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“OpenAI is pursuing an ambitious plan to construct massive 5-gigawatt (GW) data centers across various locations in the United States. This initiative aims to support the growing demands of artificial intelligence (AI) processing, which requires substantial computational power. At what price to the energy grid do you suppose?”
https://www.ai-supremacy.com/p/note-to-our-energy-sucking-overlords
Growth Death Cult goes full throttle. Tech bros accelerating for extinction.
@gerrymcgovern As far as I'm concerned "generative AI" is the Growth Death Cult incarnate!
Its only possible because of the growth discipline, & is primarily used to further needless growth.
@alcinnz @gerrymcgovern
We are an unusual species. We have invested immense sums studying cancers, and have developed a reasonable understanding of why cancer kills: Its unrestrained growth interferes with the functioning of the body's organs - consuming nutrients needed by other cells, and invading organs, this impeding their ability to function.
And so with this model of unconstrained growth, we happily build an economic system that replicates cancer in the larger world: over-extracting resources, squandering energy, generating waste we cannot get rid of, displacing essential ecosystems with land development and abusive agricultural & forestry practices.
We do it for "money" and because of "property rights" that enable "prosperity" through growth.
@PaulWermer
Well said. A great and tragic summation of what we have become.
@alcinnz
@gerrymcgovern @PaulWermer
@alcinnz
And what capitalism has always been. But humanity on the other hand has a diverse history, and beyond, of different social organizations and ethos and pathos. Such as how indigenous people have been stewards of nature for a long time for mutual benefit.
torstein@HeliosPi @gerrymcgovern @PaulWermer @alcinnz that is mostly because smaller groups of people are less capable of destruction than larger groups of people, and less the stewards of nature thing.
Otherwise there would have been a lot more megafauna around during the columbian exchange.
@Torstein @gerrymcgovern @PaulWermer
@alcinnz
People of the distant past were far more populous than previously assumed. This summary from 'Beyond kingdoms and empires", for example:
"Tropical landscapes that resisted terrestrial survey are giving up their secrets. In place of blanks on the map, we’re now able to see highly cultivated landscapes with massive infrastructure stretching back to the early centuries BCE. Road networks, terraces, ceremonial earthworks, planned residential neighbourhoods, and regional settlement systems ordered into patterns of geometrical precision can be traced across Amazonia, from Brazil to Bolivia, as far as the eastern foothills of the Andes. In certain parts of Amazonia, the forest itself turns out to be a product of past human interaction with the soil. Over time, this generated the rich ‘anthropogenic’ earths called terra preta de índio (‘black earth of the Indians’), with levels of fertility far in excess of ordinary tropical soils. Scientists now believe that between 10,000 and 20,000 large-scale sites remain to be discovered across Amazonia. Similarly startling finds are emerging from Southeast Asia, and we might reasonably expect them from the forested parts of the African continent too."
https://aeon.co/essays/an-archeological-revolution-transforms-our-image-of-human-freedoms
Then according this study "People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years",
"... the cultural shaping and use of ecosystems and landscapes is not, in itself, the primary cause of the current extinction crisis, and neither is the conversion of untouched wildlands, which were nearly as rare 10,000 y ago as they are today. The primary cause of declining biodiversity, at least in recent times, is the appropriation, colonization, and intensifying use of lands already inhabited, used, and reshaped by current and prior societies."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023483118
@HeliosPi @gerrymcgovern @PaulWermer @alcinnz (i don't respond very quickly, and this is very much a tangent)
One of my favourite what-ifs is "what if smallpox had evolved earlier and what if rinderpest had never mutated"?
Ignoring the consequences for the old world, it would have meant a extremely different map at the end of the 1500s.
Would it end up like India or Japan, would it be like the Scramble for Africa, would there be a triangular trade?
@HeliosPi @Torstein @gerrymcgovern @alcinnz
Those are great references.
I'd add the excellent book, "The History of the Countryside", by Oliver Rackham ( late 1980s or early 90s) which explores this specifically with respect to the British Isles and the evolution of the countryside. Dramatically changed the way I thought about natural areas.
@PaulWermer @Torstein @gerrymcgovern @alcinnz Nice, thanks for the recommendation.
@maxsol @PaulWermer @Torstein @alcinnz @gerrymcgovern @CCochard Ooooooohhh, thankyou.
@HeliosPi „so long as reputable publishers of academic books and journals continue to accept work based on such sources, we’re unlikely to see much progress“ …and that‘s why I’ll be sharing this eye-opening article with all my colleagues who are teaching ‚the #humanities. Thank you for sharing!
@mj Hazzah. You're welcome. And that extends to whomever shared before me, and so on and so on.
@HeliosPi @Torstein @gerrymcgovern @PaulWermer @alcinnz
Pretty amazing!
"Scientists now believe that between 10,000 and 20,000 large-scale sites remain to be discovered across Amazonia. Similarly startling finds are emerging from Southeast Asia, and we might reasonably expect them from the forested parts of the African continent too."
@alcinnz @gerrymcgovern @PaulWermer @bytebro Yes, but successful parasites evolved so as not to kill their host. The infinite growth paradigm has not.
@PaulWermer @alcinnz @gerrymcgovern One of my college classes had a speaker come in to discuss "Sustainable Living". She seemed like such a a radical extremist, but she wasn't advocating for anything more than to slowing down enough to make choices we can live with. No "give up technology", no "live simple lives", just "don't take from the world more than we can afford to" and that seemed so alien and unfeasible.
That was almost 30 years ago, and Ive never felt comfortable with it.
@PaulWermer @alcinnz @gerrymcgovern - I believe this is one of the best analogy to describe our behavior. Sad and True!
@gerrymcgovern It's already bad enough in Texas with the damn cryptominers that get paid by the state not to operate during periods of high demand.
@gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green the US powergrid is so primitive, and segmented, the source of energy cannot be far, so you can't be afraid.
“According to Boris Gamazaychikov the AI Sustainability lead of Salesforce and using cost data from OpenAI's benchmark results of their o3 announcement, we can estimate the energy and carbon footprint of a single task on the ARC-AGI benchmark (for the high-compute version of o3). Each task consumed approximately 1,785 kWh of energy—about the same amount of electricity an average U.S. household uses in two months.
Boris said this translates to 684 kg CO₂e, based on last month's U.S. grid emissions factor. To put that into perspective, that's equivalent to the carbon emissions from more than 5 full tanks of gas!”
ONE task?!?!
@firstprimate it all sounds super crazy. Yet whatever the exact figures are, we do know that AI and Big Tech is in a massive energy race where bigger and more is always better. They will burn everything to the ground to win the race.
Yes. And a race to what? ALL evidence atm points to a product that does not deliver as promised, let alone 5 tanks of gas worth. The model they using cannot not hallucinate. That makes it useless for serious tasks and definitely not AI.
@gerrymcgovern Canada’s own Kevin O’Leary is trying to drum up support for a ludicrous 7.5GW gas-powered AI data centre in northwestern Alberta right now. I think it’s unlikely it’ll get fully built, but even a fraction of that is a terrifying prospect.