But AI is going to solve all the important problems. RIGHT?

But when you ask for details, "important" keeps coming back to shareholder value, now measured in new and improved cryptocurrency!

Funny thought of the day: Think of major changes motivated by positive teleological objectives. (I don't want to say "good intentions", but...) Stuff like the abolition of slavery, the NHS, or even the EPA. Ancient history, right? I'd like to hear your more recent examples to prove me wrong, or even better, something along such lines that is currently in any pipeline with any prayer of implementation RSN. (Certainly not aware of anything in America where they are deadlocked between the Rumplicans and Dumbocrats. Orange-nosers versus hunters of flying elephants...)

Unthanks.

If I were a gambling man, I'd give HIGH odds against AC not wasting time. My time and even your time to tl;dr it.

Mod parent funny.

Even funnier is the book Tech Monopoly by Herbert Hovenkamp, especially when it comes to the area of solutions. The book Careless People was also pretty funny, especially in the parts where it tried to portray Zuck as a real human boy.

Root of the problem thoughts? Good intentions and a charged blaster will get more done than good intentions alone, and Microsoft has plenty of well-charged blasters. Now think about major changes that were linked to good intentions. Stuff like the abolition of slavery and the NHS. Ancient history, right? Anything in the pipeline now? Of course Microsoft and f[r]iends are claiming that AI will solve all the important problems, but when you ask for more details it seems the "important" stuff keeps coming back to shareholder value. "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of [Copilot-enhanced Microsoft Office]. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of [shareholder value]."

"I don't drink a spreedsheet every day, but when I do, I drink LibreOffice. I'm the most boring man in the world."

I'd want to see some numbers... I guess that means I'm questioning some of your assumptions. For example, liquid cooling is assuming that the servers run hot, but I think there is a complicated tradeoff there and it's possible to design things differently so that air cooling might be viable. But if you assume there is a race condition and we need to run everything as hot and as fast as possible, then the room for negotiating new solutions becomes much more limited. Perhaps it's more of a philosophic problem? I think the important questions are not urgent? The big problems are going to wait as long as it takes for their solutions?

Actually links to my thought of the day about major intentional changes. All of this AI stuff seems to be driven by opportunity. We can do this AI stuff now so we HAVE to do it, and on the largest possible scale. It's going to fix everything, but when you ask what "everything" means it keeps coming back to the problem of putting more fantasy money in the pockets of a few exceedingly rich folks who already have more money than gawd and no good uses for it, in stark contrast to gawd's advertising. I've been thinking about the big changes that were deliberately created for teleological reasons... Stuff like the abolition of slavery and social security and voting rights for everyone. On the medical side stuff like Medicare in the US and the NHS in England. Seems like that "fashion" has gone out of style now and I can't think of any recent examples of such grand ambitions for change that are being taken seriously... File me with the nutters who care too much about "humanity", whatever that means?

Let's ask Michael Hastings. Oh, wait.

Just joking. Of course it's only a joke, but it's the obvious one I was looking for when the topic came up. I'm sure Obama's deep state never would have done such an unethical thing and you'd have to be a real conspiracy nut to blame someone left over from Dubya's time.

Oh, and I'm also sure that this is one of those problems that will just go away if we wait a bit longer. That's the other low-hanging joke I was looking for.

Probably a PROFIT! joke hanging around somewhere, too.

Not disagreeing, but on this line of approach, it seems better to just put the data centers in the dessert rather than transmit the power. I'm even trying to imagine a design where the solar panels are providing shade to help keep the data centers cool... What kind of air gap would you need to make that work? Kind of a jungle high canopy design?

Another option might be burying the computers, but I think that would lose out because of the cooling problems... But possibly convection powered cooling could be made to work?

I think you're oversimplifying because the supply pattern for the renewable energy isn't that complicated. Depending on various factors, I'm thinking you could get relatively high usage numbers with relatively low expenditures on storage, but part of that optimization would involve idling some of the servers some of the time. However even in that case you would want to tweak the system to keep the best servers doing as much of the work as possible.

Eh? Now the spelling check has decided that videocide is problematic after all? Were my eyes napping before? Eh and double eh?

