Why the AI future will be awesome
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It’s been really great for certain problems. It may even “cure cancer.” As it stands, AI is good at specific things and not all types of things. Yet.
Optimistically, and IMO very likely, AI will allow us to continue to create progressively better tools to solve particular problems, however, which is more useful.
Pessimistically, and also IMO very likely, AI will allow us to continue to create progressively bigger problems by allowing us to reach further beyond our grasp, amplifying our abilities without necessarily amplifying our understanding of the consequences of our actions.
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
"Designing energy stores the size of an AAA battery, but with the capacity to power a cruise ship, is hard, but possible."
is false.
Think about the materials involved. What material stores all this energy, which one assumes is inert and room-temp? And if it's not inert/room-temp, what material contains the other material?
In each case, how much mass is needed of each - to store, and to contain? Noting also that the more mass you need of the energy-bearing material, the more you will need of the other. Can that mass be compressed into 4 cubic centimeters?
I personally have no idea, but it's sure sounding impossible.
Volume of a AAA battery = ~3.85 cm^3
And let's give it a density of the densest elemental metal (Osmium), at 22.6 g/cm^3
Assume the battery stores pure energy (I know, I know). So E = mc^2, which is like 8.99 x 10^16 J / kg
So that battery would hold about 22.6 g/cm^3 * 3.85 cm^3 * 8.99e16 J / kg = 7.8 * 10^ 15 joules = ~2.2 TWh, about a trillion times more than a normal AAA battery.
Doing some LLM-assisted sleuthing, a large cruise ship can use over 80,000 gallons of fuel a day [1]. A bit of searching indicates marine fuels have a density of approx 39 MJ/L (I'm using volumetric density for consistency), so 80,000 gallons * 39 MJ/L = about 1.1 x 10^7 megajoules = 3.2 GWh.
So a 2.2 TWh AAA battery could power that ship for 671 days.
Of course, the practical physics here are nonsense and there are obvious safety considerations associated with your AAA-sized nuclear weapon, but maybe that's what the author was getting at?
[1] https://blog.windstarcruises.com/how-much-fuel-cruise-ship-u...
The smallest terminal you can connect to a AAA battery is the same diameter as 00 AWG copper wire.
Provided that the engine has 100% efficiency and can turn 176MW of electricity into torque, to safely run power it needs through that 00 AWG wire, the battery would need to provide a voltage of at least 70 kV.
The materials science and biology part yes, it will be awesome. but the question is always qui bono.
First we will have the end of propriatry software and everything moving to the cloud. Even PC will end to exist with Microsoft pushing hard on their M365 virtual computers.
Who will receive these new materials.
I am looking forward to "Diamond Age" becoming reality. But it will be hell of a ride
Conversely, the present concentration of power, and the lack of any viable effort to reduce it, can be used to force moving everything-that-matters to the cloud. Not a good outcome but inevitable if things stay the same.
But what if i ment "Good with Whom?" XD
(Of course, all this is up in the air. If LLMs become commodities, the situation becomes very complex; the information flow doesn't get quite so consolidated, but it still becomes impossible to tractably analyze, as all the LLMs train off each other)
The rest is essentially just a short list of consequential problems facing the world, with "maybe AI will help us fix it" tacked on to each paragraph.
The last two problems don't even mention the role AI would play in their solution. That's a bit of a tell.
Yeah and it is such an absurd point. You take a brief look at world right now and the history and you find ... constant fight over what exactly "the values" should be. There is no single human aligned answer to "what we should do". There is no way to align AI simultaneously with liberals, transhumanists, right wing, tech CEOs and all the world religions.
And there, I am even ignoring situations where interests of one group go against another group.
Well, the real problem isn't about "humans aligning LLMs" it's about "LLMs aligning humans" according the values and desires of the LLM's masters - that kind of alignment is entirely possible, proven by history on the human side and by current LLMs on the technology side.
* Those fucking annoying workers, we don't need them anymore! Most of them can go FOAD, literally. That leaves even more money and resources for the only ones who really deserve it: the extremely wealthy.
I think its very reasonable for AI to speedup superconductor finding which will make medical scanning a lot cheaper, easier and better.
It will also allow for massive and easy energy transportation for large distances like afrika/spain <> europe.
In medicin understanding DNA and the results of it could lead to solving cancer and dementia.
New better batery chemicals will help us for solid state batteries. no AAA version of this but up to 1000kwh/kg + low temp and high temp stability and very stable against burning.
Physical ai will solve human labor.
Will be used for mass surveillance and for further destruction of the democracy. Will be used to create powerful monopoly. Will make climate change worst due to huge energy consumption. This will be unfixable, because tech CEOs who will have more power do not care at best and are far right actors at worst. "The alignment" will be defined by the people who already shown themselves sociopaths.
It just basically ignores all the issues and goes "guys, it will be great, stop worrying! There's nothing to worry about!"
Pure schlock.