| ▲ | mbgerring 3 hours ago | |
Physics allows this, and actually taking advantage of it requires billions of dollars of unprecedented infrastructure buildout that is already destabilizing the power grid. The only reason that infrastructure buildout is happening at all is the ideological capture of a small handful of obscenely wealthy people, who are fueling this buildout by spreading the extreme paranoia you’re echoing here. I do not understand why no one else can see the circularity of this reasoning. There is nothing inevitable about tying up all of this productive capital in the pursuit of AI. There are many, many other projects requiring similar capital and human effort, with much more obvious payoffs, such as decarbonizing the world’s energy systems. “It’s physically possible to provide abundant electricity without burning fossil fuels” is more provably true than any of the insane science fiction bullshit that undergirds the AI buildout, and yet, the entire clean energy industry is still having to build insane financial Rube Goldberg contraptions to make incremental progress. “Inevitability” is a lie, period. This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow. | ||
| ▲ | ctoth 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | |
> This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow. So, the Baruch Plan? The Manhattan Project was $~2B in 1945 dollars, and a national-scale industrial mobilization. Now North Korea has the bomb. That's with nuclear material, which doesn't get easier and easier and easier to work with every year. Compare to the price to train GPT-2 in 2019 ($43,000), and in 2026 ($73) [0]. | ||