This branch confused me. Not the kind of efficiency that I was asking about. This would actually be an advantage for countries that have a lot of hydropower. I think the advantage on this one would be for America (and perhaps Japan or some other places?) over China.

However the efficiency question I was asking about was the cost of building computing capacity that sometimes waits idly for the wind to blow versus the cost of batteries to keep the computers running. But on reflection I think the calculation is more complicated than I was thinking. There is also a savings from the idle time in that the servers are not wearing themselves out when they are just waiting. Also need to consider the cost of adding new servers over time. In general the CPUs are getting less expensive, but then you need to consider the value of getting the answers faster, and then you need to consider the possible advantages of thinking more carefully about which questions to ask in the first place...

Just think how much control we'll have over what gets taught.

Accidentally I found myself reflecting on some parts of this topic as America and Israel start another round of war crimes. If there are any historians in the future, and I'm increasingly skeptical there will be, I think they will probably say that the high point of America, at least in moral terms, was probably when the nation accepted the reality of Vietnam and took the loss for higher morality...

Appealing to the YOB's sense of morality will be the joke, perhaps the terminal joke, in referring to America's current situation. But the teaching bots will be able to say whatever with a straight face. And the kids will never know any better. If there are any kids?

I acknowledge that batteries exist and are significant, but the efficiency is significantly lower. I don't think it makes that much sense to do low priority stuff off of batteries and I regard most of the AI training as relatively low priority. However I have to acknowledge the other side of the inefficiency of building extra computing capacity that spends a lot of time waiting for the power...

Hmm... I just thought of a retired CPA who worked with this kind of stuff. Maybe he could work up the numbers? Or should I run it past a couple of AIs to see what they say? Bit of a funny story there. The flakiness of Gemini has been driving me to Bing these days. In one recent "incident", Bing decided to challenge my humanity and asked if I wanted to use a particular account or continue without logging in. So for grins and in hope of a less biased answer I selected the option of not logging in. Bing then continued by greeting me by my name. So much for opting out for privacy, eh?

Congratulations on the provocative FP, though I think it should have been moderated Funny over insightful. You evidently stirred up some major lying morons who had to leap to the YOB's defense with the change of Subject and the long diversion.

Unfortunately I have no joke for follow up. I think we've reached an age of Rumplicans versus Dumbocrats and "We can't get there from here", where "here" is where America is now and "there" is any better place. The orange-nosing Rumplicans are divided between cowards and sociopaths and wannabe fascists while the Dumbocrats are divided up based on which flying elephants they dream about or believe in.

Why are you laughing. The guidelines are quite clear. According to the YOB ethics rules, someone must now "donate" appropriate money to a YOB "charity" and a suitable pardon will be issued.

So did anyone see the video about the YOB saying what a great freeloader he is? Certainly not working for the US since he doesn't accept any of the salary. The particular video I saw then did the math on the YOB's charity compared to people who haven't pocketed billions of dollars recently. Turned out the presidential salary corresponds to about 10 bucks for normal pikers. Actually less if you use my recent income as the reference, but I did spend about ten bucks on lunch at a Chinese place yesterday...

(In related research I chatted with a couple of AI about the YOB's track record in business and the fluctuating value of his brand, but I couldn't dig up anything funny ha-ha, though there was plenty of monkey business.)

(Did I smell a brain fart?)

Two significant advantages on the China side, though I think the title of the story is clickbait and it's much too soon to see what is going on with AI.

The major advantage is the energy. But what do you do when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining? You just wait to train your AI because training can be done at your convenience. But I'm also sure that the Chinese are working on prioritization systems for the time-sensitive queries so that when Xi has a question he ALWAYS gets his answer ASAP. "That's what Xi said!"

The minor advantage is the number of engineers. Even if you insist that only the most brilliant engineers matter, the larger the number of candidates the more likely you're going to find some brilliant ones in there.

And one YUGE disadvantage on the American side. 'Nuff said, but the YUGE disadvantage hasn't stopped creating and empowering lesser disadvantages.

But at least the USA is the world leader in explosive diarrhea! (That was a joke. Really. In the explosive diarrhea race I'd bet on the former USAID recipient countries. (There must be another joke around here involving arms races versus other kinds of races to the... (Reminds me of my first joke about Texas: "Gawd oh gawd don't flush it!")))