I’ve got solar panels and AC. I’m keeping the house at meat locker freezing while staying within the solar panel production. Might as well use the power when it’s there.
Some people will complain about using AC in general. They can sweat all they want - I’m keeping cool.
Can’t sell your excess power to the grid?
They’re making that increasingly difficult. Basically, as more and more people get solar it becomes economically impossible to maintain the grid with millions of people being paid to connect to it.
The result is a higher and higher percentage of your power bill not be for “use” but for some other bullshit.
Because of the crazy power rate spikes during one of the Texas freezes, my power bill gets like a bunch added to it as a recovery fee for like the next 15 years. Then there’s the connection fee, maintenance fee, etc. My bill is like $300-400 a month before the first milliwatt is calculated, which makes solar less-viable. I’m paying a huge power bill no matter what (illegal to disconnect from the grid entirely), so payments towards a $50,000 solar setup would just make it more expensive.
I might save 20-40 bucks on my electric bill, but the extra $250 in payments for solar would kill that.
Yeah that’s been an anticipated problem, since home solar is essentially a lost customer for the utility, but infrastructure maintenance costs don’t change. Honestly the power grid shouldn’t be a commercial enterprise, even if it’s under shit tons of regulation. It’s so absurdly critical to society we should have nationalized the power companies a long time ago.
Yeah, if it’s a problem that our power grid is having distributed green energy connected all over the place, we need to make the damn utilities change.
Yeah… Right now California residents are paying massively inflated rates because the utility board decided that PG&E, a company that is literally a convicted killer, can pass the cost of the fines on to customers.
Kind of like our railroads? Or the internet?
Here in the Netherlands, the panels are wired into the grid so you’re always delivering back and not using that power directly. What happens is, they basically deduct the power generated from the power you’ve used. This crediting system will eventually disappear, as too many people are feeding back solar power.
For all intents and purposes, as long as we generate more than we use, we’re paying nothing except grid charges and taxes. So if you’ve got a low energy use day and plenty of solar, there’s really no reason not to run an AC (or a washer/dryer, etc)
That’s ok as long as your solar panels also provide all your needs so you don’t have to put load on the grid that could be put on your solar setup otherwise (if you’re in a sector that’s currently under alert).
How big is your solar panel set up? I’ve been thinking of getting one of those solar generators, the smaller ones, and just using as much a/c as I can power with that. It probably wouldn’t last too long, right? I’d need a bigger set up?
You’d be surprised. A little window rattler AC could be powered by such a setup - ie I have a 1.6kw cooling A/C with an input rating of 490W, I’ve measured it to be around that. That will cool a bedroom somewhat. The issue will be the surge power when the compressor kicks in, so maybe add 50%.
We’ve got nine panels on the south facing roof. Right now, reasonably sunny day, they produce about 3.6 -3.7 Kw. That amply covers the power consumption of one of the two LG aircons we have. Those take about 2.5 kW. We usually just run one, depending on outside temp.
I’m not really familiar with solar generators in general, but that feels like you’d need a pretty beefy one to keep an AC powered.
ngl, this is my lifelong goal. Have a house and being able to install and own green technology. Too bad that’s mostly out of reach for anyone born in the 90’s.
If everyone had solar panels and thought like you, we’d still have globe warming
Energy is heat. There’s no such thing as cold, just lack of heat.
Trapping sun rays then releasing hot air warms the planet. That’s what your system is doing. Removing heat from your house and putting it outside while your electric motor throws out extra heat.
It just doesn’t have the air pollution that burning coal or gas does.
That light was already going to turn into heat. That’s where basically everything but nuclear power came from.
Unless you have actual, credible researched math on the climate impact we’re all going to ignore you.
In total approximately 70% of incoming radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere and the Earth’s surface while around 30% is reflected back to space and does not heat the surface. The Earth radiates energy at wavelengths much longer than the Sun because it is colder
https://wmo.int/suns-impact-earth#:~:text=In total approximately 70%25 of,Sun because it is colder.
