Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”
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data centers are mainly air-cooled, and two innovations contribute to the water waste.
the first one was "free cooling", where instead of using a heat exchanger loop you just blow (filtered) outside air directly over the servers and out again, meaning you don't have to "get rid" of waste heat, you just blow it right out.
the second one was increasing the moisture content of the air on the way in with what is basically giant carburettors in the air stream. the wetter the air, the more heat it can take from the servers.
so basically we now have data centers designed like cloud machines.
Also the energy for those datacenters has to come from somewhere and non-renewable options (gas, oil, nuclear generation) also use a lot of water as part of the generation process itself and for cooling.
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This is where "universal basic income" comes into play
More broadly, I would expect UBI to trigger a golden age of invention and artistic creation because a lot of people would love to spend their time just creating new stuff without the need to monetise it but can't under the current system.
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Also the energy for those datacenters has to come from somewhere and non-renewable options (gas, oil, nuclear generation) also use a lot of water as part of the generation process itself and for cooling.
steam that runs turbines tends to be recirculated. that's already in the paper.
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This is where "universal basic income" comes into play
Unfortunately one will not lead to the other.
It will lead to the plot of Elysium.
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And a third intrinsic problem is that the current models with infinite training data have been proven to never approach human language capability, from papers written by OpenAI in 2020 and Deepmind in 2022, and also a paper by Stanford which proposes AI simply have no emergent behavior and only convergent behavior.
So yeah. Lots of problems.
While I completely agree with you, that is the one thing that could change with just one thing going right for all the groups that work on just that problem.
It's what happens after that that's scary.
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...in the same way that someone who's read a lot of books can make money by writing their own.
Do you know someone who's read a billion books and can write a new (trashy) book in 5 mins?
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I don't really agree that this is the biggest issue, for me the biggest issue is power consumption.
That is a big issue, but excessive power consumption isn't intrinsic to AI. You can run a reasonably good AI on your home computer.
The AI companies don't seem concerned about the diminishing returns, though, and will happily spend 1000% more power to gain that last 10% better intelligence. In a competitive market why wouldn't they, when power is so cheap.
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My biggest gripe with current AI is the same problem I have with anything crypto.
It's out of control power consumption relative to the problem it solves or purpose it serves.My biggest gripe with AI is the same problem I have with anything crypto
crypto: It's out of control power consumption relative to the problem it solves or purpose it serves.Don't thrown all crypto under the bus.
Only bitcoin and other proof of work protocols are power hungry. 2nd and 3rd generation crypto use mostly proof of stake and ZKrollups for security. Much more energy efficient. -
This completely ignores all the endless (open) academic work going on in the AI space. Loads of universities have AI data centers now and are doing great research that is being published out in the open for anyone to use and duplicate.
I've downloaded several academic models and all commercial models and AI tools are based on all that public research.
I run AI models locally on my PC and you can too.
That is entirely true and one of my favorite things about it. I just wish there was a way to nurture more of that and less of the, "Hi, I'm Alvin and my job is to make your Fortune-500 company even more profitable...the key is to pay people less!" type of AI.
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My biggest gripe with current AI is the same problem I have with anything crypto.
It's out of control power consumption relative to the problem it solves or purpose it serves.Here we are using recycled bags, banning straws, putting explosive refrigerant in fridges and using led lights in everything
lol, sucker. none of that does shit and industry was already destroying the planet just fine before ai came along.
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brian eno is cooler than most of you can ever hope to be.
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But you can make this argument for anything that is used to make rich people richer. Even something as basic as pen and paper is used everyday to make rich people richer.
Why attack the technology if its the rich people you are against and not the technology itself.
It's not even the people; it's their actions. If we could figure out how to regulate its use so its profit-generation capacity doesn't build on itself exponentially at the expense of the fair treatment of others and instead actively proliferate the models that help people, I'm all for it, for the record.
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That's... just not true? Current frontier AI models are actually surprisingly diverse, there are a dozen companies from America, Europe, and China releasing competitive models. Let alone the countless finetunes created by the community. And many of them you can run entirely on your own hardware so no one really has control over how they are used.
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Techno-Feudalism
I'll say it, yet again. It's just feudalism. "Techno-Feudalism" has nothing different enough to it to differentiate it as even a sub-type of feudalism. It's just the same thing all over again, using technological advances to improve the ability to monitor and impose control over the populace. Historical feudalists also leveraged technology to cement their rule (plate armor, cavalry, crossbows, cannon, mills, control of literacy, etc).
Attaching "tech" to everything makes it more palatable. Desirable even. It masks the fact that feudal lords are reinventing everything but with "tech".
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Eno is more a traditional algorist than "AI" (by which people generally mean neural networks)
I could see him using neural networks to generate and intentionally pick and loop short bits with weird anomalies or glitchy sounds. Thats the route I’d like AI in music to go, so maybe that’s what I’m reading in, but it fits Eno’s vibe and philosophy.
AI as a tool not to replace other forms of music, but doing things like training it on contrasting music genres or self made bits or otherwise creatively breaking and reconstructing the artwork.
John Cage was all about ‘stochastic’ music - composing based on what he divined from the I Ching. There are people who have been kicking around ideas like this for longer than the AI bubble has been around - the big problem will be digging out the good stuff when the people typing “generate a three hour vapor wave playlist” can upload ten videos a day…
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He's not wrong.
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My biggest gripe with AI is the same problem I have with anything crypto
crypto: It's out of control power consumption relative to the problem it solves or purpose it serves.Don't thrown all crypto under the bus.
Only bitcoin and other proof of work protocols are power hungry. 2nd and 3rd generation crypto use mostly proof of stake and ZKrollups for security. Much more energy efficient.I'm aware of this, but it still mostly just something for people speculate on. Something people buy, sit on, and then hopefully sell with a profit.
Bitcoin was supposed to be a decentralized money alternative, but the amount of people actually buying things with crypto are highly negligible.
And honestly even if was actually used for that the power consumption would still be something to discuss.
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Here we are using recycled bags, banning straws, putting explosive refrigerant in fridges and using led lights in everything
lol, sucker. none of that does shit and industry was already destroying the planet just fine before ai came along.
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My biggest gripe with AI is the same problem I have with anything crypto
crypto: It's out of control power consumption relative to the problem it solves or purpose it serves.Don't thrown all crypto under the bus.
Only bitcoin and other proof of work protocols are power hungry. 2nd and 3rd generation crypto use mostly proof of stake and ZKrollups for security. Much more energy efficient.Sure, but despite all the crypto bros assurances to the contrary, the only real-world applications for it is buying drugs, paying ransoms and getting scammed. Which means that any non-zero amount of energy is too much energy.
