Total Cost of AI?

I was listening to the latest episode of The Important Thing, where they meander around the implications of generative AI. One form of the question they articulated was what happens when stuff is cheaply generated for, as I heard it, by such AIs and for everyone. The question that came to mind for me was: is it even cheap? I don’t know. I haven’t done my homework, so I am speaking for myself in articulating this question — I have a vague sense of recently seeing some reporting on energy usage by these breakthrough AIs (one reason they’re in the cloud is it isn’t practical to run this client-side, they need the cloud)… but I don’t know the particulars, or how it compares to say, crypto mining.

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May 10, 2023

I wonder what we’re missing from Dominion settling with Fox.

Apr 18, 2023

For all the warranted critiques of the New York Times, and laments about the arc of newspapers, I am grateful for the Metro Diaries feature of that paper. I have been reading it, on and off, for 25 years.

I think I have to give my Dad credit, to whom I don’t give a lot of credit, for pointing it out to me in a print edition of the Sunday New York Times about that long ago. Back when the Sunday Times was a big thick paper, and the Metro section (if you bought it within range of the city, at least) seemed bigger than my local city paper (with the ads removed, anyway).

Mar 13, 2023

Fuck.

“The world will likely breach the internationally agreed-upon climate change threshold in about a decade, and keep heating to break through a next warming limit around mid-century even with big pollution cuts, artificial intelligence predicts in a new study that’s more pessimistic than previous modeling.” (Associated Press)

Feb 6, 2023

Appreciating, as I think I have nearly every year since it began, the “State of the World” thread on the Well, from Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky.

Jan 7, 2023

All the local broadcast weather reports I heard the past couple of days celebrated the 10 degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer than normal temperatures. Which was depressing. Currently put it in real context.

Nov 3, 2022

"... There is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. 'A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world [than] its grandparents did,' McGuire insists."

Aug 3, 2022

I am not a fan of the chumps who introduced and voted for this amendment, but I am disgusted with everyone—the other 97—who voted against it.

Aug 3, 2022

I was going to say this shit is killing me, but that’s not a great idiom when it is literally killing other people.

Jun 8, 2022

This (the rest of this) is a fucking war

MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule. — “the scenario which was the least closest fit to the latest empirical data happens to be the most optimistic pathway known as ‘SW’ (stabilized world), in which civilization follows a sustainable path and experiences the smallest declines in economic growth—based on a combination of technological innovation and widespread investment in public health and education.

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Jul 16, 2021