No, the energy captured by solar panels wasn’t already going to turn into heat to be released and trapped by earth’s atmosphere.
I am, in fact, quite aware of how air conditioners work :D A lot of devices work like this; it’s why a refrigerator and freezer generate heat. And why things like a slushy machine are real power hogs. Basically, anything that gets things cool will generate heat elsewhere.
Thing is, a refrigerator and freezer are very much needed in daily life. An air conditioner thankfully isn’t - yet. But on days where we have 25+ celsius, the aircon is the difference between being sweaty, irritable, unproductive and with poor sleep or… perfectly comfortable. So, we choose to not be miserable. It keeps me sane during heatwaves.
But yes, absolutely nobody should own one. And I highly encourage everybody else not to get one. I’m keeping mine though.
Same with water usage. Everybody has to reduce water, not wash cars while industry and agriculture who use like ¾ of the water don’t do anything
Yes because washing cars is much less important than growing food
Juts search for “AI water consumption” or “data center water consumption”. I’ll agree that “we could be using this to wash our cars” is a silly argument, but water shortages affect between 2 and 3 billion people every year (https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/imminent-risk-global-water-crisis-warns-un-world-water-development-report-2023). We could be doing more with this water than cloud computing and AI.
Wait a sec, how do they consume water for cooling, i thought it’s in a closed loop as its purpose is only transferring heat
Some facilities is do this. They’re not 100% efficient, so some is lost to evaporation, some must be dumped because it has too much mineral content (and too much conductivity) to go back through the cooling system. Reusing is only about 50% efficient (according to Google’s numbers).
Half a liter per kilowatt hour. That’s the average water use
It’s like the idea of recycling plastics with water.
Not all of it is reusable to the same degree. A good portion of water has to be evaporated off to cool down the exterior towers plus water isn’t really infinitely usable in these loops. It gets gross or full of materials.Another thing that people need to remember is generating electricity uses the water here as we literally don’t use many methods that don’t involve water, we are not on a green grid and neither are these huge data centers for the most part. We boil it for the electricity then have to use additional to clean the system after.
On a standard PC, you can easily have a loop because the radiator is big enough to exhause all that heat. But when your computer or cluster puts out multiple thousands of watts of heat, eventually you need to get rid of tge hot water and replace it with cold water. And when it gets even hotter, you need a steady stream of cold water that immediately gets dumped.
Right, so agricultural was a bad example.
Not really. Look at California agriculture. You’ve got immense and unsustainable amounts of water going to almonds, pistachios, and other cash crops (not to mention animal feed for the Saudis) with voracious demand for more water, despite it causing damage to the water sources.
If you can’t imagine a world without eating meat, yes.
The US massively overproduces food. We absolutely can afford to not water some of those crops.
The US massively overuses cars. You can absolutely afford to not wash your car.
If the cars are overused that means they require more maintenance, not less. I want walkable places but that’s not the argument to make lol
If you wash a car it uses less fuel. Dirt makes cars less aerodynamic.
We can do both.
You can just… not wash your car. It literally doesn’t matter. If water rationing is in effect, washing your car should be the least of your concerns.
I don’t care about washing my car. I care that they’re moderating our car washing while allowing foreign businessmen to use as much water as they want on hay that gets exported. And that could be fine if they were doing it in the Mid West. No, they’re doing it in Phoenix, Arizona. A region that knows it’s counting down to a zero day.
So while I’m not washing my car, they shouldn’t be watering those crops.
Not washing cars results in long term damage to the car. If you have a 200k mile shitbox with peeling clear coat, sure, you don’t need to wash it because it probably won’t matter.
If you have something nice with good paint, washing is an important maintenance item
If you don’t wash your car and you’ll get corrosion from the salt on the road. If you live where it snows of course.
This person is talking about being from the desert, so yeah, no sympathy here. The Fremen could figure out that water shouldn’t be wasted when it’s scarce.
lol fresh food is like all public health and wellbeing is non existent unless its been heavily industrialised to make as much money out of it as possible.
