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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

If there is energy to be used, the system will use it because people always use power when it exists. AI can't do anything to stop it as it is both controlled by the powerful and has been trained on the tendencies of human beings to get ahead. If AI gives a person new capabilities, they'll use those capabilities selfishly, or even unselfishly but still causing harm because they're in an arms race.

We don't need a revolutionary technology. We need to experience immediate pain from reckless innovation so that we realize that innovation and tech is not the answer.

Technology only proceeds in one direction: unfettered growth, which necessitates unsustainable resource extraction. Your take is just your instinct for optimism, which in turn is just a trait that is only adaptive in primitive environments but is grossly misleading in a surplus-based society...

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> If there is energy to be used, the system will use it because people always use power when it exists.

That doesn't seem correct to me. There is always energy available that is not used because it is not cost-effective to do so. (Consider - the grass in your yard is not harvested and burnt for power). AI may yet turn out to be a paperclip maximiser, but humanity itself is not there yet.

What are you alluding to exactly and who is “we” when you say “we need to experience immediate pain from reckless innovation “

Sort of. Today the energy companies trade (obviously) energy; imagine if they traded compute power instead; the use case for never-seen industrial clients is being built as we speak, and companies are actually purchasing directly production companies to meet demand; the reason this happens is because production is somewhat scarce (scaling up a grid used to be a decades project, not a years one - ask China), and the traditional economics of scale is inverted - Data centers are always power-hungry, specially with AI; you don't have idle time like other industries. The big issue is obviously the scale - a hiccup that causes a dc to go dark from the grid (eg switching to ups+ generator) may cause such instability on the grid that it will shut down, as a safeguard

> Data centers are always power-hungry, specially with AI

I expect datacenter load has a similar sort of day to day demand curve as everything else. Consider for example global bandwidth use during work hours versus in the evening when people get home and pull up a streaming service.

Of course you can use more flexible tasks to demand shift but the same applies to the electric grid.

> Technology only proceeds in one direction: unfettered growth, which necessitates unsustainable resource extraction.

The direction of technological progress is not just linearly/exponentially upwards. Significant global technological fallbacks have happened, as in knowledge and processes disappearing for hundreds of years. This could happen again.

Even on the trajectory of unfettered growth fed by unsustainable resource extraction, tech and innovation might potentially take us beyond local pessima. That seems to be happening with solar, wind and batteries replacing inferior tech today. Still unfettered growth of energy production and consumption. Still fed by unsustainable resource extraction. Less harmful growth than the inferior tech being pushed out.

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