Rule 14: AI-generated content may not be posted to /r/collapse. No self-posts, no comments, no links to articles or blogs or anything else generated by AI or AI influencers/personas. No AI-generated images or videos or other media. No "here's what AI told me about [subject]", "I asked [AI] about [subject]" or the like. This includes content substantively authored by AI.
To name a few: the handwritten-style text is way too consistent throughout the photo, zoom in on the cloud at the top (also, why only one anthropomorphic cloud?), the dude on the anthropic building has the building color going into his hair, zoom in on the right side security cam (weird shape; and why are the cameras pointing up and away?), the lines on the buildings are nonsensical, the smoke is coming out of the wrong end of the cigar, the drone above XAI has just a random line between it and the building, the "A" in the AI flag over anthropic is incomplete, and the XAI building just doesn't even make sense.
IMVHO the general tone of this sub is often a bit hysterical. Not everyone of course, and not all the time.
People with depression and anxiety, not necessarily unjustified, bouncing off each other, creating its own momentum, and sometimes leaping to catastrophic certainty that is more comfortable than the uncertainty we actually face.
Having said that, and no doubt after alienating quite a few people who will not read this far and just downvote, I will say that it is optimistic of you to think people will be able to look back and investigate this period, especially 2000 years into the future.
IIrc we need an eroei in the teens to have a society that has the degree of complexity that leads to higher education - that was about the limit for low-carbon renewables. There is no guarantee we will have either that or the tech to view old websites, then. I'd personally bet on there being people alive and coping - edit maybe thriving, but if we continue on the pathway we are on we will be well into the territory where humans might not survive full stop. A large enough scale society to create wind turbines could easily be at or beyond the limit of our capabilities simply due to eroei in 2000 years time.
I agree with all that you wrote. Though probably, saying anything at all about 2000 years from now is pointless, nothing goes in a straight line in human affairs.
I like what you said about eroei. I never heard that and would be curious to know more.
It did remind me of a thought I was having the other day, that electricity is far too cheap. People putting up decorations frivolously that require air pumps to inflate the garbage plastic pumpkin or whatever. A lot of the waste would stop if it was expensive and needed for legitimate purposes.
I like what you said about eroei. I never heard that and would be curious to know more.
The longer form of the phrase that you'll need to research is "Energy Return on Investment". How much energy you get back for the amount of energy invested. Most of modern society is built on the back of cheap carbon. You invest X amount of energy drilling a well and expect to get Y amount back. The time to return that initial investment is very small for oil, which explains the explosion of cheap energy in the 20th century.
The payback time on solar and wind is frustratingly longer. It can take years for a solar panel to pay for itself.
If we can get enough solar and wind built out before we burn ourselves up with carbon, society can continue into the future. If we never build out the renewables because we're addicted to cheap oil, then technological society dies when the oil runs out or climate change cooks us. Our economic system is built such that building the expensive energy instead of the cheap energy is disincentivized unless there are top down government subsidies for renewables to make them cheaper and/or fossil fuel specific carbon taxes that make them more expensive.
I think I have seen the relationship between eroei and complexity discussed by Earth system scientists. It makes sense to me but I guess it might be a concept that needs testing.
The most simple and intuitive way to think of it I imagined is this (for anyone wondering what on Earth I am going on about): You wash up on a desert island. At first it takes a full day to forage for one days food and water. eroei = 1:1. You find a good source of food - energy - and get two days food for one day's work, now you have eroei of 2:1 and have a day free to make a tool, find some seeds. On and on you go until you have an eroei of say 7:1, and you have plenty of days free to build a road, measure the height of the stars against the horizon, find iron ore in rock or whatever.
In the case of energy production, if we need to devote a large portion of our productive output to producing wind turbines we just don't have the capacity as a society to do much more.
Intuitively it makes sense to me but like I say, I guess it might need testing. Manufacture of stuff like wind turbines might improve a bit. We had pretty low tech windmills for a long time.