Sure but growing water intensive crops in the desert is also not logical.
Why don’t humans migrate with the seasons? Are we dumber then birds?
People who live in the desert and then complain about not spraying their giant hunk of metal with water are definitely dumber than birds
Yep… phoenix, Tucson, LV, all of those need to be vacated and the populations moved somewhere useful like the Midwest where they can help grow crops somewhere that makes sense
Last I ran the numbers, industry and agriculture used 98% of the water. This being in CA.
Not a fan of disinformation so I’ll post this here as well:
I run ComfyUI locally on my own Laptop and generating an image takes 4 seconds, during which my 3070 Laptop GPU uses 80 Watts (the maximum amount of power it can use). It also fully uses one of the 16 threads of my i7-11800H (TDP of 45W). Let’s overestimate a bit and say it uses 100% of the CPU (even though in reality it’s only 6.25%), which adds 45 watts resulting in 125 watts (or 83 watts if you account for the fact that it only uses one thread).
That’s 125 watts for 4 seconds for one image, or about 0.139 WH (0.000139KWH). That would be 7200 images per KWH. Playing one hour of Cyberpunk on a PS5 (assuming 200 watts) would be equivalent to me generating 1440 images on my laptop.
“Sources”:
https://www.ecoenergygeek.com/ps5-power-consumption/How much of a prude must you be to think you need to censor the word tits?
The working class got screwed over? I’m shocked!
you can say tits online
Momma says you can’t
That’s it momma and I are going for a long train ride
Momma says trains are the devul
The various platforms with their various advertiser-friendly stances have all but maimed the english language. Had someone I know talking about a death in their family and they legit said “unalive” once without realizing it.
I know people who go by nicknames in some places because their name is apparently censored.
I think a lot about Nassa being censored to N***a in some game lol.
tots online
Dammit! It doesn’t work. They lied to me.
You can’t, many social media now has OCR that read text from image and if it discovers no no words, it’ll censor the post
Ahh yes, you can’t ever use swear words and eurasia has always been at war with eastasia.
Police!
And if you are going to censor it don’t censor one letter with a line that looks like the letter.
But “you can’t see tits on the radio”
You cant see fucking anything on the radio me thinks
Depends. I just asked my wife to put her tits on our radio, and she was nice enough to do so, but now she’s wondering what the hell I’m looking at on the internet, but I CAN see tits on the radio.
I appreciate the play on words. I was referencing a song, but now I can only see someone (literally) resting their tits on a radio… and it’s a pretty funny image lol
Fortunately my wife is a good sport about these kind of things. She’s used to my odd requests after all this time.
I can’t see the image. My instance must be broken.
I specifically asked for five pictures of girls with one tit. No wonder the usage is so high!
Are they sharing the same tit?
Optimally, yes.
Whoa!
I call bullshit. Stable Diffusion XL has energy footprint of about 0.29 watt hours per image while generating. That is roughly equivalent to running a 0.5 Watt energy LED light bulb for slightly less than 35 minutes. Even for training the costs are not that extreme. Stable Diffusion needed 150,000 GPU hours. At 300 Watt for an A100 at full load that would 45,000 kWh. This roughly the energy neeed to drive an electric car for 180,000 miles, which is a lot, but still on a reasonable scale.
You are kinda missing the point.
It’s not about how energy efficient or inefficient a single ChatGPT prompt is.
It’s that A/C is arguably more important to an individual than your ability to use AI. But while the government asking people to reduce AC usage is not new, AI is.
So we’re introducing new and unnecessary ways to draw power while asking people to tolerate higher temperatures within their homes.
My personal take is that we should be investing in nuclear power so we continue evolving as a society. But I guess we can hold back progress in the name of puttering along with other technology as the world slowly burns and people cook inside their homes
Nothing about that sounds reasonable.
