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There have been good discussions on the usefulness and prospects for Augmented Intelligence in this forum. However, I believe this particular aspect has not yet been addressed: AI requires a great deal of energy (in the form of electricity). This WSJ piece has some of the details.
A few key passages:
Some experts project that global electricity consumption for AI systems could soon require adding the equivalent of a small country’s worth of power generation to our planet.
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According to de Vries’ estimates, the amount of electricity required to power the world’s data centers could jump by 50% by 2027, thanks to AI alone.
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Competition between AI service providers such as Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and others is pushing them to rely on bigger—and more electrically needy—AI models. The bigger the AI model, the more things it can do, and in general the better it is at a wider variety of tasks.
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On the other hand, there has been a great deal of research showing that AI models could be made much more efficient than they are now. Many companies are working on smaller, less power-hungry AI models that, they claim, are just as effective as the bigger ones.
Obviously, one should take all such projections with a grain of salt. But there is no doubt that doing ~5 trillion multiply-accumulates per second (my estimate for an interaction with GPT-4) requires a lot of electrons to flow.
What are some implications of this basic reality?
- Investing in energy production is probably a very effective strategy for wealth creation, even if you don’t have strong technical knowledge about the underlying algorithms.
- If you do have good technical knowledge, looking for innovations that will produce smaller but still effective models is probably a good strategy.
- Environmentalism will be a vector that is used to impede the progress of this technology. Alex Epstein’s point that energy use is critical to human flourishing will take on even more salience.
- “Controlling” the technology – if that is your goal – can ultimately be as simple as flipping a switch.
The philosophical (metaphysical) point is that these algorithms are not disembodied “spirits”; they are human-produced tools that require physical components to function. This is sometimes easy to forget when you are typing text that is transmitted to the “cloud.” That cloud is really an enormous facility with tens of thousands of incredibly complex (and beautiful) machines merrily chugging along, moving electrons through a truly incredible sequence of transformations, resulting in the answers we requested.
We take this “magic” for granted, too often.
/sb
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Re: Roger Zimmerman’s post 104002 of 12/18/23
A remedy to this taking-for-granted thinking is Ayn Rand’s Causality Walk.
Now, it doesn’t have to be a walk per se, as some of the causal nodes for our technology are widely spaced out. Though, it is interesting and enlightening to see some of these nodes in person, at least once in one’s life.
As we are sitting in our homes, offices, or cafes, our first nodes are our phones, laptops, or desktops and our using them. The next node is how these things are powered. Our laptops and phones go on chargers from time to time. Our desktops are permanently coupled to the wall’s outlet. Electricity is wired into the building from wires over the streets, which connect ultimately to a power plant. When you walk or drive down a street, take a look at all the wires, the transformers, and the different kinds of insulators. Among those electricity wires are other wires for phone signals and internet signals, etc.
The cell phone towers are another node. And we can see at their bases they are connected to the same electricity sources. And we can find the local power plant that is supplying our locale. Then we can imagine all the nodes leading to it.
Life, at all, arose from a concentration of energy that allowed life to emerge from self-organizing non-living molecules. Evolution is powered by living things finding new sources of energy and developing new ways to extract it. Humans ultimately evolved and reason emerged as the next level up of energy processing. When the industrial revolution came about, life expectancy leaped, showing our superior ability to concentrate and more efficiently utilize and organize energy. Life requires a surplus of energy; this requirement is a thread from the very first microscopic, non-living forms that came to make us to us. And as we advance, we require more and more energy.
If you have read Dr. Gena Gorlin’s most recent Substack about the project she is working on with using Chat GPT for psychology self-analysis, you can see a new node emerging of causal efficacy in the energy-intensive advancement and organization of human life: To “raise the psychological ceiling of humanity,” to turn life into a greater and greater thoughtful enterprise. It is reminiscent of Rand’s asking what if men had advanced to giants earlier? Where would we be now?!
And the mind and life of man is energy-intensive. We already know of the biological energy use of our brains. This is just our brains! And what we think of and create requires so much energy than we are already using.
Reason has no limits and to have no limits is to require an unending supply of energy. It’s not just an attack on the lives of man, it is an attack on the minds of man. It’s an attack on reason. Attacking energy use is the sin qua non of attacks. These are the attacks we must fend off. Reason the supreme must be protected. The life of man the ultimate must be protected.
/sb
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Re: Roger Zimmerman’s post 104002 of 12/18/23
I like the use of the term Augmented Intelligence. It emphasizes the role of the mind that is being leveraged and enhanced by this technology.
I cannot think of any alteration of the world around us that does not require energy. I submit that there is a strong correlation between the impact of any such alteration and the amount of energy required. There’s no reason AI should be an exception. So, yes, the environmental nihilists will be the enemies of AI, perhaps doubly so because AI so clearly augments the mind.
*sb
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