Canals were at least solving a problem that actually existed and needed solving at the time when they were started. AI data centres are being built in anticipation of future demand, for use cases that haven’t been developed yet.
That’s not accurate from my understanding. I quit my SDE job in December, but my former coworkers say they use AI pretty much all day and find it useful. Ofc, the company’s systems were an indecipherable mess, mostly because of rushed choices those same people made everyday, but neither here nor there. This is why tech companies are cutting jobs.
Whether any of this is sustainable remains to be seen, but there are current use cases and real demand for “AI” data centers.
Current tech layoffs are mostly a result of over hiring during the pandemic. Blaming AI is just the sales pitch to investors try to prove that the AI spending was worth it.
Maybe. There were rounds of layoffs a couple years ago where companies used COVID over employment as the rationale. I think four years removed that rationale is a bit of a stretch.
I think it’s also possible that the looming recession is a cause, but they can’t say that out loud for fear of offending the Crybaby in Chief.
And if AI is working properly these “innovative” tech companies shouldn’t really need to fire anyone, right? All their bright employees should just be able to use AI to generate value for their respective companies.
Idk the answer, but I can say that I personally know high-performing engineers who swear by it. I mostly found it useful as a rubber duck, or to quickly tear down some code in a language with which I’m not acquainted.
I actively try to avoid AI for moral reasons, but I have found it useful for certain tasks. It’s not a panacea, but it’s also not useless.
I believe that they use it all day. I believe that they say they find it useful.
I also believe that their bosses gave them a productivity slot machine and told them if they don’t play it they’re fired.
So some of them like it for bad reasons, and some of them have to pretend to like it.
A few years ago with ARM arriving at the data centers I envisioned there would be a day that density would go up and new data centers would be less in demand. I’m either too early or wrong.
In economics, the Jevons paradox, or Jevons effect, is said to occur when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource’s use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource.
Unfortunately using less of a good thing isn’t how we do things.
I’m thinking you might have been wrong. Even without AI, I don’t foresee demand for compute going down. Even if everything went over to ARM, I think that would have just slowed the rate of new builds.
We will never need less processing though even if AI goes away.
Fun Fact: the Panic of 1837 was caused by Andrew Jackson’s idiotic idea to pay off the national debt by stealing land and selling it, which crashed the real estate market. Jackson had also refused to continue the American central banking charter so there were basically no tools to fight it.
He is literally Trump’s favorite president. You know, the real estate guy fighting with the Fed.
Differencr that railway is still the absolute best and most efficient way
Canals are more vastly more fuel efficient per kg of cargo. But rail is much faster.
The US profits a lot from having so many waterways. When they are usable, they literally are the cheapest and most efficient mode of transportation.
Railroads replaced canals in the Midwest because the canals weren’t large enough to handle a lot of cargo, unlike the Suez or Panama canals. The canals here are maybe 20ft wide, and locks were maybe 50ft long. Trying to modify them to handle more cargo would have cost tremendous amounts of money and also disable the canals while they were being worked on.
Trains were simply able to carry significantly more cargo to their destination in less time
Just think, after the systems-manufactured destitute addicts clean out the rare metals from those industrial pustules, the whole country’s houseless will have homes, right?
Right?
Pretty terrible metaphor as realistically even without AI we will never need less compute. Compute is awesome, it’s a good thing to have more. The problem is the environmental damage not anything else.
That makes the metaphor imperfect, but the data centers are being paid with circular money that isn’t there, based on the assumption that AI will make obscene amounts of money to actually pay their bills when currently they’re losing lots of investor money to subsidize the price, and they’re already talking about transitioning to a usage based system, which might push some enterprises to use a FOSS alternative from China.
We’re in a bubble, when it pops it’s likely many data center projects will be abandoned before they’re done.
isn’t that a good thing though? let billionaires lose money then just don’t bail them out. Either way the datacenters will remain useful and might actually benefit real work. This is btw how we got a lot of open technologies where corporate overinvests and then community takes over.
Considering the MIC is in bed with AI corporations I worry they will get bailed out to some extent, and that the gains will remain completely private, with taxpayers being expected to foot the bill (or alternatively, dealing with the inflation while their wages remain stagnant). I hope you’re right though, I really want there to be a positive in the end, I’m just skeptical on this front.
The silver lining to me is that there’s encouraging developments in FOSS AI, developed mainly in China. Maybe after the crash we can get somewhat cheaper GPUs to run them locally.
I think it’ll be really hard to bail AI out on public funds with current reputation if bubble pops.
However I think real risk is not full bail but constant leeching of public funds to private enterprise. This is not new to AI and this datacenter issue is exactly that - have people bear the environmental costs for private gains of datacenters. The other argument that US “doesn’t need datacenters” is just bad - that’s not the issue, everyone will need more datacenters forever basically.
encouraging developments in FOSS AI, developed mainly in China.
I wouldn’t really trust China’s open source commitments though. FOSS is non-existent in chinese culture and it’s directly a competitive response to american corporate models. That being said, a good deed done for bad reasons still can be good!
Honestly if AI would gracefully decline now and we just had open source models we’d still have work for the next 10 years implementing these tools.
The choice to compare data centers to canals rather than to railroads seems rather arbitrary.
It’s not arbitrary at all. In fact it’s the entire point.
Is this post trying to insinuate that car-roads are more worthwhile than railroads? Or canals for that matter? Because they aren’t. You backed the wrong boom. Sticking with rail would’ve been better in the long run.