At 300 Watt for an A100 at full load that would 45,000 kWh. This roughly the energy neeed to drive an electric car for 180,000 miles, which is a lot, but still on a reasonable scale.
My guy. That is over 15 years of daily driving and the occasional long haul trip, 1.5x the average lifespan of an EV. Consumed in under 2 years. For ONE iteration of ONE AI model. Nevermind how many thousands of people are running that “light bulb for slightly less than 35 minutes” every second, with the vast majority of what it spits out not even being used for anything of value except to tell the prompt writer what they need to tweak in order to get their perfect anime waifu out of it.
Still not much on an industrial scale. For example, you can compare it to the aviation industry. There are roughly 550 transatlantic flights per day and each one consumes about 5000kg of fuel per hour for 6 to 10 hours straight. A kg of jet A1 has roughly 11 kWh. So a single transatlantic flight consumes roughly 385,000 kWh of energy. So training one model still consumes a lot less energy than a single one of the 550 transatlantic flights daily.
Not sure why people rip on commercial air travel so much.
Some “back of the napkin math here”.
A380 can hold 84,545 gallons of fuel, and has a range of 9200 miles, giving it a fuel economy of roughly 0.1MPG…
Except it can carry 853 people at a time. At 1/3rd capacity, it exceeds the average fuel economy per person per mile than a car with a single person in it in the US. (26mpg). At full capacity it’s around 85 mpg/person.
Oh good job, you found another thing we need to reduce!
I don’t like that first article, it gives contradicting information about the energy usage per image, saying 0.29kWh/image then saying 0.29kWh/1000 images.
Good point. I just tried it on my M1 macbook with 16 gb ram to get better data (but used SD 1.5 though). It took roughly 2 minutes to create an image at roughly full power load (which I would conservatively assume to be roughly identical to the 96 Watt max load of my power adapater.). So i’s 3.2 watt hours per image (with my inefficient setup)
The article is way, waaaaaaay off. My PC generates images at a rate of about one per second (SDXL Turbo) with an Nvidia 4060 Ti which uses 160W (~12W when idle). Let’s assume I have it generate images constantly for one hour:
- 3,600 images per 0.16kWh
- About 22,500 images per hour.
In other words, generating a single image is a trivial amount of power.
How are you able to generate images so quickly? When I tried to run Stable Diffusion on my nominally comparable GPU (RX6800M, similar to 6700XT, 12GB VRAM), it took over a minute to get halfway to generating a medium sized image before my entire computer crashed.
SDXL Turbo I guess. This needs only one diffusion pass per image, while SD 1.5 needs 8 for most images.
Okay, but corpos aren’t training one model and being done with it. They’re training thousands of models, tweaking hyperparameters to find the correct fine tuning needed.
Also, putting the scale at 180,000 miles of driving makes it sound more insane to me. The earth is like 25,000 miles. If you could drive on the ocean, you could circumnavigate the globe seven times over!
Yeah but only with a fairly efficient EV in the TESLA model 3 class. With a typical gasoline car you’d be closer to only one and half circumnaviagtions with 45.000 kWh. The average american car can apparently drive 25 Miles per Gallon. A gallon of gas has roughly 33 kWh of energy in it. That’s only 34090 miles on the energy used train stable diffusion.
You aren’t making it sound bettter 34,000 miles is still a lot of miles.
That’s a fraction of the life of a single car, for an AI model used by millions of people. AI isn’t that big of an energy consumer if done right it seems. Look at how much energy data centers used before the AI shenanigans, or how much Bitcoin uses.
1 AI search uses the equivalent of 10 google searches…
Just imagine how much power you’re using up browsing the web lol.
AI is not making or breaking power grids, water sources, or any other bullshit alarmist prop you’re peddling like AI isn’t being used all over from image generation, checking your shitty grammar, or saving us all time from writing bullshit proper emails every day.
LLMs are 5 tits of awesome that I’ll be suckling on every chance I get.
Large Language Model searches are distinct from text-to-image generative “AI” image processing. Generative image AI uses more energy.
