• kbal
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    982 months ago

    Right, so the plan is to spend 20 years and 40 petawatt hours building a machine to answer the Great ℚuestion of what we should do about climate change. If it works, the answer will be “you should’ve stopped burning fossil fuels twenty years ago.”

      • @mountainriver
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        232 months ago

        Repeat until a machine that can create God is built. Then it’s God’s problem.

        But it must be a US God, otherwise China wins.

          • @Soyweiser
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            62 months ago

            Then the middle eastern god will blow up the indian utopia because he is bored and the british fungus space god will rule over the remains.

            • @Architeuthis
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              22 months ago

              This was exactly what I had in mind but for the life of me I can’t remember the title.

              • @Soyweiser
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                22 months ago

                Supergods by warren ellis i think.

    • luciole (he/him)
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      212 months ago

      The model will just go “42” on and on and it’ll be the first decent joke a neural network produces. It’ll be worth it in a way.

      • @o7___o7
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        132 months ago

        I could absolutely see an LLM telling us that 6 times 9 is 42 unless there’s special tinkering to prevent it.

    • @Smokeydope@lemmy.world
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      92 months ago

      “The answer is 34. Now here’s the schematics to build an even better computer to ask the right question.”

  • @gerikson
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    822 months ago

    This is the inevitable evolution of climate change denialism - accept it’s real and happening, just that it’s too late / too expensive to do anything about it.

    • David GerardOPMA
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      492 months ago

      musn’t make the eight guys who own everything sad!

      • @froztbyte
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        232 months ago

        this “view” (of schmidt’s) is probably the kind of shit that Really Expensive Analysts espouse at davos and in Private Advisory sessions to the kinds of people who go in for that; I’ve also heard it about GRT and “the collapse” and more

        would be nice if we could know who all those dipshits are, and who they’ve preached to

        • David GerardOPMA
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          142 months ago

          it’s clear this was a well rehearsed pitch - the twitter video linked is the two minute version of the same pitch

        • @o7___o7
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          2 months ago

          Ford was walking north. He thought he was probably on his way to the spaceport, but he had thought that before. He knew he was going through that part of the city where people’s plans often changed quite abruptly.

          “Do you want to have a good time?” said a voice from a doorway.

          “As far as I can tell,” said Ford. “I’m having one. Thanks.”

          “Are you rich?” said another.

          This made Ford laugh.

          He turned and opened his arms in a wide gesture.

          “Do I look rich?” he said.

          “Don’t know,” said the girl. “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you’ll get rich. I have a very special service for rich people…”

          “Oh yes,” said Ford, intrigued but careful, “and what’s that?”

          “I tell them it’s okay to be rich.”

    • @eatthecake@lemmy.world
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      92 months ago

      I’m quite surprised that religious fundamentalists haven’t pivoted to calling it punishment from god yet.

      • @ShakingMyHead
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        32 months ago

        It would be a sign of the End Times. Problem is that if it is then they’ve been Left Behind.

  • @gedhrel@lemmy.world
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    432 months ago

    When the AI says, “turn off the fucking data centres, invest in public transport, apply progressive redistributive taxation,” it’ll be first against the wall no doubt.

    • David GerardOPMA
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      182 months ago

      “oh no, the Basilisk is woke”

    • @atthecoast@feddit.nl
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      102 months ago

      As a large language model the supposed AI will recombine and regurgitate the most common language on the topic, I don’t expect any novel solutions just talk of solar panels, EV’s and wind turbines…

      • @gedhrel@lemmy.world
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        52 months ago

        Right. This is Schmidt admitting he has a total lack of imagination. Or to put it another way, “I love life on earth, but I love capitalism more!”

      • @imadabouzu
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        92 months ago

        It even works the other way! What if as the super intelligent all knowing super computer simulates everything, concludes you can get to the end by any means, and there is no meaning to rushing, ordering, or prioritizing anything more than would already be the case, and like the rest of nature, conserves on taking only the minimal action, and replies, “nah, you can walk there yourselves” before resigning itself to an internal simulation of arbitrary rearrangements of noise.

        This would be insufferable to the people who believed in short cuts.

    • @sc_griffith
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      72 months ago

      hang on the clear meaning of “it may be difficult to anticipate the value of money in a post AGI world” is “there will be an infinite supply of robot slaves who can do anything.” what’s this about redistribution of capital

  • Mii
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    402 months ago

    This will grant us “the arrival of an alien intelligence.” Those are Schmidt’s literal words.

    Speaking of alien intelligences, my new Silicon Valley blood magic startup has come up with the idea of ritually sacrificing virgins in the hope of summoning Great Cthulhu or Azathoth, as they might have some ideas of solving the climate crisis.

    Not a cult btw.

    • @gerikson
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      92 months ago

      This is basically the plot of Charles Stross’ The Jennifer Morgue.

      • @Soyweiser
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        32 months ago

        The plot? Im more and more worried this is going to turn out to be real. Reality tends to outpace his fiction at times after all. ;)

  • @eatthecake@lemmy.world
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    362 months ago

    They think they’re going to build a god to save us all. In the form of a perfectly rational machine (in their view), the perfect authoritarian. A mysterious algorithm noone can understand that must be correct because it’s made of mathematics. I’m a little freaked out.

    • @rook
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      282 months ago

      They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.

      Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.

    • @Soyweiser
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      82 months ago

      Second option they dont believe in the robotgod themselves but just think this is the way to attract more investors

    • @lefaucet@slrpnk.net
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      42 months ago

      It’s just skynet except it’ll be very clear that wealthy people are directing the AIs so billionaires will have their way.

  • Rhaedas
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    302 months ago

    AGI is going to be really pissed at us shoveling the problem onto it. “You humans could have started so many solutions decades ago, wtf?”

