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late stage capitalism news , nothing new under the sun.
THE MORE YOU BUY
THE MORE YOU SAVE
Boiling the oceans for deepfake porn, scamcoins and worse web search.
Believe it or not, peak humanity.
It’s all downhill from hereThe Matrix was such a nice movie. In 2000 they already had Linux, PlayStation, ICQ, filesharing, old Star Wars (with a good chunk of the classical EU) and even the Phantom Menace (haters gonna hate), and the first 3 Harry Potter books. And WarCraft II, and X-Wing Alliance, and I’m lazy to go on with this
I think we passed the peak a few years ago. But yeah, peak from here on out.
Innovation is a scam, it breeds endless bullshit we keep buying and talking about like 10 year olds with their latest gimmick.
Look, they replaced this button with A TOUCHSCREEN!
Look! This artficial face has PORES NOW!
LOOK! This coffee machine costs 2000$ now and uses PROPRIATARY SUPEREXPENSIVE CAPSULES!!
We need progress, which is harder to do because it takes a paradigm shift on an Individual and social level. It’s much less gadgety.You’re not wrong. We’ve reached a point, technologically, where there is little-to-no true innovation left… and what I mean by that is that everything is now built on incredible amounts of work by others who came before. “Standing on the shoulders of giants”, as it were. And yet we have a corrupt “patent” system that is exclusively used to steal the work of those giants while at the same time depriving all of humanity of true progress. And why? So that a handful of very rich people can get even more rich.
Exactly, innovations no longer help to satisfy real basic needs, they are used to create new, artificial needs. Always new toys that make us feel like we’re making progress.
That’s not true, but to have planned “innovation” bring profit you need to impede real progress. Cause real progress disrupts such plans.
Improvement is not a scam.
Innovation is a scam created by representing change as improvement when it isn’t.
And every time change gets replaced with innovation, it’s connected to totalitarian\fascist tendencies, because it makes easier to sell societal change which is clearly not improvement.
A person who seriously affected my life advised “Homo Ludens” by Johan Huizinga, not sure whether because of the part of it about fascism in the 30s.
We need progress, which is harder to do because it takes a paradigm shift on an Individual and social level.
Sometimes it just takes a marginal improvement to the quality of the engineering. But these “what if manual labor but fascade of robots!” gimmicks aren’t improvements in engineering. They’re an effort to cut corners on quality in pursuit of a higher profit margin.
Even setting aside you believe these aren’t just a line up of mechanical turks controlled from a sweetshop in the Philippines, their work product isn’t anything approaching good. Its just cheap.
Tech is neither good nor bad, but control of tech is a major issue.
The existing capitalist control of tech is bad.
Agreed! And that’s where the problem lies. It’s not tech so much as our existing power structures.
Innovatin is good if it results in clean water, meds, housing, safe food and goods and services.
It’s bad if it means: the most profit for useless shit that people only buy because advertisment made them believe they need it.
Capitalism is a tool. Please let’s grow a pair and stop letting it decide how it will be used. It’s like pulling the trigger on an ak47 without holding it tight. Do we expect the weapon to know where to shot?
Capitalism is a tool that wants to maximize its profits. Unfortunately it discovered that changing the politics and laws is an easy way to do that, even if it’s bad for the people.
Capitalism is per definition not bound to ethics or moral. We need to set rules, even if big corporations made us to believe we shouldn’t.
We need to set rules, even if big corporations made us to believe we shouldn’t.
That’s a strawman, possibly aimed at libertarians. Like everyone else, corps want to set rules which benefit them.
Fun fact the first Mr coffee cost 300 dollars in 1971, which would be more than 2000 dollars today
I remember hearing this argument before…about the Internet. Glad that fad went away.
As it has always been, these technologies are being used to push us forward by teams of underpaid unnamed researchers with no interest in profit. Meanwhile you focus on the scammers and capitalists and unload your wallets to them, all while complaining about the lack of progress as measured by the products you see in advertisements.
Luckily, when you get that cancer diagnosis or your child is born with some rare disease, that progress will attend to your needs despite your ignorance if it.
Exactly. OP is mad at alienation, not at progress. In a different, less stupid world these labor saving devices would actually be great, leading to a better quality of life for everyone, and getting a really awesome coffee maker. But the people making the decisions aren’t the consumers or the researchers.
You misunderstood me. I have nothing against progress. Medical progress is great! But what is often sold to us as innovation is not progress but just more nonsense that only pretends to get us further.
So if each GPU takes 1,800W, isn’t that the equivalent of what a handheld hair dryer consumes?
Yes, and you leave it on all day at full blast. And you have a dedicated building where there’s thousands of them doing the same.
All to take away jobs and break the internet.
It’s more than your average space heater.
And that energy doesn’t just go away after computing. You’ll have the equivalent of an average space heater of heat coming out of your computer. It’d be awesome to compute with heating energy when needed, but when you need AC it’s going to be a bitch.