Also Google searches are AI searches now.
You sound very angry and defensive. And you will continue to do so after evidence shows that AI has had a negative impact on the environment. On the bright side, the end of humanity will mean that people being angry and defensive won’t exist either, which will be nice.
That does not sound angry in the slightest.
How about instead of strawmanning their emotional state, why don’t you be a better person?
Agreed, there is no sound, because this medium is purely text-based, so we have limited information. This is why saying things like “be a better person” can come off as silly.
The environmental impact is interesting, if an AI search being as environmentally impactful as 10 Google searches is true.
I don’t know about you, but it often takes a number of Google searches for me to find the right information, whereas with AI and Google combined I usually get the info I need in 1/2 Google searches.
That means that, based on my personal experience, AI is probably more environmentally efficient at getting me the correct info than google search alone.
Try using the duckduckgo search engine. I switched recently and the search results are way better than Google now. I get what I’m looking for first try more often than not.
I have the opposite issue with DDG and it’s been my default search engine for a year now. I frequently have to try bing or Google or cheat and just use reddit for specific info just like I did with Google.
DDG is terrible at indexing certain info though and really only hits some of the biggest sites.
Trying to vaguely search for stuff is an absolute crapshoot on DDG.
That’s interesting, I’ve been having way better luck digging around on ddg. Google just seems to serve up ads when I’m trying to research a company or something and won’t give me what I’m looking for.
Maybe its the types of things I search for though. It’s really hard to sayI think a large part of it is whether you know what you’re searching for already. If you have a good idea of what it is already then you can generally find it. If you’re already good at using search terms or syntax it’s always helpful but it was the same for Google.
Simply put though Google just scrapes waaaaaaay more data so it’s going to have more to index from.
Either way it’s just one tool. Just like I’m using Bing for porn over either lol.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/
DDG is bing though, is it not?
The ai results from Google I have been getting are less helpful than two specific searches. It could be because of how we search for things and it is definitely getting messed with because of seo weighting and ai targeting those tools, so I think a better option would be to teach people how to actually use the search engines properly instead of just sitting back and letting ais pick up slack.
My scenario is that I use chatgpt to get context and terminology in the area I’m researching.
I then know how to do more specific Google searches (only 1/2).
So effectively 11-12 searches vs 2.
I guess it adds up to 12 searches worth of environmental impact with chatgpt+Google (10 searches worth from chatgpt, 2 from Google)
When I use Google alone it’s often the same as that if not more. Sometimes it’s less if I already know the subject matter, but in those scenarios I would usually give just Google a go first anyway.
Basically chatgpt often either gives me the answer or a much better starting place for what to Google.
I don’t understand the chatgpt bit still. When you say you need more context on the subject matter, you could search for the wiki or a forum and get the same information chatgpt is pulling without the impact.
AI has a negative impact on the environment today (because of energy use) but it could also result in breakthroughs in battery and power generation technology that enable us to overcome our energy problems. It’s already having a huge impact with things like medicine and was a key component in recent advancements in fusion reactor design (which would be the thing that saves us from our energy problems).
It’s not all LLM and image generation.
but it could also
If the last 20 years has taught us anything, I think it should be to hold back on assuming that technology makes the world better without significant drawbacks.
Angry and defensive? Sounds like they are saying AI is ten times less efficient than what we’ve already built but they are fine with that because of the convenience the new tool offers them. They seem like they are attempting humor more than expressing anger to me.
They seem like they are attempting humor
Ha, yes, “bullshit alarmist prop” truly is a very funny phrase!
Yep, I’m familiar with it. More from previous comments since these disingenuous memes get pedaled here regularly. People love to spout stats about AI in data centers that aren’t just used for AI without having any sense of how much CO2 is produced from really really common stuff lol. Let alone it being contingent on being run in non-renewable powered areas.
