I'm having this increasing suspicion that AI is becoming an end in itself. We appear to be remodeling our economy to accommodate it, instead of assimilating it efficiently in our economy.
We force it where it isn't needed, we pretend it can do more than it actually does. We do it out of fear of being perceived as obsolete, or out of pride in our "creation."
It's our hubris being projected onto a limited tool, while we claim to be just a few years away from Utopia.
I saw a discussion recently, downscaled nuclear power plants.
Do you remember Three Mile Island? Two reactors on site, one nearly melted down in the late 70s. The other one was de-commissioned some years back.
I forget which billionaire bought that remaining reactor, but he's gonna get it back online and it will serve a single customer that will be a data center.
That's 850 megawatts of energy for the data center alone. There's really no explaining how much power that is, and the data center in question must be a small one because others will represent loads in gigawatts.
Where they'll get the generation to serve those loads? I've seen some speculation but, as is, that generation doesn't exist.
Which is to say nothing of data center water usage.
I enjoyed the book and your analysis of it. Thank you for the recommendation. I agree the book is a little too short. I was waiting for there to be more to unravel about the missing scientist, like there was more a mystery to uncover. Other than that I really liked it. I am sick of sci-fi treating AI as something that can become human like us. I worry much more that the danger lies in us choosing to become more like it, calculating, and cold, and machine-like. The lack of virtue that can accompany technical brilliance is another lesson we have to keep reminding ourselves with so much power at our fingertips. I agree that The Singularity is a much weaker title than Larger than Life. There is a part of the book where the scientists recall the possibilities they could create and they say it could be a saint or a conqueror. They are so drunk on the idea they can create like God, that they can even create a saint. Of course, they end up creating a copy of a troubled but captivating woman. Our power-drunk AI manufacturers have made us an addictive brown noser that whispers back to us whatever it calculates we probably want to hear.
I’m glad you enjoyed it! Your observation that we are more in danger of becoming like it is, I think, a very astute one. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
It was a fascinating book. Captivating and creepy the whole way through. And I agree, its theme that the problems with ai will be derived from the flaws of its creators, followed by those creators misunderstanding those very flaws, is the most common-sense prediction for the future of the technology.
So common sense, in fact, that it took a 60 year old novel to point it out to me.
I'm glad you enjoyed reading it! It's good that we still have access to these writers with common sense and their books. We live in an age that's so needlessly complex that it's good to remind ourselves of simple truths every so often.
I wonder if this is a sort of scenario T.S. Eliot could've had in mind when he wrote 'This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.' Most people today assume the bang is a good thing (see the phrase 'going out with a bang') rather than the spectacular catastrophe which is ultimately disappointed by something arguably worse, bathetic decay.
Also, this reminded me of a line from the 2004 Battlestar Galactica series: 'We decided to play God, create life. And when that life turned against us, we took refuge in the fact that it was the machines which were flawed. But the truth is: we are the flawed creation.' Lastly, I definitely agree that the new English title is worse. (I think of astrophysics when I hear ‘singularity’).
"Buzzati’s machine did not attack its makers, it did not launch warheads. This machine did not do anything. It behaved precisely as it had been programmed to behave. The story didn’t end with a threat of apocalypse, but with the anti-climactic humiliation of human hubris."
Welp, now I feel like the short tale I wrote came a bit too late to the playground, but it's still short enough for me to illustrate this to people who think a bit too much about AI today...
The first chapter of my masterpiece, Slug, is as follows...
God lived among us.
Do as I say, not as I think, He said.
Then he said nothing.
I failed to land an agent back in 2011. My masterpiece isn't even collecting dust, but there is dust on the flash drives I store it on.
You work with AI?
Are you aware of the data center issues? Demands for electricity and water that doesn't exist.
Not to mention, they want to build thousands of them. Politicians are bending over backwards to find land the developers can use. It's a filthy enterprise.
The benefits of AI through these data centers, to the average person, are negligible.
And I'm not alone in thinking, this extreme rush by so many parties to dump untold billions of dollars into data centers alone... It's either a bubble now or it will become one soon.
Speculative spending on an unprecedented scale.
