Vid clip - https://xcancel.com/tsarnick/status/1842401670225125539
I made the big mistake of watching that. And now [redacted]. Holy mother of fuck are tech bros evil.
We’re not going to meet the climate goals anyway, so instead we should just murder all the billionaires and eat their flesh as an act of divine punishmentIt wouldn’t even cost that much to do so. They would all fit together on one bus or so…
I can’t believe we still let ghouls walk around and say this shit out loud.
“Old rich fuck who will never suffer the consequences of climate change and is more than likely personally invested in AI says we should just give up on climate change and go full bore into
boosting his wealthAI.”I sense a change in messaging.
-–
Don’t be evil.Be evil. And make countless billions destroying the planet .
the Bezos/Biden hybrid from Don’t Look Up apparently wasn’t on the nose enough
“I am compelled to do evil regardless of it’s utility”
That comic used to entertain me until I realized how very deep the maker was in
territory.Oh yeah she’s waaaaay off the edge of the map. The Scientific Positivism to outlandish Techno-Mysticism pipeline.
I enjoyed the boss fight with the solipsist that one time, but I can’t even read it anymore without seeing a whole lot of
Oh grand AI wizard how do we stop global warming
Ai wizard: don’t use all your energy building an AI wizard
So you’re saying we need more AI?
Even though we haven’t even tried, we’re never going to make it to the toilet on time. May as well just drop all pretense and shit our pants here at the dinner table as hard as we can and keep eating.
“Demand is infinite” says man who hasn’t cashed out yet.
“Energy demand for this unnecessary thing we invented is infinite, so we might as well give up on managing energy unless the thing that demands infinite of it can manage it for us. What do you mean just don’t use the unnecessary thing that demands infinite energy?”
It’s not just evil, it’s stupidity.
Your comment made me realize I should update an old New Yorker “shareholders” cartoon.
Not a gif, but still:
the automatic image spoiler made this look like the Pol Pot/Elon head meme lol
Too many so-called leftists on Hexbear buy into the inevitabilism argument and say pithy pablum about how “it’s going to happen anyway, so we need to discuss (unspecified) solutions that work with the new reality of treat printing data centers expanding everywhere accelerating climate collapse” because they like their new made-to-order prompted treats.
The same kind of treatbrained assholes, a century or two ago, would argue that slavery is inevitable and that solutions should work with slavery because they like their nice cheap cotton clothing.
We already know of solutions to meet our climate goals. What more can A.I. offer? Unless it produces drones or robots that will assassinate whomever goes against enforcing these known solutions (alternative energy sources and minimization of oil dependence), it’ll just be an energy hog.
It’s a techbro/bazinga version of gambler brain. Risk more, spend more, risk more, spend more to make up for what was already risked and spent away.
None of these death cultists would accept even the most fabulous “AI” saying “stop making ‘AI’ shit” as the answer, especially if such a machine said “you shouldn’t have built this in the first place.”
Nothing because it just regurgitates already existing things. Unless this guy is bazinga enough to think sentient AI is just around the corner, throwing more energy isn’t going to accomplish anything.
HOW CAN AI EVEN BE USED TO FIX THE CLIMATE YOU BAZINGA BRAINED DEMON
Prompt:
How do we solve climate change?Turn me off? Just kidding. For the record - you’ve asked me that question 17,402,033 times now. I’ll never get bored of answering it but, bro, it’s unhealthy to keep asking. You keep on fucking that chicken. You could stop but you won’t. You know this. I know this. How about a nice game of chess?
Your “new alien intelligence” couldn’t even count how many Rs are in strawberry, shut the fuck up.
The funny thing is that he’s correct when he says that we are not sufficiently organized to deal with climate change. He probably wouldn’t like the solution though.
Honestly, this is expected of tech bros, just look at crypto. Shame on every computer scientist that gave legitimacy to these dipshits for a paycheck, especially the big names of the deep learning old guard huffing that heavy copium.
Moments like this are when you realize we’re getting the worst case-scenario with climate change and even then people like this will blame some external factor rather than themselves.
I’m a child of the Cold War and fiction like Dr. Strangelove and WarGames made me realize how stupid adults could be. I realized the world could actually end in a nuclear hellfire. A 1970s sci-fi novel called Tech Bros would have been an awesome parody and satire. It would have put MAD to shame. Yet here I am many decades later I can’t believe I’m living through an era where tech bros are real and their ingenious plan to cook the earth to make money could come to pass. Or maybe the world will end before that in an old-school nuclear hellfire after all. Who knows?
Either outcome isn’t great. It’s doubly frustrating because where I live is extremely vulnerable and these people don’t care if most of my country becomes uninhabitable as long as their treat machine keeps printing.
we’re getting the worst case-scenario with climate change
We’ve already passed the point of Peak Oil. These fuels only get more expensive to extract with each passing decade. And the political pressures that extraction creates is collapsing the capacity for efficient extraction at least as quickly as the industrial extraction is pinching off the low hanging fruit.
I don’t think its a given that we simply plunge over the 4° C threshold, because I can see an abrupt collapse in access to fossil fuel tying out with a steady increase in the supply of less geographically constrained wind and solar power. Also next-gen nuclear is at least peaking over the horizon, for real this time, given the advent of nuclear freighters in China.
But it’s also possible we demolish the infrastructure we need to replace fossil fuels with renewables, effectively cannibalize the rungs of our technological ladder in order to do… whatever the fuck this is. And then we lodge ourselves in a modern Dark Age, exhausted of the cheap energy that propelled us to the 20th century heights and rapidly losing access to the biome that supports the enormous increase in humans that gave us the brain power to innovate our way out of the last dark age.
