AI

“I do not fear the rise of superintelligence; I do, however, fear the rise of rapacious and selfish individuals, organizations, and governments who seek to use computing in any form to extend their power and control over others.” —Grady Booch

If you don’t have time to read this post, these five graphs give most of the argument. Each includes both the energy/water cost of using ChatGPT in the moment and the cost of training GPT-4 divided by the number of prompts:

Consumer demand for smaller scale and human-crafted versions of everything will grow in an AI world. While the future of work might lend itself to small business creation, let’s ****not forget the demand side of the equation. We are going to crave artisanal and story-driven sources and experiences. Why? As every big company floods the zone of our a... See more

Modern resistance to AI is just the latest chapter in a long history of moral anxiety about ease.

Gartner: More than 40% of agentic AI projects will fail by 2027

The AI industry oscillates between fear-mongering and utopianism. In that dichotomy is hidden a subtle manipulation. Where’s the middle ground? Where are the headlines that treat AI as normal technology? Is it not possible that the world will mostly stay the same, with a few perks or a few downsides, and a few trade-offs?

No, they jump from “AI will... See more

Why this matters

Two groups are having the wrong argument:

The AI boosters think we’re building digital brains. The AI critics think we’re destroying human authenticity.

Both are missing the point.

We’re not building intelligence. We’re building culture machines. Tools that can compress and reconstruct the patterns of human expression.

That’s not a bug.... See more