|
I think people are always looking to dismiss emerging technologies. AI is especially scary to many people that read newspapers (and this site); it's going to listen to press releases and write newspaper articles, it's going to illustrate them, and it's going to write the FactoryFactoryInterfaceAdaptor that serves the content to the public. So pretty much everyone involved in this discussion has to fight it or lose their career. (I think that's pretty far away, but I can't blame people for being paranoid here.) What happens in these cases is that people look for reasons why the emerging technology is objectively bad, and then throw out arguments and see which ones stick. Electricity usage implies climate change, and that's a popular fear to play on right now. "This thing that's going to kill your career is also why hurricanes are stronger now!" Of course, that is only partially true; maybe AI isn't the problem and driving 60 miles a day in stop-and-go-traffic to go to work is what we really need to crack down on. But, that sort of thing is 70 years old and people are comfortable with it, so there isn't much persuasion left to do; people know it's bad and do it anyway. Meanwhile, climate change was a huge problem before the phrases "Bitcoin" or "deep learning" were ever coined, so it's kind of weird to blame them. This sort of complaining is also easy. Sure, with more electricity users coming online, we worry about the cost going up. The cost going up is good for killing energy intensive activities that you don't like; eventually it won't be profitable to mine Bitcoins or train AIs. But the cost going up also affects other industries that we DO like; poorer people heating their homes can't absorb the cost, or industries like aluminum smelting can't absorb the cost. So now we want to distribute resources with some system other than "the highest bidder wins", and you know what that means! Time to involve the government! But the government is terrible at reacting to things like this, and even though regulation is obviously the globally optimal path forward, it moves too slowly to really make a difference. By the time we charge data centers more for electricity, AI will have taken your jobs and the East Coast will be underwater. (Meanwhile, many data centers are powered by cheap renewable hydroelectricity anyway and so aren't causing climate change. They can build their AI training data centers near a hydroelectric dam, but people aren't going to move their family so they can get cheaper electricity or spend less energy commuting to work or whatever. I'm not sure where this all leads, but it does feel like appointing a boogeyman to blame instead of actually fixing the problem. This goes back to my opening argument about seeing which argument sticks. If you don't look into things too deeply, you have a nice set of rules that leads to an obvious action. I don't like Bitcoin because the existing system works OK. Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity. Some energy use changes the climate. The changing climate kill us all. So we'd better kill Bitcoin. A simple path from "I don't like it" to "kill it before it kills us". Get out your pitchforks!) |