Every AI tool that is not a pet project on GitHub is hosted on the cloud. It's not even just that consumer hardware can't store the training sets, but nobody allows you to run the 'ChatGPT', 'Dall-E', 'Midjourney', 'Bard', or any of these on your local system. You go to a webpage, or Discord chat for some reason, and your consumer hardware just needs to be powerful enough to run the Javascript UI. If you're hardware can do a YouTube video, it can any AI tool that is coming down the pipeline from the major players.

I want to start this by saying, I agreed with my calculations that humans take way less power to 'train' than 'AI'. But human's don't take '20 watts' to train, there's a big setup cost which requires a surprisingly small of energy. Although it's really hard for a human to compete with the upper bound of ChatGPT's running expenses so they're shockingly energy efficient there in the same way I can't compete with the electric costs of a pocket calculator in my energy efficiency at solving math.

> "What do you mean, 20 years for humans to be "useful"? Humans 4 years old can talk, often in multiple languages, with semantic understanding even if basic. Many can even read at that age. They can do pattern recognition. They can walk around without running into things. They can perform eye-hand coordination tasks. Adolescents used to be employed to do a huge range of complicated physical tasks. They can play sports (well!). Teenagers can operate vehicles, draw, read, sing, compose and play music. This is not "takes 20 years to be useful.""

People are asking ChatGPT, DALL-E and other tools to write essays, emails, code, and draw pictures at skill levels comparable to adults. Does that mean 15 years or 25 years? Doesn't freaking matter.

Imagine buying a self driving car where it advertises being as skilled at driving as a teenager with a learners permit. I mean, from what I've seen from Tesla, that's about right but still.

In theory, the training of these trillion+ parameter models is the most expensive aspect. Humans have a very long and expensive training process. Around a quarter of our calories are used by the brain, but I'm going to ignore that distinction since you do need to interface with the outside world to train that brain.

It takes a human brain about 20 years to be useful. During that time we eat an average of 1500kCal / day = 6MJ / day, and after 20 years we've used up 45 gigajoules (12MWH). This gives us our basic MVP product. Most specialist skills require additional training so lets round this up to 20MWH. This is comparable to the energy output for a typical wind turbine in a day.

OpenAI's GPT-4 pricing is has it 'reading' and 'writing' 1000 words at a cost of $0.20. People tend to write between 1k and 10k words per day. If you go for 5k words, we need to keep a human alive for under $1.00 / day. You can do it with beans and rice but that's about it. Using these models actually seems to be more energy efficient than humans.

There are situations where people have died because they wore a seatbelt. If it jams and you can't get out of a car when it's on fire or sinking. We're talking about a statically improbable chain of events but we don't optimize for that situation.

Dietary fads based on elimination of items rarely work in people and people can't keep track of liquid calories since they aren't filling. Substitutions work great. Instead of going from soda to water, people drink soda. If you tell people that diet soda causes cancer, diet soda goes off the menu and regular soda goes back.

A can of soda has 100-150 calories. If you drink 25 or so you gain a pound from the excess calories. We know that obesity causes cancer and is one of the highest risk factors outside of exposure to other common carcinogens like smoking. About 5% of cancers today in the US are from obesity and the biggest thing keeping it low is other causes of death are so much higher that the odds of living long enough to get cancer drop.

There was a weird obsession within the Three Body Problem series with planets being destroyed by their stars. Trisolaris being an inciting incident made sense, but also the chain reactions of planets falling into stars was brought by some other random star system and in the Wallfacer's Mercury project. The vast majority of exoplanets known at the time that the books were written where extremely close to their stars as it predated the Kepler Mission so it seems like that had a huge influence on the plots.

The CEO using their main account /u/spez used to be a moderator in /r/jailbait. That should have been a career ender.

This was a subreddit dedicated to sharing pictures of teenagers with no verification of either consent or age. That's the guy they picked to become a CEO, a walking liability.

I agree with you with the self-driving vehicles thing. Although I would like to point out that millions of employees are still out there whose job is to basically talk to others to sell something. Call center employees, recruiters, sales, receptionists are going to be a lot cheaper to replace. One program and a AWS server farm has a lot of scaling potential without the $50-200k cost per work truck. Among commercial vehicles, taxis and freight trucks require minimal driver interactions. But a lot of commercial vehicles require a driver to handle final delivery for one reason or another so deliveries to individuals or small companies that don't have dedicated employees to handle loading or unloading.

Virtual presence based parties and companies was a fad all the way back in 2005 when every few months we'd get an article posted on Slashdot about a company making a virtual office or store, or some conference happening in SecondLife and other short lived alternatives. They all died.

