Here in the USA, you have to be afraid for your job these days. Layoffs are rampant everywhere due to outsourcing, and now we have AI on the horizon promising to make things more efficient, but we really know what it is actually going to be used for. They want automate out everything. People packaging up goods for shipping, white collar jobs like analytics, business intelligence, customer service, chat support. Any sort of job that takes a low or moderate amount of effort or intellectual ability is threatened by AI. But once AI takes all these jobs away and shrinks the amount of labor required, what are all these people going to do for work? It’s not like you can train someone who’s a business intelligence engineer easily to go do something else like HVAC, or be a nurse. So you have the entire tech industry basically folding in on itself trying to win the rat race and get the few remaining jobs left over…
But it should be pretty obvious that you can’t run an entire society with no jobs. Because then people can’t buy groceries, groceries don’t sell so grocery stores start hurting and then they can’t afford to employ cashiers and stockers, and the entire thing starts crumbling. This is the future of AI, basically. The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don’t have jobs and no income, not able to survive…
Like, how long until we realize how detrimental AI is to society? 10 years? 15?
The whole planet is threatened by AI. If you look at the amount of energy needed not only to power the infrastructure, but the energy needed to create the infrastructure, and compare it to the work produced, and the energy needed for humans to produce equivalent work, it’s totally fucked and dumb as hell
Edit: to elaborate, there was this commercial for a Google Pixel I saw, people in group chat talking about a football game, person says “create an image of football gloves made out of butter”. .08kWh later that image gets posted in chat for a chuckle. Dude, just say “gloves made of butter? smdh” Lady laying in bed talking to a glorified chatbot, just hop on Lemmy or reconnect with an old friend and save .16kWh. These are the most common use cases for AI, basically finessing a prompt a dozen times to make a Shrek and Garlfield comic that winds up in some Facebook group with 9 likes. Multiply those figures a couple million times tho and it’s like holy shit. We somehow went from extremely low-bandwidth words to high bandwidth Youtube and Tiktok to the messiest bullshit humans have ever invented, to do things we could easily do with characters on a keyboard
Energy demands are only going to increase as we replace gas with electric alternatives. The problem you’re pointing to is an issue with the current infrastructure.
Infrastructure in this case refers to the data centers and LLMs. It takes hundreds of megawatt hours to train a single current-gen LLM and who knows how many gigawatts of energy are being consumed by the sum of LLMs at any given point but it likely dwarfs the sum of all energy spent training LLMs.
But then there’s the energy involved in producing those cards, shipping those cards, the data centers themselves.
It wouldn’t be preposterous to suggest that the sum of energy spent at any given time on generative AI is enough to power New York City. Might even be well more than
No, in this case I’m referring to the electric grid and what powers it.
Yeah and the problem I’m pointing to has nothing to with electrical infrastructure and instead the sheer amount of energy wasted on bullshit.
You could have fantastic electrical infrastructure but if people are consuming literal gigawatt hours and boiling municipal water dry making Garfield and Shrek comics, that’s the problem. Where does this energy come from? How is the copious amount of heat dealth with? Those are the corollaries
It’s seriously the biggest waste of energy in human existence and it’s staring at you right in the face. Gotta be blind to miss it