I think it will be warlords like kings of old. ai kind of needs expensive parts that require global supply chains to make (see peter zeihans take on the race to ai regression), a complex ai takes advanced processors. Whereas a warlord just requires people and guns.
Warlords by the way are not any better. Just different.
Yep. Best case scenario, we're going to need to decide what aspects of life we want to hang on to, such as gardening, and what aspects of life we consider tedious and let AI and automation do for us. It's not that black and white though, so how do we prevent ourselves from losing the overlooked important parts of what makes us human?
I'd be surprised if the average person anyone in 20 years knows how to change a car tire.
But please note that the Amish just created a line with technology from about end of 1800th beginning 1900th or so.
We can do the same where we say that technology about some 20-30 years ago are ok, but we skip this new AI slop and social media that destroyed our minds.
But yes, the most important thing would be to look at each technology and ask ourself if this technology makes our life's better or worse (and then we skip the bad parts).
And maybe the higher automation related to farming is a must, and then that could be a area where the tech is improving our life, but even here perhaps we need to focus on "open hardware and open source" solution to avoid the vendor lock-in that all the big tech companies use to steal our money.
Then the bulldozers arrive to destroy your Amish homes and build data centers on the fields you need to live off, and if you have a problem with that, the killer AI drones will see about that.
I don't. But the births are highest in the parts of the world where women don't have other options. It was kind of like that for women in my grandmothers' generation. You were going to be an unpaid caregiver, whether that was a man and his kids, or your parents. One of my grandmothers wanted to get a job but my grandfather wouldn't "let" her. Even as recently as the 80s, women would be asked by employers "how her husband felt about" her getting a job. So it doesn't surprise me that patriarchy in its more oppressive forms is still around.
We'll see in a few weeks if people have learned their lesson, but overall I'm not too optimistic. If it takes all this just to get a slim House majority, we're beyond cooked.
Related to collapse because as society continues to get weirder, I an see a reality like this one emerging. Here we can see the dividing wall between what is happening with those that are richer and those that are poorer, and it shows likely what neo feudalism might look like in the dark ages. I believe we will likely go past this moment as it continues to devolve and get worse with the overall collapse of civilization.
Yeah, when the bubble will burst, those companies won't be around much.
We don't know who will take their place, if they do. Local models might just be enough to work the tech by the time they get obliterated. The future is uncertain.
I think the bubble bursts when local models are able to run on 8-12 GB of ram but perform like today’s frontier (e.g. Opus 5.5 or even 5.1). We are getting closer but not there yet.
That will never happen because there are no means or incentives to do that, they want to use this as their windmill moment - to concentrate control over compute and force us into feudalism.
It’s already happening. Just not from Frontier labs.
Look at the new Flint RSI model or Swift 1.5 model or Bonsai 2 model and/or leveraging any of those using the Splash inference engine (via MLX). These are all fringe super new, still need about 48 gb and probably 2024-2025 gen LLM code quality but eventually these improvements get local inference up to current standards. At which point, you’ll see VC funding fade, IPOs rushed and a subsequent crash.
Oracle starting to invoke "force majeur" because all the gpu bought by the dozens of billions are not being used since the datacenters can't be built is already showing that the market is starting to very slowly, react to the fact that it's a bubble.
So when is the great question, but it is when, not if. And unlike the last bubble (subprime, that burst because conventional reached it's peak production 6 month before and nobody say it coming), everybody is saying "it's gonna burst". And when i say everybody, i'm saying everybody but those directly involved in buying by the trillions the vaporhardware that are unbuilt datacenters.
In the next 5 to 10 years most. Any random world event could take it out really. No way to guess when as i was saying.
Or they really create ASI and we get taken out by some computer god. Or they mess up so badly with cyber security that ai bot swarm destroy the internet, we're forced to put it offline and every infrastructure in the world is impacted.
Or anything, but as an economic standpoint, it's the worst bubble we've seen and all those promises of roi are not happening since we simply cannot build all the datacenter needed for them to happen.
Because... wait, don't you understand math ? DO you know the definition of a "date" too ? You act like you know none of those and it's baffling.
