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Comment by righthand | Hacker News Reader

This is something I don’t get. The general cost of living is sky rocketing, largely due to this push and some of the population thinks there is prosperity for all on the otherside of the meat processing machine we’re pushing everyone toward.

Groceries are going to get more expensive. Every dollar we spend on over building AI infrastructure is a dollar we never get back.

We could use this money for other things such as healthcare and fixing our broken parts of our education system. Instead people are getting ancy to chat with a summarized version of all the garbage on the internet.

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the idea is to use AI to build super productive farms and greenhouses, improve the capability to do that in urban areas, automated and super efficient transportation. but it's not just AI doing all that, it's someone who wants to start a business using AI himself to figure out how to best start up a greenhouse in his community and setup the tech infra needed including the API for people to be able to view available produce, estimates on availability, initiate trades, etc. (this greenhouse thing is just one example).

another example could be someone wants to build an ecosystem monitoring station to monitor the nearby ravine (pollution levels with rainfall and other events etc.) and air quality over time. this is just a small datapoint but if people all over the place build their own ecosystem/weather monitoring things using basic electronics ordered from the internet and all plug them in to a standard observability software system then that could provide some pretty awesome outcomes including figuring the best way to clean polluted water (because some of the places will surely have implemented varying methods of sanitizing their own water).

Okay this is even more pie-in-the-sky. You can build productive greenhouses today, we don’t need AI to summarize the internet to figure out how to do it. There are no secrets hidden in the generative token tea-leaves that reveals better greenhouses. Urban farming will never be profitable or sustainable in a dense urban center. It’s been done.

“Standard observability software” whatever that is also does not require AI to build. We need 10GW to calculate rainfall for who? What benefit over how we currently calculate rainfall? This rainfall is hallucinated through summarization?

i can't come up with all the examples. i'm not a farming or ecology expert. so thanks for the information. do some thinking

> the idea is to use AI to build super productive farms and greenhouses

How? What are the mechanisms in which AI will lead to farms and greenhouses being more productive? How will AI improve the existing automation that already exists for the farming sector, and has existed for a hundred years?

fully automated with robots. the AI designs thousands of experiments and deploys them at scale. idk, i'm not an agriculture expert. it was just one example. what other possibilities are there?

electronics recycling, disassembling old computers to get the raw materials into a form that can be used again. we'll need programs to automate the production and testing and analysis of the robots that will recycle the components.

> idk, i'm not an agriculture expert.

That much is obvious. The fact that you’re straining so hard to come up with these bongcloud “ideas” should clue you in that maybe this isn’t the revolutionary tech that the suits are selling it as

> The general cost of living is sky rocketing, largely due to this push

How are cost of living increases tied to AI investment?

This is an intentionally disingenuous question right?

Where do you think the tax money being given away to these huge datacenters is going?

What downstream effects does major increase to limited consumer services and goods do across the board?

No, it was a genuine question. Sorry if I’m asking basic questions, but I actually don’t find your questions as responses help make things any clearer.

There are only two ways it could: either power cost increases which only make up a small portion of cost of living or somehow believing it responsible for inflation. But the latter doesn't make any sense, especially as they believe the money spent to be 'lost'.

How does that not make sense? Inflation is lost money from a consumer viewpoint.

Money spent on AI is taking GPUs and software engineers off the market, as well as the energy needed to drive AI data centers. AI doesn’t need food, well, beyond the SWEs, it shouldn’t be inflating food at all. The only thing I could think of is AI investment drawing away agriculture investment or something. Or maybe AI data centers replacing farmland?

The collective west enjoyed a period of prosperity because it had massive technological advantage. The Spanish had guns, native Americans had sticks. The British had steam engines, the Indians had cows. The Americans had computers, the soviets had abascus. Now the Chinese have AI, we have if statements. Losing the AI race is an existential threat to our civilization.

Yet no one can detail how it’s an existential threat. No real usecases for larger society from AI models but we must make everyone’s life worse so we don’t lose the race to nowhere.

> The collective west enjoyed a period of prosperity because it had massive technological advantage. The Spanish had guns,

as it was said in 1898 by Hilaire Belloc: "Whatever happens, we have got. The Maxim gun, and they have not."

In that case it was the British who had just slaughtered a lot of Matabele in Africa.

> Losing the AI race is an existential threat to our civilization.

Lol. If winning it means a sea of hallucinated "factual" text and deepfake videos, then that death of truth is also a threat. Being rid of that is no threat at all.

> The general cost of living is sky rocketing

there is no evidence of this

What's not to get? Groceries, healthcare, and education aren't expensive for them to afford, why would they want to invest their money and time in making those things more affordable for poor people? Better to invest all their resources making a robot slave army. Then it doesn't matter how unaffordable anything is to the poors, they can just die. Win win.

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