1 AI search = 10 google searches. https://www.snexplores.org/article/green-artificial-intelligence-less-energy-ai-climate
How about watching TikTok? 30 minutes of video daily = 28kg of carbon a year. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/social-media-emissions-carbon-footprint/ or https://www.comparethemarket.com.au/energy/features/social-carbon-footprint-calculator/ or https://yoast.com/carbon-footprint-of-website/
Oh no 1/5 a city’s water! They use 770,000 gallons a day… So it uses 154,000 gallons of water for an entire piece of critical infrastructure that keeps the internet running. For the entire data center lol.
https://www.newsweek.com/why-ai-so-thirsty-data-centers-use-massive-amounts-water-1882374
A real common citation is how much carbon it takes to initially train these too. 500 tons of carbon dioxide… That’s the only 33/334,000,000 Americans worth of CO2 for the year lol.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-ton-carbon-dioxide
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ais-climate-impact-goes-beyond-its-emissions/
1 image of a girl with 5 tits
Username checks out.
That’s 7 tits.
This guy counts
Those are Great
One is blue
A tits a tit. I don’t care what color they are, big or smole.
I love them all.
It’s a nice set of peckers.
This comment isn’t about the genocide in Palestine. You’re complicit in the system and endorsing genocide.
Fuck off. This is irrelevant and unnecessary.
This dude is an asshole who endorses vandalizing public libraries if it supports his political narrative. If he’s in favor of people shouting their opinion where it isn’t wanted, them I’m sure he’ll be in favor of my comment.
Kinda wish the people I rent from would do this. They keep theirs at like 65 and I’ve been freezing my nuts off in their basement all summer. It’s their house and they deserve to be comfortable in it but damn. It’s a good excuse to keep active I guess.
79 °F (26 °C)?! That’s the unbearable temperature you need the AC for. If that was the limit, there’d be no point in having it, at least where I am. 20 °C (68 °F) is room temp and comfortable, although I’d prefer 18 °C (64 °F).
I guess it would depend of humidity level. I lucky enough to not have very humid warmer temperature where I am, but I could imagine how it could be a problem in other part of the world.
In the Caribbean, people laugh at you if it’s 26C and you turn a fan on.
But that’s where it’s hot to slightly cool for the entire year. You can get used to that. Where I live, it can go anywhere from 35C to -17C throughout the year. As soon as you’re used to one extreme, it’s over and you head towards the other extreme.
The problems start when you don’t get a stable enough period of either to acclimate
79F is a cool summer day in my part of the US.
That’s the low during summer.
No, that’s the temp they recommend to set the AC too in order to save power.
And I’m saying it’s insane that that’s where we’re at.
I prefer it colder when I sleep, but am usually comfortable up until about 72°F (22°C) during the day. But I live in the Southeastern US, so hot (and humid) is something you adapt to.
Outside, it’s currently 93°F (~34°C), humidity of 55% and the “feels like temp” is 105°F (40.6°C). We’re under a heat advisory until 19:00, which is common in the summer
Unfortunately… the new place I’m renting has an A/C that can’t keep up. Sometimes, it’ll reach 79°F (26°C) with the A/C just running up my electric bill non-stop. It’s somehow bearable though, and doesn’t feel as hot as I would expect, so that’s good. Blackout curtains, some fans, and a portable A/C in one room if you need to cool back down (like after a shower); it’s manageable/comfortable enough, until we can find something else.
It’s not my preference, but I guess being acclimated to the heat down here at least helps a bit. Can’t wait to move somewhere a little more arid, maybe with a true 4 seasons kind of weather
Why would you need to cool down after a shower? Showers have usually have the possibility to dispense cold water.
Where i live in central Europe most houses dont have ACs and 20 years ago during the hottest times of summer you’d reach that indoors with keeping blinds shut and airing out at night. Nowadays 30°C+ indoors as hottest summer temperatures is pretty common. At 26°C you can still function somewhat. Especially when you are used to these temperatures it is still fine for office work.