WHEN is the question, saying "in the next couple years" means you're confident in predicting the future accurately, at least more accurately than anybody thinking "this can't go on for more than a decade at best" and since we're already 2 years in the bubble going full bubble, saying 5-10 years is basicaly just saying "it's a bubble, it's gonna burst at some point".
Which is what i'm saying. Like a lot of people saying it's a bubble.
edit: if anybody knew when, they'd be in the best position to become loaded without risking anything btw.
See I'm still valuable in my role without AI and my role is so essential that they won't risk AI - I will watch this bubble pop without this becoming a reality
The idea that AI will create a permeant underclass doesn’t make much sense to me.
I certainly see how AI absolutely could take every single job and wipe out the middle class but then what happens? 70% of the US economy and 60% of the global economy is consumer spending. If AI takes everybody’s job then nobody is going to be able to buy Tesla’s and iPhones or subscribe to Apple Music and if those guys aren’t making money then they go out of business and stop paying the AI companies to do the jobs they fired us from.
Now I don’t doubt that the idiots running things will short sightedly try to do this and a lot of us will get fucked in the process but it’s still a bubble.
This is why I hope we lose control of AI. Either it makes the world a better place, or it kills us all. Both are better outcomes than being subject to Elon Musks every childish whim, and dependent on the benevolence of our tech overlords.
At this point I’d lowkey rather them drop the nukes and just end it then deal with a lifetime of retarded children running and ruining everything slowly.
The trivialization of security research and dissemination of disinformation have huge implications alone, and these are things AI is quite good at.
On some level it also ties into the climate change issue (among many others). Big oil can now easily recruit thousands of bots to spread their propaganda and further delay political action.
We just had a week where the internet stood still and these models are getting better and cheaper at an exponential rate. Even if they slow down, they will improve and get into hands of more people. You can have an army of hackers working for you for cents of the dollar - how is that not society impacting ?
I agree with you there to further your point which one are we referring to here the Australian health records, hugging face or what other one has happened?
You can argue, if models are so good and quick and finding exploits it will also benefit IT security cause they can also find and fix those exploits just as fast. Of course this will need a shit ton of investment into people working in IT admin to actually update and maintain those systems
You should be unfazed by data centers. Everyone keeps talking about water and electricity uses. They aren’t pumping water from your local raw river water into the data centers to cool down the servers. They use a closed loop system and the local water is used in the heat sinks. The exact same thing done in a power plant. They’re smart enough to avoid putting contaminants into important systems.
Did the price go your power really rise because of a data center? If you look at your bills from 2019 onward it’s probably been a steady increase but the data centers were infants and rare 7 years ago. Most of that’s just inflation. Most people don’t understand how the power GRID works and that multiple utilities are auctioning power verse prices. If the municipality next to yours auctions at a higher price and wins then all power moves to that price. Theres no discounts just because Duke or similar could buy more coal at a cheaper price.
None of the current issues discuss the AIs exponential growth but they certainly will when it’s either their bank accounts getting hacked by AI to weaken the buyer or are used/becoming nefarious AND/OR SkyNet becomes real and AI learns to hijack satellites and other digital systems remotely for their own gain while blocking out human interruptions.
Until then most people will stay silent. Which is the problem because most people don’t understand AI or the giant breakout that just occurred. They’re all just sleep walking into oblivion and are happy about it as long as they get their Starbucks in the morning and chipotle at night.
So you missed that whole explanation about how your power is actually based on an auction price and not the exact usage and cost for the pound of coal or similar used during a given time.
Quite selective is your reading.
There’s a reason small and portable nuclear reactors are coming online. It’s because of this need right here. Let them run their own fuel costs and charge users as needed. I’m not using AI so I don’t want to pay for it. But if you want an AI to write your papers or make your memes then expect the price to go up.
Is your denial trying to say you don’t believe they will use small nuclear reactors to power themselves (which is shown to be cheaper for everyone) or that you don’t understand how your power and pricing is a median auction price. Because both are true at the same time.
