Yes, but they are not gaming devices. They are meant to efficiently compute things. When used for that purpose they use little energy compared to other devices doing the same thing.

You’re not wrong. We’ve reached a point, technologically, where there is little-to-no true innovation left… and what I mean by that is that everything is now built on incredible amounts of work by others who came before. “Standing on the shoulders of giants”, as it were. And yet we have a corrupt “patent” system that is exclusively used to steal the work of those giants while at the same time depriving all of humanity of true progress. And why? So that a handful of very rich people can get even more rich.

I remember hearing this argument before…about the Internet. Glad that fad went away.

As it has always been, these technologies are being used to push us forward by teams of underpaid unnamed researchers with no interest in profit. Meanwhile you focus on the scammers and capitalists and unload your wallets to them, all while complaining about the lack of progress as measured by the products you see in advertisements.

Luckily, when you get that cancer diagnosis or your child is born with some rare disease, that progress will attend to your needs despite your ignorance if it.

We need progress, which is harder to do because it takes a paradigm shift on an Individual and social level.

Sometimes it just takes a marginal improvement to the quality of the engineering. But these “what if manual labor but fascade of robots!” gimmicks aren’t improvements in engineering. They’re an effort to cut corners on quality in pursuit of a higher profit margin.

Even setting aside you believe these aren’t just a line up of mechanical turks controlled from a sweetshop in the Philippines, their work product isn’t anything approaching good. Its just cheap.

Innovatin is good if it results in clean water, meds, housing, safe food and goods and services.

It’s bad if it means: the most profit for useless shit that people only buy because advertisment made them believe they need it.

Capitalism is a tool. Please let’s grow a pair and stop letting it decide how it will be used. It’s like pulling the trigger on an ak47 without holding it tight. Do we expect the weapon to know where to shot?

Capitalism is a tool that wants to maximize its profits. Unfortunately it discovered that changing the politics and laws is an easy way to do that, even if it’s bad for the people.

Capitalism is per definition not bound to ethics or moral. We need to set rules, even if big corporations made us to believe we shouldn’t.

The wealthy ruling class have siphoned off nearly all of the productivity gains since the 70s. AI won’t stop that machine. If half of us die of starvation and half the remaining half die from fighting each other for cake, they don’t care.

I’ve been watching people try to deliver the end-to-end Food Making conveyor belt for my entire life. What I’ve consistently seen delivered are novelties, more prone to creating a giant mess in your mechanical kitchen than producing anything both efficient and edible. The closest I’ve seen are those microwaved dinners, and they’re hardly what I’d call an exciting meal.

But they are cheap to churn out. That’s what is ultimately upsetting about this overall trend. Not that we’ll be eliminating a chronic demand on human labor, but that we’ll be excising any amount of artistry or quality from the menu in order to sell people assembly line TV dinners at 100x markups in pursuit of another percentage point of GDP growth.

As more and more of the agricultural sector falls under the domain of business interests fixated on profits ahead of product, we’re going to see the volume and quality of food squeezed down into what a robot can shove through a tube.

The tragic irony of the kind of misinformed article this is linking is that the server farms that would be running this stuff are fairly efficient. The water is reused and recycled, the heat is often used for other applications. Because wasting fewer resources is cheaper than wasting more resources.

But all those locally-run models on laptop CPUs and desktop GPUs? That’s grid power being turned into heat and vented into a home (probably with air conditioning on).

The weird AI panic, driven by an attempt to repurpose the popular anti-crypto arguments whether they matched the new challenges or not, is going to PR this tech into wasting way more energy than it would otherwise by distributing it over billions of computer devices paid by individual users. And nobody is going to notice or care.

I do hate our media landscape sometimes.

Eh it’s not that great.

One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power.

Fossil fuel-burning plants, whether that’s natural gas, coal, or oil, produce even less. There’s no way to ramp up nuclear capacity in the time it will take to supply these millions of chips, so much, if not all, of that extra power demand is going to come from carbon-emitting sources.

If you ignore the two fastest growing methods of power generation, which coincidentally are also carbon free, cheap and scalable, the future does indeed look bleak. But solar and wind do exist…

The rest is purely a policy rant. Yes, if productivity increases we need some way of distributing the gains from said productivity increase fairly across the population. But jumping to the conclusion that, since this is a challenge to be solved, the increase in productivity is bad, is just stupid.