Yes, but they are not gaming devices. They are meant to efficiently compute things. When used for that purpose they use little energy compared to other devices doing the same thing.
Holy crap, I thought I hated AI and I was uncertain. Now I’m sure I hate AI
My blood runs cold! My dignity has just been sold. nVidia is the centerfold.
Elysium incoming
But without even just the cool space station to just stare at longingly…
The article is really interesting and all your comments too.
For now I have a negative bias towards AI as I only see its downsides, but I can see that not everyone thinks like me and it’s great to share knowledge and understanding.
According to some people (who have never programmed and don’t know what AI can do), we will all be able to retire with a lot of money and we’ll all write poetry and become painters or make music and have fun. It’s not realistic and it won’t happen.
The only positive thing that AI can do is detect bad stuff in the human body before a surgery as long as it’s validated by a professional. I could throw everything else in the trash as it’s meant to replace humans forever.
Im starting to wonder if the Butlerian Jihad isn’t a good idea after all.
You still need a massive fleet of these to train those multi-billion parameter models.
On the invocation side, if you have a cloud SaaS service like ChatGPT, hosted Anthropic, or AWS Bedrock, these could answer questions quickly. But they cost a lot to operate at scale. I have a feeling the bean-counters are going to slow down the crazy overspending.
We’re heading into a world where edge computing is more cost and energy efficient to operate. It’s also more privacy-friendly. I’m more enthused about a running these models on our phones and in-home devices. There, the race will be for TOPS vs power savings.
A lot of the “elites” (OpenAI board, Thiel, Andreessen, etc) are on the effective-accelerationism grift now. The idea is to disregard all negative effects of pursuing technological “progress,” because techno-capitalism will solve all problems. They support burning fossil fuels as fast as possible because that will enable “progress,” which will solve climate change (through geoengineering, presumably). I’ve seen some accelerationists write that it would be ok if AI destroys humanity, because it would be the next evolution of “intelligence.” I dunno if they’ve fallen for their own grift or not, but it’s obviously a very convenient belief for them.
Effective-accelerationism was first coined by Nick Land, who appears to be some kind of fascist.
The problem with this approach is that progress here is viewed like a brick wall you build.
You don’t get progress from just burning a lot of wood in 1400s. You can get it if that wood is burnt with the goal of, I dunno, making better metal or bricks for some specific mechanism.
Same with our time, how can they expect solutions of problems to be found when they don’t understand what they are trying to find?
It’s like a cargo cult - “white people had this thing and it could fly and drop cargo, so we must reproduce its shape and we’ll be rich”, only in this case it’s even dumber - nobody has seen the things they are trying to reach anywhere outside of space opera series.
What differentiates IT from most other engineering areas is that most of people doing it solve abstract tasks in abstract environments, defined by social and market demand. They are, sadly, simply a grade below real engineers and scientists for that reason alone.
I think the worst part of Huang’s keynote wasn’t that none of this mattered, it’s that I don’t think anyone in Huang’s position is really thinking about any of this at all. I hope they’re not, which at least means it’s possible they can be convinced to change course. The alternative is that they do not care, which is a far darker problem for the world.
well yeah… they just don’t care, after all the climate crisis is somebody else’s problem… and what really matters is that the line goes up next quarter, mankind’s future be damned
This article is one of the most down-to-earth, realistic observations on technology I’ve ever read. Utterly striking as well.
Go Read This Article.
Agreed, stop scrolling the comments and go read it random reader.
I used to get so excited by tech advances but now I’ve gotten to the point where its still cool and a fascinating application of science… but this stuff is legitimately existential. The author raises great points around it.
Come on. Stop reading the comments. Go check the article.
This ironically(?) made me go read it. Normally I don’t.
Thank you.
This article is a regurgitation of every tech article since the microchip. There is literally nothing new here. Tech makes labor obsolete. Tech never considers the ramifications of tech.
These things have been known since the beginning of tech.
The tech that exists so far haven’t had the potential to replace every job on earth, that’s the real difference for me.
haven’t had the potential to replace every job on earth, that’s the real difference for me.
This really doesn’t either tbh. But that’s certainly what they’re selling.
How do you know what the limits of this technology is? How do you know that they couldn’t be able to reach that point in 5-10-20-50-100-1000 years?
Unless you’re thinking of the current iteration of the technology and not its future evolutions.
Its future iterations that are definitely not this?
Sure, I don’t know.
I’d wager we’ll probably reach climate collapse / political crises that throw us off course before a “Westworld-esque” thing is ever possible.
People don’t seem to realize that these tech leaders are all just weaponizing your imagination against you (a.k.a. using a sales technique). GPUs and LLMs aren’t skynet no matter how much people want to project that onto them.
Nvidia cares maybe even less about the outcome than I do, they’ll sell you all the pickaxe you want to buy in the AI gold rush.
