I know, I'm late to this.
I was very slow to use AI coding agents. It seems like a lot of programmers never actually liked programming and are thrilled to have a machine do it for them. But I like programming! That's the fun part! Even for programmers who like programming, I know a lot of people feel like they have to use AI to keep up with the competition, especially in a tough job market. But my business is actually having one of its best years ever. So I figured, if I like programming, why not keep programming?
I wasn't blind to what was going on around me, though. A lot of slop and hype, but a lot of real stuff too. Engineers I have respected for years saying they no longer write code. Non-programmers accomplishing things that previously would have been far beyond their grasp. And skilled programmers accomplishing truly incredible feats.
I couldn't avoid it forever. Eventually I tried it.
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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.
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?
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