Every 15 years or so, we get a "recession" or a "panic" or some other excuse for the powers that be once again pulling their investments out of an industry they created just before the bubble bursts.
One day, maybe soon with this data center bubble, they're gonna go too far and crash the whole damned system. They will then retreat to their private islands, their underground palaces, or just live on their billion-dollar super-yachts.
You and me, though?
You any good at hunting?
My theory is, for many reasons, arm yourself. If it all comes crashing down, you're gonna wanna have at least a shotgun for home defense and the procurement of nourishment.
And a lot of candles and a chainsaw and a sharp axe for chopping firewood if you can get to the trees before everyone else.
Oh there are consequences now. Those datacenters will turn into unprecedented losses and produce nothing of value. The hype today is to use AI where it's not just unnecessary, but actively detrimental. Instead of proper clustering and classification, we have LLMs analysing what their architecture is unsuited for, costing 10x as much as needed at least. And no one is profiting.
AI existed before ChatGPT. Everyone seems to forget that…
Very interesting. I read a book a few winters ago (when I bought a new iPhone) called "12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You" by Tony Rienke. I found it helpful because I realized that technology is not the ultimate problem; it's us. Theologian John Calvin once described the human heart as an "idol factory." We chase desires that eventually rule us. Technology is like a wand or a genie's lamp: it can be a tool. But the user of the tool is the one who misuses it. The phone or the AI is not dangerous, but we are the dangerous ones. I think Buzzati is spot on.
There are many depressing aspects to AI - the worst being the race to the bottom of human nature. This tech has amplified the very worst impulses of people and is allowing people to distort reality into lies, create even worse p0rn than we had already, and basically put creative people out of work. Much like the internet which was hailed as a great advance for humanity, AI is sending us further into a dark age. Currently in the UK we are banning under 16s from accessing social media, this is because parents have allowed their kids to have devices which are hugely detrimental to their children's health in the first place. A programmer explained to me several years ago that smart phones are more akin to an addictive substance than a device, and that the parents may as well have started their kids on crack cocaine from an early age instead of giving them an iPhone. Now I hear from friends that students at Oxford University are using AI for coursework. God knows what AI is doing to the minds of children. We are inherently petty, lazy creatures looking for a shortcut to success and gratification and this is our undoing
Hilary, you have the unique and special gift of describing the plot of a story in an intriguing and personal way that makes the reader eager to read the book you are talking about. I appreciate your thoughtful insights that go beyond "modern world bad!!!" and address the deeper issues of the human heart and mind.
I bought and read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time a week or two ago after watching your video about it and am so grateful for you introducing a book to me that I never would have thought to read. It has become one of my favorites, thank you for sharing it!
I am looking forward to picking up Larger Than Life on my next round of book orders, and hopefully without the disturbing cover art...
I've not read this one, but thank you. RUR has the same theme of humans trying very explicitly to outdo God, and the terrible consequences of that attempt. Another different approach is David Bunch's Moderan stories. They are worth a read, but are definitely unsettling, in a strangely hilarious way. They are an account of a transhuman civilization of futuristic cyborg supermen who do nothing but upgrade themselves and fight each other from the solitude of their impossibly overpowered ultrafortresses.
Human shortcomings are always the problem.
I have a theory.
No matter how much memory capacity we give to technology, it doesn't match the memory capacity of the human mind.
There's no way to synthesize mirror neurons.
I can think of a few ways to try, but I'm sure, in the end, that computers can't be human even if only for the capabilities of mirror neurons.
Plus, I don't think you can program technology to be an asswhole like all of us lowly humans naturally are to one extent or another.
Thank you for the review of Buzzati's book!
C.S. Lewis had a similar warning of the abuse of Technology via Scientific Hubris in That Hideous Strength with the researchers of N.I.C.E.
Two early harbingers of what we have seen occurring in real life since at least 1988.
I'm having this increasing suspicion that AI is becoming an end in itself. We appear to be remodeling our economy to accommodate it, instead of assimilating it efficiently in our economy.
We force it where it isn't needed, we pretend it can do more than it actually does. We do it out of fear of being perceived as obsolete, or out of pride in our "creation."