My electricity company says 76 is a good target, and I’ve grown accustomed to it. If sedentary, it actually feels a little cold. People acclimate to their local climate (last summer, daily highs were 100-110 for something like 3 months straight where I live).
God I hate global warming. 76 °F (24.5 °C) would traditionally be the hottest summer temp overall. Now we get above 30 sometimes even here in Scandinavia, and it’s absolutely unbearable when you’re not used to it.
79 is where I set my air to be when it’s 105 outside. Gawd I wish it was 79 outside.
My balls would freeze off in 18C mate what the hell
26 is okay, 30+ is hot
We have different origins, I guess.
I’m built for the artic, I run a window a/c at night set at 62 even though we have central air, and I use it in the winter too. I work too hard to be uncomfortable in my home.
I feel you. We don’t have AC, but have the bedroom window open at night from April and a fan on all night from May.
It was near 100 °F across most of the US last week lol
Holy shit! That’s insane!
Yeah it’s a really good thing global warming is a liberal conspiracy, otherwise I’d be starting to get reallllll nervous right now.
We’re so into pushing the limits of AI, but we’re forgetting about the important stuff, like making sure everyone has power when the weather goes crazy. It’s like we’re so focused on the shiny new toy that we’re ignoring the basics. It’s like we’re trading our populations health for a few cool pictures. We need to think about the bigger picture and make sure we’re not sacrificing what really matters for the sake of technology.
“we”
“forgetting”
Oh everyone is into toys and roleplaying right now. That’s the theme of the era.
Pretend.
Pretend to do business like your daddy and then sit back and watch number go up. Pretend the new algorithm system is some super future app. Pretend we can just undo it and that we really have control over everything we do.
Heck, even most politicians aren’t actually bringing plans but simply roleplaying what they think is the party or level of conservativeness needed to just make it work a little longer.
No plans. No thoughts towards the future. Just now and how to make it feel more right than be.
We are an emotional species, it’s always been entirely about feelings and games of pretend. We briefly dabbled with the idea that we were a species of reason and logic, but the advent of being able to share our thoughts and ideas with anyone, anywhere, instantly, has dashed all our hopes that we can rise above our biological nature. We simply cannot handle things we weren’t designed by evolution to handle, and as soon as we get distressed, our brains work overtime to invent a story to explain how we feel.
You do this a thousand times a day about small things. The brain doesn’t care if the story it presents you makes sense, it just has to tie every feeling to something it thinks it knows. Which is why you have doctors and nurses becoming anti-vax science deniers and why so many people are so ready to accept an alternative view of the universe even if makes no sense and there’s no evidence for it.
We are now currently making machines that can connect with those emotional responses and create new stories for us and make us feel things. This should be incredibly worrying, even as we’re suffering under climate change.
You should check out Adam Curtis’ “century of the self”, might be up your alley.
It’s funny that the way western Roman empire declined in public image is not the way that really happened, but we are still trying to imitate it.
Cause in reality it was very agile. Late Romans really wanted to keep relevance and they managed to do that, but they also made the possible adversaries just as relevant and had too much infighting.
While our time imitates that empty helpless shell with nice looks from stupid movies which suddenly gets destroyed.
A weird thought.
People don’t know these things or they assume and project the idea all they did was have power and that’s all that needs to be done to maintain it.
Maybe it’s our attention spans are shorter to even deal with it, maybe it’s just that we are so comfortable in our existence plus so overwhelmed by knowledge that it’s easy to just pick parts you like and assume it will all be fine without the struggle. But we are to busy lying to ourselves, and just carrying on as expected I think, to pivot until forced.
or they assume and project the idea all they did was have power and that’s all that needs to be done to maintain it.
Yes. And those people who for some reason are near power are very arrogant and think that abusing it is how you achieve things.
There’s been a time in my childhood where I thought that the humanity will become better and kinder, if we make everyone play non-rigged multiplayer games again and again, so that everyone sees how these things really work.
My childhood with Travian and MMOs and WarCraft III and browser RPGs has definitely taught me some things in that area.