We just had one of the perfect storms for creating a VR based internet:

* Several trillion dollars worth of companies were investing in VR.
* The technology was easily affordable to middle class consumers.
* Companies and individuals had a large amount of reserves and the economy looked good fueling investment along with the cheap debt.
* Lockdowns and the work from home shift drove the largest change in working and socialization we've ever seen in history to online spaces.

Billions have been thrown into these projects by every one of the major tech companies and Folding Idea's description of them as 'dead malls' seems like an insult to some perfectly good zombie filming locations.

In what world did you live in that companies hired only based on skill and never made risky decisions that went bad? That sounds like a nice place.

https://www.svb.com/leadership

This is SVB's leadership. Everyone here is white and it looks like everyone there started their career before ~2000. These people didn't get into the banking industry because of some modern identity politics.

"And unlike a "wet" signature, there is even less ability to prove the person who signed it was actually the correct person."

The point I tried was the signature doesn't prove who signed it either. It just says, a person had access to a copy of the real signature and practiced it a bit before a filling in some form or contract. Nobody checks if a signature matches the real one matches so it's as secure as an age verification that asks for your birthday. John Doe wants to do a contract so someone who claims to be John Doe meets someone who has never met John Doe before and asks him to write John Doe in 2 different ways to prove that they are indeed John Doe and has no reference to see what the the name should look like. That's not security, that's proving identity with handwriting tautology. It only works with honest actors and in that case you basically didn't need it.

"They have worked fine for hundreds and hundreds of years. And experts can examine the mark to ensure it was human-written and it contains a type of biometric that can be tied to other exemplars. Even more so when the writing is live-captured on a pad."

I don't think that this can really be stated. Fraud has always happened in history and while handwriting analysis is a thing it is generally done on longer statements where you have more samples which can be compared. A signature simply don't have many unique traits since generally 2 words that are going to be reproduced in countless locations.

Even if signatures where truly unique in a verifiable method we end up with problems of validation: I can sign a document in a method that looks intentionally different than others with the intention of later disputing the contract by falsely calling it forged giving the other party no protection. Or I can impersonate another person and defraud them. Since the cost to validate a signature with an expert is so high there's no real protections for any party involved in the contract and it would only be economical to validate in extreme cases. The primary method to address these limitations is a notary service, but that just moved the forgery to 2 locations instead so an improvement but not significant.

Why make a comment like this:

We already have ways to measure the production output of most employees. The problem is those metrics often suck and can be gamed. How many boxes can a warehouse worker fulfill with weights for item counts, mass, volume. How many packages and miles does a driver deliver, maybe some weights for packages that are farther harder for one reason or another. That's not too hard to do and certainty exists.

We've tried doing stuff like this for creative / software like fields with lines of code, bug counts, and other activity. The metrics are hard. So what are we going to look for if someone's brain is engaged in 'thinking'? The problem solving skills in Factorio aren't too different than the ones in coding so what then?

"We've successfully created the perfect performance metric allowing us to track when our employee brain's are engaged at work! It just can't distinguish person playing a video game on their phone from work, but that's fine because it only costs $X,000 for each person and all of our highest performers left."

North Korea? Khmer Rouge in Vietnam? Annexation of Tibet, Xinjiang, and other bordering regions? The Cultural Revolution where various different minority groups where purged as the CCP consolidated power.

These where not peaceful events and governments. China doesn't have a history of going to a new continent and installing a puppet government, they just do it to their borders and then eventually call it more China as they wipe out the existing culture.

You know they already had this.

We didn't need technology to figure out when a restaurants has higher traffic or to identify what type of food people order. The waitress already gave them that information when we placed our order. Now they can put a name to the credit card number that we've all been using for the last 15 years. John Doe loves ordering the BLT on Wednesday at 12:15. Cool, you where probably planning on making 20 BLTs during the lunch rush anyway. 20 or 25 you're still cooking up a pound of bacon and slicing a dozen tomatoes up at 11.

What can we do with this information? Maybe we send John Doe a email about a special 10% off deal on the Super BLT which then goes into the spam folder. But otherwise it doesn't change how much food needs to be prepared or force John Doe into doing anything.

Metastasis tends to kill most cancers as the host dies which we'd rather avoid if the host is civilization.

There's a weird lack of correlation between the size of an animal and it's risk of dying from cancer known Peto's Paradox. One potential contribution is cancers effectively start stealing resources from other parts of the tumor. So this could be a corporate hypertumor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AElONvi9WQ