mbgerring

No, they do not, they very clearly model the medium. Why do you believe otherwise?

Yes, we have been. Writing software was always the 21st century equivalent of being a skilled factory worker. Nothing at all like law, medicine, or real engineering, all of which require real credentials, licenses, and meaningful accountability for the practitioner if their work breaks something.

> We discovered a sophisticated recording device

did you though

State sponsored intelligence agencies can point a camera at an exterior window and reconstruct dialogue from the vibrations. This was a loose, hand-soldered ESP32. Settle down.

Big picture, where this leads is a lot of physical stuff just getting unplugged from the Internet.

It's very easy to see how this goes — one side of the ledger is the cost savings you get from remote monitoring, remote control, automated cloud backups of access logs from employee badges, or whatever dumb reason this system was internet-connected in the first place.

On the other side of the ledger is the potential cost and probability of a shutdown from a cyberattack, whether that's from a belligerent state actor, a malfunctioning or maliciously deployed AI agent swarm, weird accelerationist hackers, or whatever, plus the cost of constantly defending and hardening systems against attack.

Chances are, the cost/benefit analysis will heavily favor just unplugging the thing from the Internet.

That’s correct, one of the many gigs I did during my 10-month search for a new full-time job this year was working 11 hours, 6 days a week, under the blazing desert sun, building solar and battery systems at Burning Man to take diesel generators offline. What were you trying to say about that here?

You, and people like you, really need to get it through your head that most people need to work to eat.

"Oh ho ho, unemployed? Why not spend the thousands of dollars you certainly have just lying around to dick around with chatbots, with all the spare time you have?"

If this is how you're thinking, you are not living in reality.

This is confusing. "Thinking" has been a hobby, a luxury reserved for the wealthy, for most of human history. "Thinking as a hobby" was the Renaissance — a large enough agricultural surplus enabled a small handful of people to spend most of their time just thinking.

> It's not clear what this fad of attributing everything an AI does to the human prompting it is supposed to accomplish.

It's meant to assign agency and accountability where it actually lies instead of mystifying it with anthropomorphic language.

Failing to do so has real and harmful consequences, such as enabling OpenAI to escape accountability for clearly criminal behavior.

I encountered this argument from EA cult recruitment literature back when it was written, and it seemed like bullshit then, too.

> many people are already focused on it, and it is therefore not an especially "neglected" area.

OK. Spend an afternoon reading about the current funding environment for decarbonization projects, vs the amount of capital available for AI, which is driving an increase in carbon emissions.

When I first encountered this argument back in the 20-teens, it didn't make sense, because there was effectively no forward progress on decarbonization. Much has changed since then, and the transition is moving, but it's moving in fits and starts, in punctuated bursts driven by reactions to long-predicted disasters actually showing up at the doorsteps of people with money (see, for example, the explosion in climate tech funding following San Francisco's "orange sky day" in 2020).

If we had an AI-data-center-boom-sized pile of cash to set on fire, we'd have completed the clean energy transition already. What's happening instead is that any hard tech company related to reducing emissions that hasn't already pivoted to some kind of AI-related marketing message is struggling to stay afloat, while losses at the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic are expected to accelerate, and everyone seems fine with that.

All the EA language around climate change is CYA bullshit. If this was true:

> Working on this issue seems to be among the best ways of improving the long-term future we know of..."

Then the above conditions would not obtain.

> AI is now capable of developing its own inference hardware

No, it isn't.

A human prompted an LLM to build a software simulation environment for hardware design, enabling an LLM, when prompted by a human, to optimize hardware designs against constraints in the simulation.

A battery will replace your generator and you are too late to stop it.

Site last modified in 2015

Lots of us working in clean energy read this book, and everything that’s happened since it was published makes the projections here useless

Right, as long as you specify “without energy storage”, renewables “can’t work alone,” even though energy storage is included in most common sense definitions of “renewables”

Thankfully, energy storage is being deployed worldwide, so this is a moot point, and renewables can and will replace fossil fuel electricity generation.