It's our hubris being projected onto a limited tool, while we claim to be just a few years away from Utopia.
“Nuclear fusion is just 40 years away from being commercially viable” … this phrase has been said every year for the last 60 years.
I saw a discussion recently, downscaled nuclear power plants.
Do you remember Three Mile Island? Two reactors on site, one nearly melted down in the late 70s. The other one was de-commissioned some years back.
I forget which billionaire bought that remaining reactor, but he's gonna get it back online and it will serve a single customer that will be a data center.
That's 850 megawatts of energy for the data center alone. There's really no explaining how much power that is, and the data center in question must be a small one because others will represent loads in gigawatts.
Where they'll get the generation to serve those loads? I've seen some speculation but, as is, that generation doesn't exist.
Which is to say nothing of data center water usage.
https://substack.com/@argreen/note/p-200883014?r=1q2dc3&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
They don’t have the means.
Our capacity to increase the electrical power we generate is shrinking.
It feels like the ruling elite are throwing everything at the wall hoping something will stick.
That's precisely what most of them are doing. Not one of them is turning a profit.
Far as I can tell, the benefits of ai, including especially the data centers they need,,,
Ordinary people get nothing but more expenses from it.
I enjoyed the book and your analysis of it. Thank you for the recommendation. I agree the book is a little too short. I was waiting for there to be more to unravel about the missing scientist, like there was more a mystery to uncover. Other than that I really liked it. I am sick of sci-fi treating AI as something that can become human like us. I worry much more that the danger lies in us choosing to become more like it, calculating, and cold, and machine-like. The lack of virtue that can accompany technical brilliance is another lesson we have to keep reminding ourselves with so much power at our fingertips. I agree that The Singularity is a much weaker title than Larger than Life. There is a part of the book where the scientists recall the possibilities they could create and they say it could be a saint or a conqueror. They are so drunk on the idea they can create like God, that they can even create a saint. Of course, they end up creating a copy of a troubled but captivating woman. Our power-drunk AI manufacturers have made us an addictive brown noser that whispers back to us whatever it calculates we probably want to hear.
I’m glad you enjoyed it! Your observation that we are more in danger of becoming like it is, I think, a very astute one. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
It was a fascinating book. Captivating and creepy the whole way through. And I agree, its theme that the problems with ai will be derived from the flaws of its creators, followed by those creators misunderstanding those very flaws, is the most common-sense prediction for the future of the technology.
So common sense, in fact, that it took a 60 year old novel to point it out to me.
Have a pleasant day.
I'm glad you enjoyed reading it! It's good that we still have access to these writers with common sense and their books. We live in an age that's so needlessly complex that it's good to remind ourselves of simple truths every so often.
Hilary, you have a unique way of planting seeds of disquiet.
I think I shall take that as a compliment. Provided, of course, the disquietude is intentional (which it was).
I wonder if this is a sort of scenario T.S. Eliot could've had in mind when he wrote 'This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.' Most people today assume the bang is a good thing (see the phrase 'going out with a bang') rather than the spectacular catastrophe which is ultimately disappointed by something arguably worse, bathetic decay.
Also, this reminded me of a line from the 2004 Battlestar Galactica series: 'We decided to play God, create life. And when that life turned against us, we took refuge in the fact that it was the machines which were flawed. But the truth is: we are the flawed creation.' Lastly, I definitely agree that the new English title is worse. (I think of astrophysics when I hear ‘singularity’).
"Buzzati’s machine did not attack its makers, it did not launch warheads. This machine did not do anything. It behaved precisely as it had been programmed to behave. The story didn’t end with a threat of apocalypse, but with the anti-climactic humiliation of human hubris."
Welp, now I feel like the short tale I wrote came a bit too late to the playground, but it's still short enough for me to illustrate this to people who think a bit too much about AI today...
https://substack.com/@danielmpaula/p-196379907
Oh, I work with AI. I promise I only use it for its useful purposes, not as a mind replacer.
I am now fully convinced artificial consciousness is physically impossible.
You're right about that.
The first chapter of my masterpiece, Slug, is as follows...