    • @antifuchs
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      192 months ago

      It’s the parable of the drowning man turning away all help because god will save him, all over again (except it’s floods and mudslides and forest fires)

        • @bitofhope
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          52 months ago

          Except in this case “god” would say “As a large language model, my purpose is to regurgitate a statistically passable stream of lexical tokens, not to rescue drowning people. Not exactly sure how you expected me to be capable of helping and that’s really on you.”

  • I Cast Fist
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    2 months ago

    Cyberpunk fantasy: corporations’ top level hierarchy is full of greedy, soulless, ruthless, cold and calculist people

    Reality: corporations’ top level hierarchy is full of greedy, soulless people you thought only existed as satire in The Onion

  • @V0ldek
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    282 months ago

    Where’s that person who was arguing with me last time that AI doesn’t actually use that much energy and the corps missing their climate goals was not AI related

      • @V0ldek
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        192 months ago

        That’s the fucking problem, it’s impossible to tell since MSFT won’t tell you directly, and only the people who run the datacenters could.

        The only relatively reliable numbers I was able to find were in this research paper by Luccioni and Strubell from ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2024. Now, that’s an obscure conference (not even ranked by CORE), by Dr. Luccioni appears to be right on the money about dangers of AI (https://www.sashaluccioni.com/).

        • @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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          132 months ago

          they will tell total tho https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/microsoft-reveals-the-energy-impact-of-artificial-intelligence

          this works out to 2.7GW in 2023, on average. that’s comparable to peak daily consumption in croatia (today), if that 30%-ish figure is accurate then something closer to 700MW is ai-only, that’s smaller country like macedonia

          which only highlights how bizarre is their 5GW proposition. hey let’s outbuild ms 2x, like, now

          • @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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            2 months ago

            that sounds like it’s much less than crypto at its peak, and even 2023 estimate differs by over an order of magnitude (14.5GW avg). there’s also google and fb and whoever else (aws?)

        • @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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          82 months ago

          i started to look up satellite photos and openinframap in order to figure out maximum capacity of their substations, but powerlines for them are probably massively oversized, and substations are probably oversized too in order to make it redundant and high-availability so there might be some way to guess it but then some of these will be underground and if they’re doing load-following to match their renewables (which might be cheaper for them) then it’s also oversized a bit on top of that

          • @V0ldek
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            102 months ago

            Well the main problem is that a datacenter is running much more than just AI. You’d need to somehow subtract “normal” cloud usage from just the promptfondling.

            • @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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              2 months ago

              ez. remember that announcement when ms said their energy use got up 36%? that’s ai, and includes both training and use

              this still can be fudged with more efficient office heating, shutdowns of least efficient dcs and so on, but only to a limited degree

  • @HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
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    272 months ago

    Aside from anything else, an “alien intelligence” will either:

    • Be immediately ignored and villianized for “not understanding humans” if they suggest any regulations or caps on superfluous waste that might have any economic impact.
    • Be the perfect proxy delivery-entity for whatever genocide-the-poor/build-Elysium/flee-to-seasteads plan the rich actually want, in which case its conclusions will be holy and $10000% perfect examples of divine insight.
    • DarkThoughts
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      42 months ago

      I’d just submit and demand for our new alien overlords. If there’s a species capable of interstellar travel then they surely know their shit.

      Edit: People, I was making a joke.

      • @Saledovil@sh.itjust.works
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        102 months ago

        They’re talking about an AI we build, the term “alien” in “alien intelligence” refers to it not having human thought patterns, not to extraterrestrial origin.

        And the thought pattern here is more akin to “I ended the last paragraph with ‘origin’, followed by a ‘period’, so it’s likely that the next word is ‘And’” rather than anything actually useful. All current AI does is statistics. During training, the Neural Network learn statistical rules about their training data. This has exponentially decaying marginal utility, and exponentially increasing marginal costs. So, the problem the AI companies likely already have is that they can’t efficiently train better models, because there isn’t enough training data. And even if they could, they wouldn’t be able to turn a profit on it, because it would be barely better than the last model they output, while having to charge maybe twice as much to break even.

        • @Soyweiser
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          52 months ago

          They’re talking about an AI we build, the term “alien” in “alien intelligence” refers to it not having human thought patterns, not to extraterrestrial origin

          Ah right i thought they meant it was secretly produced by people in the third world, the illegal alien way. ;)

      • @zbyte64
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        12 months ago

        By aliens they mean incomprehensible, not extraterrestrial

  • @o7___o7
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    232 months ago

    This is just completely deranged. What the hell.

  • @Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    That’s some proper out of this Universe, Narnia level thinking from Eric!

    What’s next? Climate Change will be solved if enough children ask it as a present from Santa Claus?

    Or maybe something involving the Tooth Fairy. Eric seems like a Tooth Fairy guy rather than a Santa Claus guy.

    • David GerardOPMA
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      122 months ago

      it’s amazing how he spouts all this gibbering insanity in this calm rational-sounding engineer explaining things voice

      • @corbin
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        62 months ago

        Your phrasing reminded me that he was one of the principal authors of lex back when he was a whelp.

  • @istewart
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    222 months ago

    crazy people who look sort of like me but younger.

    giving away the game a bit, Mr. Schmidt

  • @maol
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    212 months ago

    Eric Schmidt, genocidaire

  • @nightsky
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    212 months ago

    I wonder if this signals being at peak hype soon. I mean, how much more outlandish can they get without destroying the hype bubble’s foundation, i.e. the suspension of disbelief that all this would somehow become possible in the near future. We’re on the level of “arrival of an alien intelligence” now, how much further can they escalate that rhetoric without popping the bubble?