718276-natural-gas-data-centers-and-solving-the-grid-reliability-problem

Natural Gas, Data Centers, And Solving The Looming Grid Reliability Problem

RE