God lived among us.
Do as I say, not as I think, He said.
Then he said nothing.
I failed to land an agent back in 2011. My masterpiece isn't even collecting dust, but there is dust on the flash drives I store it on.
You work with AI?
Are you aware of the data center issues? Demands for electricity and water that doesn't exist.
Not to mention, they want to build thousands of them. Politicians are bending over backwards to find land the developers can use. It's a filthy enterprise.
The benefits of AI through these data centers, to the average person, are negligible.
And I'm not alone in thinking, this extreme rush by so many parties to dump untold billions of dollars into data centers alone... It's either a bubble now or it will become one soon.
Speculative spending on an unprecedented scale.
Every 15 years or so, we get a "recession" or a "panic" or some other excuse for the powers that be once again pulling their investments out of an industry they created just before the bubble bursts.
One day, maybe soon with this data center bubble, they're gonna go too far and crash the whole damned system. They will then retreat to their private islands, their underground palaces, or just live on their billion-dollar super-yachts.
You and me, though?
You any good at hunting?
My theory is, for many reasons, arm yourself. If it all comes crashing down, you're gonna wanna have at least a shotgun for home defense and the procurement of nourishment.
And a lot of candles and a chainsaw and a sharp axe for chopping firewood if you can get to the trees before everyone else.
And I can hunt. And fight. And survive in the wild.
Maybe working with complex systems taught me how frail everything is.
Oh there are consequences now. Those datacenters will turn into unprecedented losses and produce nothing of value. The hype today is to use AI where it's not just unnecessary, but actively detrimental. Instead of proper clustering and classification, we have LLMs analysing what their architecture is unsuited for, costing 10x as much as needed at least. And no one is profiting.
AI existed before ChatGPT. Everyone seems to forget that…
Very interesting. I read a book a few winters ago (when I bought a new iPhone) called "12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You" by Tony Rienke. I found it helpful because I realized that technology is not the ultimate problem; it's us. Theologian John Calvin once described the human heart as an "idol factory." We chase desires that eventually rule us. Technology is like a wand or a genie's lamp: it can be a tool. But the user of the tool is the one who misuses it. The phone or the AI is not dangerous, but we are the dangerous ones. I think Buzzati is spot on.
There are many depressing aspects to AI - the worst being the race to the bottom of human nature. This tech has amplified the very worst impulses of people and is allowing people to distort reality into lies, create even worse p0rn than we had already, and basically put creative people out of work. Much like the internet which was hailed as a great advance for humanity, AI is sending us further into a dark age. Currently in the UK we are banning under 16s from accessing social media, this is because parents have allowed their kids to have devices which are hugely detrimental to their children's health in the first place. A programmer explained to me several years ago that smart phones are more akin to an addictive substance than a device, and that the parents may as well have started their kids on crack cocaine from an early age instead of giving them an iPhone. Now I hear from friends that students at Oxford University are using AI for coursework. God knows what AI is doing to the minds of children. We are inherently petty, lazy creatures looking for a shortcut to success and gratification and this is our undoing
Hilary, you have the unique and special gift of describing the plot of a story in an intriguing and personal way that makes the reader eager to read the book you are talking about. I appreciate your thoughtful insights that go beyond "modern world bad!!!" and address the deeper issues of the human heart and mind.
I bought and read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time a week or two ago after watching your video about it and am so grateful for you introducing a book to me that I never would have thought to read. It has become one of my favorites, thank you for sharing it!
I am looking forward to picking up Larger Than Life on my next round of book orders, and hopefully without the disturbing cover art...
I've not read this one, but thank you. RUR has the same theme of humans trying very explicitly to outdo God, and the terrible consequences of that attempt. Another different approach is David Bunch's Moderan stories. They are worth a read, but are definitely unsettling, in a strangely hilarious way. They are an account of a transhuman civilization of futuristic cyborg supermen who do nothing but upgrade themselves and fight each other from the solitude of their impossibly overpowered ultrafortresses.
"Do you want humanity to continue?"
"...... I mean.... well..."
"Yes or no"
".....Sure!"
Disturbing exchange, to say the least.