dumbmatter.com

Online home of Jeremy Scheff

Environmentalism is so fucked

People are worried about carbon emissions and energy usage and shit like that. But AGI is (probably) coming. And AGI doesn't just require software and hardware, it requires energy. Lots of it.

Even if we had done smart things in energy policy, such as continuing to build nuclear power plants so that we were running almost entirely on clean energy now, we'd still be fucked just because of the coming massive increase in energy demand.

Regardless of whether AGI leads to positive or negative outcomes for humanity, you don't want someone else to get it before you, do you? The advantage of being first to AGI would probably be even larger than being first to nuclear weapons or any other transformative technology in history. So any corporation/government with any reasonable amount of resources is going to be scrambling to be first.

And that means they'll be using whatever energy they have. Coal, oil, natural gas, all will be sacrified to manifest the Sand God.


My take on ChatGPT, LLMs, and our eventual doom

ChatGPT. Cool stuff, right? Very fun. Kind of scary too. That's the naive impression you get from playing around with it, or reading about other people's experiences. It's cute until the easily-confused chat bot says "I will not harm you unless you harm me first".

But can a fancy Markov chain actually be scary? I mean it's just predicting the next word, right?

Read more...