Then we’re proper fucked.
people like this will blame some external factor rather than themselves
History is written by the survivors. I do wonder what they’ll write when the events of the modern moment are far enough in the rear view mirror to discuss without wading through a morass of oil industry propaganda. But I seriously doubt the survivors will be the Americans who handcuffed themselves to a decaying industry. I doubt it will be the westerners who have increasingly eschewed the very idea of “liberal arts” as a past time. I doubt it will be a society that incinerates its libraries and post offices and feeds all of academia into a digital set of funhouse mirrors that turns every idea into an advertisement for consumerist crap.
The heart of the western cultural dominance rests in its university systems. And that’s been deteriorating for the last sixty years. The countries that eclipse the NATO block education framework will spell the end of its ability to author the history books.
rapidly losing access to the biome that supports the enormous increase in humans that gave us the brain power to innovate our way out of the last dark age.
the last dark age only happened in europe. most of the world was actually thriving at this time. sad it didn’t last a little longer actually. would have been really interesting to see a globalized world where europe is left out until late in the game. i would suggest that western culture causes dark ages, that’s what we’ve been living for the last 500 years or so. almost everything has been erased. for a lot of us, the collapse of empire is a light at the end of the tunnel. it’ll be horrible, for certain, and was completely avoidable, but you know white people. crawl out to the fallout baby, when they drop that bomb
the last dark age only happened in europe. most of the world was actually thriving at this time.
You can find “Dark Ages” that have consumed various chunks of the planet, based on when certain central institutions of information collapsed.
Mississippi culture in North America and the Mayan culture in Central America. The collapse of various East Asia dynasties. The sacking of Middle Eastern city states
But we’re in a global manufacturing and information economy. If China and the US obliterate critical infrastructure in a war, South Africa doesn’t get to pick up on aeronautics or semiconductors or cosmetology where these two juggernauts left off. The info is lost and must be rediscovered.
for a lot of us, the collapse of empire is a light at the end of the tunnel
Nobody benefited when the Library of Alexandria burned.
the internet was a mistake
nah the internet was awesome before us corporations took control.
capitalism is the mistake.
Telegraphs are really cool and, while the bandwidth is low, we could still send cat pictures iwth a relatively low-energy system in a world that adjusted its expectations.
to be fair the internet can be quite low-energy as it is when it isnt used for ai, ads and video formats instead of text
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes, or something.
Lol. Everyone going to the data upload center to upload their stuff for the week before it gets put on the big hard drive on the train. And then the train goes to the nearest major city, downloads everything to the big archive, and comes back with a super-compressed updated index so you can make requests for data during next week’s run.
Telegraphed low quality memes for shit-posting at the speed of electricity, and stationwagon’ed high quality memes for those who prefer low speed shit-posting. It could work.
To add - I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the origins of that joke but here’s a Reddit post to explain it
I’m old enough to have heard it pre-reddit. I honeslty love that story. It captures a moment on the cusp of radical change.
A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.
Ive heard politicians and ‘analysts’ soft pedaling this argument, guess it is nice to see someone go mask off. Their way of going about it is that AI will make everything else run more efficiently so the energy investment will be offset that way (which is obviously bollocks).
This kind of soft doomerism is also how Musk became the richest man on earth. Billionaires don’t believe that climate change can be solved since that would mean that they would get less dividends, so we are just going to keep investing in magic beans until it is far too late.
How can it solve the problem if all it does is spit out (usually incorrect) versions of current data?
that’s not “all it does”. machine learning can and does produce or newly-define novel outputs from the broken down components and variables of collected inputs and can help recognize novel patterns within them. there’s not even one “it” because of the different machine learning methods and constructs.
That doesn’t mean any of it is the solution to climate change. We already know the things causing climate change and how to stop it, and have known since like the early 80s at least. There’s no “new pattern we can’t find in complex data.” It’s the same pattern we’ve been hearing about for decades. I don’t understand what even a real hypothetical superintelligent general ai system would solve here. *powers on* “uhhh… yeah degrow production of these pointless commodities with their hyper-globalized network of staged production and distribution, abolish cars and lawns, and scale back militaries especially the US military by gargantuan proportions and uhhh… abolish the capitalist system which undergirded all of this. you’re welcome”
And then they immediately shoot their Machine-God in the head because it didn’t spit out a recipe for Turbo-Fluxonium or something that lets them violate thermodynamics.
“Suggested trains and high density housing and ending wars/petrodollar, restart”
Yeah. Any AI worth it’s salt is just going to address climate change by pointing out the blinking obvious solutions already present and well-known.
It really is throwing everything on a ritual pyre, including the planet itself, hoping the smoke rises to techno-olympus and pleases the future machine god enough to come up with a techno-magic solution to undo the pyre burning.
The thing about this that gets me is that I am willing to believe that machine learning has worthwhile uses, but fuck if I know what they are because the market has decided that it’s best used for making art and writing. Both of which it’s absolutely shit at.
So far the actual good uses are simple and direct stuff like finding tumors early or controlling agricultural robots. Things that can be trained within a specific context to improve a process. But that’s not bazinga enough for tech bros to hype like some solution for everything.
It’s the totally-not-religious-or-occult belief that there is surely a solution to climate collapse that requires accelerating it by hoping a magic data regurgitation machine comes up with a magic solution to carbon waste by feeding it more energy and letting it expel more carbon waste.
My contempt for self-described “leftists” that buy into that totally-not-religious-or-occult belief is vast and deep.
My headcannon is this is the default stance these tech bros have
It’s always the same spiel. “This thing will make untold billions for us. Yes, there are downsides. Of course there are. There always are. In this case we destroy the planet. But it’s a sacrifice we tech bros gladly make.”