“According to my paranoid fantasy derived from internet fan fiction, worrying about currently-occurring real-world harm doesn’t make sense”

We are living through an ongoing mass extinction event of non-human species. There is a very well understood risk to the stability of human civilization resulting from global average temperatures reaching and sustaining 1.5deg above the historical average. The higher the temperature goes, the greater the risk of social collapse. We are already seeing it, and it is almost certainly going to get worse.

EA cult members do not take this very real, measurable, non-speculative danger seriously. Consequently, I don’t think they should be trusted or consulted on any subject of any importance.

They literally cannot. They can detect the user’s intent to do math, and then use a different tool to do math, hopefully with the correct inputs. The LLM is not suited to giving deterministic answers to math problems.

Times have changed my friend.

It’s extremely annoying that this was taken down, because anybody who’s followed rationalism/EA/adjacent groups since their public emergence in the last decade knows that this is true, and I really, really wish this was more commonly understood.

I was talking to a friend about the billionaire's tax and this issue came up. Here's how I see it: either individually wealthy people stay here, and we take their money to build state capacity to even out the distortions created by their wealth, or, they leave, and the distortions fix themselves.

The easiest one to point to is property prices. Wealthy people buy land, and drive up the price of land and rent for everyone else. If a lot of people suddenly make a lot of money in San Francisco, in general, for me and most of the people I know, there's no "rising tide" that lifts our boats. Our income remains the same, but our rent goes up, and maybe our lives don't make sense anymore, and we have to move.

But if there's a wealth tax, and it encourages rich people to leave the state? Awesome. Go drive up rents in Texas or Montana or somewhere else. Or pay the tax, and then the state can use that money to build affordable housing.

Before you say anything: I lived through the 90s, and you can't trick me with "WOW YOU THINK THE GOVERNMENT CAN DO THINGS? WHAT ABOUT THE DMV???" Go somewhere else.

We need to stop beating around the bush and hit these companies with severe criminal charges. There is no good reason to allow these companies to behave as if they’re above the law.

The linked article doesn’t say what you think it does.

It says that China’s use of coal this year is increasing after a multi-year trend of leveling off or decreasing, mainly because China is using coal in place of LNG imports made more expensive due to the U.S. attacks against Iran.

The overall trend is very clear — China is expanding both its supply of electricity, and generation from renewable sources, at the same time. Which we should also be doing in the United States.

This is cope. Oil, gas, and coal are dead, and with them, America’s control over the global financial system, and its political hegemony.

America is actively ceding the future to China, and our ruling class have no ideas left other than looting the place as it’s burning to the ground.

> the math doesn’t add up

There’s no way for you to know that. You don’t do the math. People like me, who work in the clean energy industry, do the math. The math works fine. You should try working as hard as the math does, instead of complaining.

Cool man, how good of a job would you do at your craft if I only gave you $5

This paper was extremely influential for me, and it’s worth reading for a perspective shift that’s not often considered in these discussions: what happens when you consider “the apocalypse” as an event in the very distant past? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325453561_Indigenou...

People have been saying this a long time, and I’ve participated in this movement, and I think we need to add something: science fiction can be gritty, realistic, and full of conflict, and also optimistic. I’ve encountered a lot of “climate fiction” that just comes off as schmaltzy, and I don’t think that does the job.

> although I doubt something else would be widespread in in just one decade.

I know this is off topic, but I feel compelled to point this out — the transition away from fossil fuels is happening extremely fast, in punctuated bursts, in broad daylight, and you still get comments like this. And meanwhile, many putatively smart people are really worried about an imminent robot apocalypse.

If I had the money to do it, I would be willing to make a large wager that neither gas-powered lawnmowers, nor lawns, nor robots capable of autonomously stealing power from your neighbor, will be common in 2035.

Not in my lifetime!

This is the missing context for NIMBYism. The legal mechanisms used to stall construction in San Francisco were created because of an explicitly racist plan to demolish people’s homes to build freeways. The people building datacenters should stop, take a breath, and think a few moves ahead about how to get to real agreement and mutual benefit with surrounding communities instead of just driving a truck over them. Nobody’s going to be happy with the consequences.