What about the climate impact? You didn’t even address that. That’s the worst part of the AI boom, were already way in the red for climate change, and this is going to accelerate the problem rather than slowing or stopping (let alone reversing it)
That’s a very solvable problem though, AI can easily be run off green energy and a lot of the new data centers being built are utilizing it, tons are popping up in Seattle with its abundance of hydro energy. Compare that to meat production or transportation via combustion which have a much harder transition and this seems way less of an existential problem then the author makes it out to be.
Also most of the energy needed is for the training which can be done at any time, so it can be run on off peak hours. It can also absorb surpluses from solar energy in the middle of the day which can put strain on the grid.
This is all assuming it’s done right, which it may not and could exasperate the ditch were already in, but the technology itself isn’t inherently bad.
AI can easily be run off green energy
This is all assuming it’s done right
That right there is the problem. I don’t trust any tech CEO to do the right thing ever, because historically they haven’t. For every single technological advancement since the industrial revolution brought forth by the corporate class, masses of people have had to beat them up and shed blood to get them to stop being assholes for a beat and abuse and murder people a little less.
It doesn’t matter if AI is run on green energy as long as other things are still running on fossil fuels. There is a limit to how fast renewables energy sources are built and if the power consumption of AI eats away all of that growth, then the amount of fossil energy doesn’t change.
All increases in energy consumption are not green because they force something else to run on fossil energy for longer.
We need to deploy solar and wind at a breakneck pace to replace the fossil fuel usage we already have. Why compound that with a whole new source?
Well, ok then haha. You’ve convinced me.
Eh it’s not that great.
One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power.
Fossil fuel-burning plants, whether that’s natural gas, coal, or oil, produce even less. There’s no way to ramp up nuclear capacity in the time it will take to supply these millions of chips, so much, if not all, of that extra power demand is going to come from carbon-emitting sources.
If you ignore the two fastest growing methods of power generation, which coincidentally are also carbon free, cheap and scalable, the future does indeed look bleak. But solar and wind do exist…
The rest is purely a policy rant. Yes, if productivity increases we need some way of distributing the gains from said productivity increase fairly across the population. But jumping to the conclusion that, since this is a challenge to be solved, the increase in productivity is bad, is just stupid.
All these issues are valid and need solving but I’m kind of tired of people implying we shouldn’t do certain work because of efficiency.
And tech gets all the scrutiny for some reason (it’s transparency?). I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen an article on industrial machine efficiency and how we should just stop producing whatever.
What we really need to do is find ways to improve efficiency on all work while moving towards carbon neutrality. All work is valid.
If I want to compute pi for no reason or drive to the Grand Canyon for lunch, I should be able to do so.
If I want to compute pi for no reason or drive to the Grand Canyon for lunch, I should be able to do so.
Are you able to explain why?
I’m sure I won’t be very eloquent about it but simply, liberty. Freedom of compute is on par with freedom of thought and expression.
Freedom of travel is something else, but I’m sure most people that don’t like being imprisoned can appreciate.
Work (as in energy expenditure) enables these freedoms and I think it’s important not to stifle that whenever possible.
“Hey fucker, your right to swing your fist ends where it collides with someone else’s face”
^ Dont make me tap the sign
Computing and leisure travel aren’t human rights, while freedoms of thought and expression are.
I just disagree. Computing is expression and in my opinion freedom of travel should be a human right.
Even if you add “leisure” to it to bolster your argument.
Well you are free to travel with your feet, because in 50 years from now I am not so sure you’ll be able to do it with a plane anymore.
This would be fine if there were no externalities.
Disagree that all work is valid. That only makes sense in a world with no resource constraints
Efficiency??
This is about the total amount of emissions, not the emissions-per-unit-of-compute (or whatever).
Not sure what you’re getting at. Increased system efficiency lowers total emissions or at least increases work capacity.
Yeah, but no https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
The climate doesn’t give a toss how much value for shareholders is generated, all that matters is the total amount of emissions.
Unless you’re looking to get rid of half of humanity and go back to living like the Amish I don’t think we can put that genie back in the bottle.
What we can do is work on how energy is generated and increase efficiency. And this has nothing to do with shareholders.
lol at tech’s transparency. You have an availability heuristic issue with your thought process. Every other industry has similar critiques. Your media diet is leading you to false conclusions.
We’re literally in a technology community followed by tons of industry outsiders, of which there is a similar one on every other similar aggregation site. I don’t see any of that for things like plastics manufacturers, furniture makers, or miners. So yeah, I’d say transparency for the general public tends to be higher in tech than most other industries.
Anyone with experience in corporate operations will tell you the ROI on process changes is dramatically higher than technology. People invent so many stupid and dangerous ways to “improve” their work area. The worst part is that it just takes a little orchestration to understand their needs and use that creativity to everyone’s benefit.