Not sure if today’s multiplayer games generally lacking this effect (except for Eve, maybe, but it’s unplayable with ADHD, thus for me) is a result of some targeted policy (as in conspiracy) or just evolution.
Who’s “we”? Big corporations? Because the average Joe doesn’t give a shit about pushing the limits of AI.
Royal “we”, as in humanity. Your statement may be valid that the average Joe does not care, but it is important. Just as it was important to develop electricity to what is the modern grid today.
Startups can easily raise 7-figures by adding AI to their proposals and get seed money.
We struggle to fulfill GoFundMes for small town projects.
Humanity is doomed. (And I didn’t even talk about the disgustingly gross allocation of funding for weapons of war vs helping the poor)
Judging by half of Lemmy and R*ddit, I don’t think many of us tech folk care about GenAI
We have the combination of knowing a little bit about how it works while also not trying to fire a bunch of humans or sell some shiny new product while the getting is good.
Gee almost as if capitalism is the actual underlying issue.
The really juicy bit is the hypocrisy of asking common people to refrain from consuming.
“Fuck you plebe” would at least have the positive of being honest.
That’s history. The ones with the means hoard anything of value while blaming the commons for their problems. Doesn’t matter if it’s the Irish Potato Famine or telling us global warming is our fault because we didn’t buy enough greenwashed shit to fix it.
The Irish famine was more of a result of imperial policy. It’s about genocidal states, not capitalism. I mean, yes, most of Ireland was owned by landlords residing elsewhere, and “protection” of their rights was one of the reasons, but there were also things quite obviously showing the intent, like widespread destruction of church records and local history.
It can both be about profit and genocide. They can exist at the same time. IOW, genocide can be profitable.
There really was a motive, if you wish, to use the land freed by expelled (or dead) tenants for something else.
I just don’t like blaming things on markets and profit motives and capitalism in general, because “tit for tat” in human interactions is not something you can just replace ideologically. It’s in our nature. The sane approach is to make it work in less catastrophic ways, like with sports and video games and martial arts and adult entertainment.
I think profit and power, or the lack thereof, can be the root of a lot of these awful human traits. It can just be straight up greed driven by a few looking to gain power and/or money that push an agenda of [insert tried and true bogeymen here like xenophobia, religion, racism, etc.] to create motives and instabity to trigger the wars. It could be genuine problems like economic issues or severe agricultural deficiency, via real misfortune or more likely due to greed, corruption, and mismanagement by the country’s leadership. Even religion can be the rationalization, a tit-for-tat, but nonetheless the end result is to take that the enemy has. It doesn’t have to be formalized markets or capitalism.
Free market economics are going to slurp any extra watt as long as it’s capable of making a modicum of profit, unless it is just told “no”. The private sector is going to have to pay far more for their power, or else we’ll never reach NET zero emissions.
“bUt ThInK aBoUt ThE eCoNoMy!!”
- Everytime, anyone every mentions any of the many unfair advantages that businesses are getting.
Just replace “economy” with “rich peoples money” to translate.
Perhaps people would give a shit about the economy if we could afford to own a house?
There’s no free market. Free market would mean no copyright, no patents, no brand protection. With real free market (provided you have endless energy from Satan knows where to support that state of things) we’d have noname small to medium businesses coming and going, bigger corporations existing for very complex supply chains and\or some advantageous trade secrets.
That would potentially cause stagnation in some long perspective, but fix the current situation.
Are you suggesting we harvest portals to hell for unlimited free energy? Genius!
Well, there is a joke about Chernobyl station fulfilling the 5-year plan for energy output in 5 seconds.
I meant that to protect that free market from various people trying to make it less free in their favor you’d need that energy. Which is why it’ll never reach that state.
And removing those very important limitations I named is very hard, even unrealistic maybe, but that doesn’t mean that it’s adequate to pretend that a market including them is free. They change everything.
I was referencing Doom, where free energy was one of the excuses for the hell portals.
