This isn't about AI but about Ukraine. Aside from this being drastically off topic, it is worth articulating the many differences here. The AI companies are taking individual books and scanning so they have training data. They are making use of them. And they are doing so largely with older used books which would often be thrown out anyways. Used book stores throw out old books all the time, as do libraries. Moreover, the books being destroyed for digital scanning are often things which are not just that important, things like random sword-and-sorcery novels from 1975 and car manuals. This is in drastic contrast to the wide-scale deliberate destruction of books and book infrastructure by Russia; they are trying to destroy Ukrainian culture and the ability for children to get an education. In some cases, nearly entire print runs of a book or entire print runs have been destroyed by what Russia has done here. The situations aren't remotely comparable. So instead of making complaints about AI again, maybe show you actually care about books by making a donation as they've asked?

Yes, people are using AI to generate slop, and do things like generate kitten pictures. But there's a lot of extremely productive use. We have a lot of people using it for coding. We have mathematicians using them to prove long-standing open math problems. There are a lot of positive uses here also.

Noise is largely due to gas turbines or diesel generators running. That's again the sort of thing where reasonable regulation can help out. Some other noise claims are also just not plausible; there have been examples of noise complaints about completed data centers which hadn't been turned on yet for example. The heat claims are generally not plausible. If you take the claims seriously, they'd have to be generating far more energy than they are. Meanwhile, people don't object to large parking lots which are constantly taking in sunlight and converting to heat. I'm also not sure how they engage in "destruction of neighborhoods" any more than any other building project.

Not really. Heavy duty training involves intensive energy use. And one of the genuine problems with AI data centers is the electricity use can be very high or very low with minimal warning to the grid operators. This is part of why it pushes up electric costs. I'm not sure what evidence you have that any new data center now is being built for AI. Many of the data centers being objected to are small "Edge Data Centers" used primarily to reduce latency for video streaming, video games, and other activities which require low latency https://www.maysteel.com/why-maysteel/resources/blog/types-of-data-centers-how-do-you-choose-the-right-data-center.

So, first putting solar panels on is a step. It doesn't do everything, but it is a good step. It also has the nice advantage that if there's a serious bust in data centers, there will be already solar panels ready to be connected the other way for the grid. But you are also underestimating the effectiveness of solar panels, for a few reasons. First, almost no data center is used at 100% capacity. The solar panels keep producing even when server racks are getting little use. Second, data centers require corridors for humans to move, office spaces for humans who work there to stay, along with bathrooms and other needed things. Typically, actual server space takes up around 20-25% of the actual space. Now, that's not quite as good as it seems, since data centers are often 2 or 3 floors. But overall, the ratio is still better than you state.

But if you think that's not enough, then you can make it tighter. You can do things like require that their parking lots have solar panels too. Or you can even just require a specific percentage of their power be handled by solar, and then let them figure out the details, including attached solar arrays if needed. But these are all conversations we can have, and far more useful than just saying "No!" very loudly.

There's obviously a massive large-scale backlash here, and it is pretty bipartisan. Part of it is concern about water use (which is largely overblown) and part is concern about increases in electricity cost (which is much more reasonable). But it is clear that two related things are happening: 1) People are reacting this way to all data centers, whether or not they have anything to do with AI. 2) People are blocking data centers rather than trying to take reasonable steps to make them manageable with their concerns, like requiring that they have solar panels. There's room for compromise here, but we're not getting it.

Social media is like if someone took all the problems of usenet and amplified them to the point of unusability...

Writing music (or any other creative endeavor) is not just about mimicking learned patterns, but about experimenting until you create something actually new. Models are recombining patterns using deep learning, which can give the appearance of novelty without actually being genuine creations, unless there's adequate guidance and shaping by a human. The problem is that there is a way that real inspiration and innovation *feel* which becomes delocalized when the cognitive labor is mostly offloaded to a model and thus hard to recognize, especially if you don't actually have experience doing the creative act yourself. So people who don't know how to write music will make slop, and even experienced artists could end up with stuff that is mostly slop if they're not paying very careful attention.

Plus the social value of creativity is based on recognition of the effort involved in creating novel things; many people appreciate art because it reflects human experience and human effort, which can get muddled or lost with generative AI.

I have been writing music and studying computing since childhood and studying some machine learning since I was a teen, three decades ago. I don't think all generative AI is useless or offensive (though the resource overconsumption with the LLMs-in-everything fad is a serious problem, and I do believe there is a type of expected-usage violation / consent problem with many AI vendor training sets and products). The disagreements about deep learning and generative AI (exaggerated by a bubble-driven profit motive, unfortunately) will take work to solve because new social contract concepts will have to gradually be explored and tested over the coming years by billions of humans until a general consensus is reached on what fair use now means and how intellectual "property" ethics are navigated.

