In the 10 years prior to like 2023, any new large scale data center build-out was explicitly for serving more ads. Meanwhile, now that we have a new tech that's literally solving unsolved math problems, we're suddenly doomers. Why?
I'm guessing you have no conception of what the world used to be like before 9/11. Back then, the news was reported, and people got outraged at things. Sure, there was injustice then too, and all wars are a racket, but there were still standards of morals.
Today, you have a level of corruption in all things that is beyond the imagination, out in the open; and it is out in the open because the powers that be have been using technology to silence dissent and cancel everyone who speaks out against it.
Those with eyes to see see very clearly where the times are headed; it's a cross between 1984, Minority Report, the Hunger Games, and Back to the Future 2, and the Terminator series. If you don't see it coming, don't know what to tell ya. It's already here, but you don't see it in your feed by design.
What's wild is how long it took for HN to wake up. You're the straggler.
The US was founded on Christian principles. Even the chief author of the constitution separated church and state for the express purpose of spreading the gospels of Jesus. There is the source of morality.
And then since the mid 20th century this stronghold of morality was by the hidden architects of human affairs allowed to diminish by the corruption of the monetary system. The constitution only allows for the federal government to mint silver and gold coins, but over a series of events (starting with the sinking of the Titanic, believe it or not) the power to print money became centralized and co-opted by the global banking elites, and now everything that gets in the way is either purchased or neutralized.
Some of the media I cited like 1984 or the Terminator series were as a warning by moral men. It's not surprising that we failed to heed these warnings against the god of money, at least temporarily. Others like Back to the Future 2 (Biff == Trump), or the Simpsons, are predictive programming leaks from mortal architects.
What's more surprising to me is the myopic greed of those who choose the dark side willingly despite the forewarned consequences as if all of this wasn't already written about by higher powers, heavenly and earthly. We're living in biblical times whether you agree with it or not. They've been planning for global depopulation since the 60's w/ the World3 simulator. We just lived through the man-made pandemic from the Wuhan lab ala EcoHealth funded by Fauci, and I'm guessing it'll never bother most readers here that he's still not in jail because y'all neither have the attention span nor resources to learn the truth anymore because you keep scrolling censored sources.
Which reminds me... Utopia (the UK version), more predictive programming. It's just two seasons, I suggest everyone watch it to get a sense of what I mean by predictive programming. In one scene you'll even find the masonic square and compass. In the US version they even added Bill Gates as a character, just to hammer it home.
Thing is, way too many conspiracy theories, it would seem, are just plain facts (or at least very close to the truth if not 100% perfectly accurate in all the details)
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
Dude wrote an essay around infrasound being pseudoscience and chose to ignore the obvious, audible, constant hum.
Which is what's happening again.
Assume every post here is automatically anti something and don't engage. Your mental health isn't worth it.
20 years ago even with automation etc you needed armies of people to make something work. It was more of a transformation of the type of work. Look at the amount of work Amazon as a company has created. It changed how people buy stuff etc, but behind the scenes there is always human workforce, to deliver, to invent the recommendation algorithms, to package the items, etc (although here there is heavy automation).
Now the idea is that we need AI so we can replace humans, so "people can spend more time on what they like to do". Which is what, searching for jobs on LinkedIn?
Well at least you're planning to have a very healthy population of enslaved serfs. I'm sure they'll appreciate all you've done for them.
This also applies within companies. You can get temporary lucky with a CEO that isn't accountable to anyone, but then that brings sycophancy, leading to degraded decisions. It's how it always works.
So it's very clear cut, because you are offering a trade that cannot actually happen in practice. The economic growth will turn into zero sum status games, like it always has.
This is too unrealistic a statement. Democracy in the US has had some destruction wrought on it since the media started believing that activism and opinion journalism were more important than facts, and that change is the goal of journalism. That's a massive blow to democracy - far greater than anything happening today. We are living in its results.
> Autocracies are, in practice, inefficient messes that put loyalty ahead of competency, so one cannot really get prosperity in exchange for no representation.
This is totally wrong - autocracies can be extremely efficient. Mussolini made the trains run on time. That is one of the few problems the autocracies don't have, unless their bureaucracy is genuinely so inefficient it can't carry out the autocrat's will.
All government options and private companies can definitely reward loyalty over competence.
—Sparta
Pretty sure that problem is not limited by computer power
Oligarchs (trillionares and billionaires as they get called in the US) are fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
Explain _why_.
Thus, economic inequality leads to backslide of democracy:
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/economic-inequality-leads-de...
Just because capital is happy to take advantage our current incompetent authoritarian populist administration doesn't doesn't mean they don't prefer predictable technocrats in charge. Trump was outspent during all of his campaigns.
Because it’s easy. It’s free to post internet comments. The doomers have the lowest effort take so they’re very prominent. People doing things are too busy doing things to post doomer comments.
It is extremely hard to imagine that the world where this amount of money going into actual research tools and researchers wouldn’t give vastly better results.
Building a nuclear powered shovel to dig a grave would work but it doesn’t mean it is a sensible thing to do
Most people can't really understand the numbers in question due to their size. It's like that picture of 1 million dollars in $100's stacked up on a pallet, then 1 billion and 1 trillion. But instead of worthless paper, it is consuming huge swaths of the limited fresh water on the planet, creating the largest natural gas power plants in the world, consuming huge swaths of the fundamental foundry and fab processes that our entire technological society relies upon ...
And the "literally solving unsolved math problems"... Who cares, how will knowing the answer to that math problem solve our global climate disaster from taking out modern human technologies civilization? It's not!
We'll be able to increase chip capacity eventually, and we're also still doing pretty well at clean energy conversion. Eventually we'll get there.
I'm much less pessimistic about this.
There is LOTS of reporting about this. One example:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/microsof...
Again, I ask, where are you getting the 60-80% number?
https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/closed-loop-co...
I wasn't born yesterday dude, it's obvious you're deflecting. You cited a sloptistic generated by an LLM. Take the L.
When these days centers say they use (x) MW/GW, that is all turning into heat, with some additional (%) on top for inefficiencies.
And don't forget, they are literally making the largest natural gas power plants. Which in turn generate a fuck ton of heat to make the power because they burn gas to heat water to turn it into steam to turn a turbine... Which in itself is another +30%-60% of heat on top of what ever number they quote for power because of the inefficiencies.
So for every MW, it's really 1.3-1.6MW of heating, then they use that 1 MW to power the cooling systems or the server clusters. So for every 1MW of power use, it's on the order of 2.3-2.6x of heat generated.
Again, the scale is the issue at hand. These data centers are consuming more supplies and power for something that is not necessary to human existence
What?
Like the water situation east of the rockies has been pretty bad... It just ain't the desert that you get over in California or Arizona
Maybe "drought" doesn't mean what I think it means. In this case, I amend my comment to say "There's clearly lots of water there" instead of "drought."
AI data centers dwarf any previous data centers you know about