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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

Why are we still stuck with computing technology that requires nuclear power plants worth of energy to power AI that can barely match the cognitive power of a human brain running on a cup of coffee and some calories?

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Because the AI that can barely match the cognitive power of a human brain running on a cup of coffee and some calories doesn't sleep, eat, get sick, go on maternity/paternity leave, go on strike, want to be paid, want their pay to increase with the cost of living, or have pesky human rights that limit the value you can extract from them.

This is increasingly reminding me of those dystopian science fiction films.

Would you say the same of any automated or mechanised process that massively reduces necessary human input for the above reasons?

That is honestly how I actually see these things being used now, they can be powerful tools if used effectively.

The thought of people being replaced wholesale though…

Tractors and combine harvesters replaced humans wholesale. Would you rather we go back to a world where all farming must be done by humans manually operating equipment? Countless advancements in manufacturing replaced humans wholesale in factories. Should we undo that?

I don’t think you understand. Can we create a computer the size of a bee’s brain and with the same intelligence and energy requirements? If we can’t, then I don’t think we’ll ever truly achieve an efficient general intelligence.

You're not calculating the energy required for a human being to do computation. It requires food, clothing, recreation, temperature control, healthcare, and education and all sorts of things that require oodles more energy than a simply calculation of daily calorie consumption of a human being.

True, but the alternative is letting people starve. I suggest that this should not be one of the goals of our society.

The computing machines that the Manhattan project used were famously as fast as the average secretary doing the same calculations. Yet the computer age still happened. Ask yourself why.

One is miniaturization and the other one is some sort of science breakthroughs to understand how the brain works.

If it helps the AI doesnt 'match' humans at all, it does a completely different thing.

Didn’t know there was a human brain running on a cup of coffee and some calories answering hundreds of millions of cognitive API requests across the world each minute and continuing to grow.

Tbh AI is already at the stage that its more effective and insightful on most subjects than a huge chunk of humans and their coffee and calorie sippin brains.

I don’t think this sort of sadist hot take on nascent revolutionary tech that’s becoming better exponentially each year, is productive or fits into HN.

Let’s see about the exponential part. Too early to judge. Some signs that the current capabilities are actually stagnating and progress is slowing down. The problem of determining when an LLM is wrong is fundamental and might be a show-stopper for exponential imorovements.

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