I think people are asserting a lot of things which amount to gazing into a crystal ball around these topics, but there are at least two things which I feel pretty sure of based on my experience: the human creative process is much more complicated than LLM/GAN training+prompting, and actual human creativity has value which a machine is unlikely to replicate effectively at least anytime soon â" though simulacra of creativity pass enough of a capitalist sniff test to make money, detracting from the livelihoods of artists already dealing with the nightmarish economic calculus of trying to make creative things while paying the bills in the contemporary era.

Of course, litigative copyright scalping companies don't add any value to society either and are effectively just another type of nuisance; Round Hill looks to be a hedge fund manager's project to make money off others' labor without actually facilitating human creativity. Cue the infamous "I believe everyone involved in this story should die" Norm Macdonald line... (which is much more applicable here than the original transphobic "joke"!)

I'm really hoping that occurs. But right now, Starship has run into a lot of delays, and we cannot rely on this turning to work out to be as cheap as we hope for our long-term planning. The expectation for the Space Shuttle was also that it would drastically reduce launch costs. It didn't for a wide variety of reasons. Starship incorporates a lot of lessons from that, including no use of solid fuel, much more improved heat shield, and using methane for the main liquid rocket engines rather than the harder to use hydrogen. (In general, one of the major insights the last few years has been that paying a small performance penalty in engines is worth it if it makes the engines cheaper and easier to reuse. This is essentially the design philosophy behind the Falcon 9's Merlin engines also, even as they did end up being pretty high performance engines even though they used kerosene. And the Raptor is going to be pretty high performance even though it uses methane.) And Starship doesn't have the engineering restraints being insisted upon to make the US military happy with weird orbital profiles. But whether that's enough is genuinely not easy to predict.

Huh. I had no idea that the prices had gone down that far. That's very neat.

Maybe you should stop panicking lie a wee baby and think from the other end: things are working as well as they can, and the problem is a lot bigger than just snapping your fingers and hoping a genie shows up.

Fabs are expensive and big, and can't be built overnight. Even stupid ordinary homes take months to build, and fans are thousands of times bigger with thousands of times the utility requirements.

I don't think that's correct? Possibly I'm misreading this, but it looks like the study involved giving two things, both the Keytruda, and a separate personalized vaccine.

Unfortunately, we've already seen people refuse to take treatments for deadly diseases even when they have them. In the 1980s and 1990s you had a very loud HIV-AIDS denial movement which often got people to refuse to take anti-HIV drugs, claiming that the drugs were what we're making people sick. See for example Continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(magazine) where the magazine ironically had to stop publication because all the editors and major contributors had died from AIDS. And one already sees a lot of people with cancer trying to use alternative treatments, often instead of chemotherapy or radiation. The more positive take here though is that since this treatment has fewer side-effects than chemo (which itself has fewer side-effects than older chemo treatments did) there may be less inclination for people to refuse it there.

If this works well, similar methods will likely work for other cancers also. Unfortunately, since it requires an individual design for a specific person, it likely is going to not benefit much from economies of scale, so it may remain very expensive. Also, given that it uses mRNA, it is likely that parts of the US right will either refuse to use it or will try to block it. Given RFK Jr. being in the Secretary of Health, what should be a slam dunk may end up becoming an uphill battle. On the bright side, some of the anti-vaxxers seem to be ok with mRNA systems once someone already has a disease.

A bunch of reasons. Although the OP's summary about instantaneous exchange is largely wrong, similar systems to this are useful for quantum key distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_key_distribution and superdense coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdense_coding, the first which has obvious practical applications and the second which may have practical applications. This is also important because it pushes the limits of how quantum mechanics behaves. Some people have suggested that entanglement might change or break down over long-distances, which would be counter to what standard quantum mechanics predicts. So doing these sorts of experiments helps us become more confident that QM is essentially correct. In the same way how we do things like experiments to test other elements of physics, like general relativity, or using MICROSCOPE to test the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MICROSCOPE.

It's taxpayer money. Means they'll burn through it all the faster.

Oh, for crying out loud. Disagreement with you doesn't mean someone is trying to feed any misinformation. I'm pretty public about who I am. And I've talked before on Slashdot about some of the major negatives of LLMs, including high energy use. I've discussed also how my spouse has at her library job been one of many who has had trouble getting patrons to understand that books hallucinated by ChatGPT don't exist. There's a lot of negatives here. But that doesn't mean that every single thing has the answer of AI-companies-be-evil.