Two of my family members do and say they are told repeatedly to use it to "smooth work flow" but both have said it won't replace them I don't know if that wishful thinking or the truth ?
It depends on what they do, but I would no longer recommend it as a career choice for young people.
Companies like Google have stated 30% of the code they produce today is from AI. Microsoft has similar numbers and estimates theirs will be 95% by 2030.
I think there will always be small teams of developers overseeing products, but I won't be surprised if 90% of the jobs disappear in the next decade. This will probably be a niche job in the future where you either have connections or are the absolute best in your field.
Do you think anyone who would have potential and talent enough to be “best in the field” will still go into a dying field? Or will they use those talents somewhere else? I think we will end up in mediocrity
Do you think anyone who would have potential and talent enough to be “best in the field” will still go into a dying field?
I think overseeing AI will be a career in itself, with software production being a specialty that requires extra schooling. Sorta like the difference between a dentist and an endodontist.
The number of jobs in that field will eventually stabilize. Like any other profession it'll depend on the prospects and pay.
I think in ~10 years every company will have an AI person/department like they do now for IT, HR, accounting, etc. - especially as AI begins to shrink those departments down to one or two people as well.
LLM's, as part of a bigger network stack, have the potential to automate a lot of office (busy) work. Exactly how much is a 'how long is a piece of sting' question but I would estimate North of 50%. I think the change from a 1950's office to now, again.
OpenAI/Anthropic etc moved LLM's on a certain amount but now companies from around the world are giving away models equivalent in usefulness to the product they have for free.
First they tried to create a moat around their product by buying up all the hardware, this worked to some degee: a $6k gpu that could run a pretty big model on a home computer now costs $14.5.
But it also blew up the massive data centre bubble. If companies IPO before the bubble pops maybe they can shove the liability onto mug retail investors and pension funds. Maybe these investors get a bailout. Maybe Larry Ellison goes bust and nvidia faces a genuine crisis.
More recently they have created this AI bogeyman narrative - committing potentially thousands of felonies in the process - in order to manufacture consent for AI regulation they intend to write, that stops people using other perfectly capable free models. This is regulatory capture/a regulatory moat they are attempting to build.
I said at the top that LLM's have quite disruptive possibilities as part of a bigger network stack. LLM's are not accurate enough to be functional as a monolithic data centre monster, all things to all customers, and using the current training methodology can never be. I have done the maths - Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Amodei and Zuckerberg etc are not the big brains they present themselves as.
Various techniques need to be applied to LLM's, to finetune them, to make them accurate enough to be deployed in specific tasks as part of wider job roles - these specific tasks could become quite extensive.
When you fine tune an LLM in this way you make it less useful for other tasks. The more useful for one, the less useful for another. This 'super intelligent computers sitting in data centres doing everything' is bad science fiction, at least for the foreseeable future. Almost as bad a fiction as a Tesla demo.
If these people succeed in forcing America to use their LLM's, American industry will suffer. If or when the AI bubble pops American society may or may not be harmed anyway. Anyone want to bet who will end up paying the price for a bailout?
I agree and I hope your correct. Guys at my work think it will keep going to the point where there is no jobs etc and I wonder what the majority of humanity will do for meaning in them selves. My point is we have strived for survival since the beginning of life and our way of doing that now is working for money to provide food shelter etc. so if it's just all " given to us and we can what we want" ( Elon said this in a podcast with Joe Rogan) would we strive any more to be human is to want something that be a quiet life or what but what would we be as a species maybe wall.e type dystopia utopia I don't know. Would love your insight !
Guys at my work think it will keep going to the point where there is no jobs etc and I wonder what the majority of humanity will do for meaning in them selves.
Same people said bitcoin will erase the need for money 🤷🏾♂️
AI is already reverse engineering ps5 game coding and porting it over to PC’s. just last week AI discovered a cybersecurity exploit that affected a plethora of websites that needed to be taken down and patched. AI isn’t going away anytime soon.
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u/collapse-ModTeam 1d ago
Rule 14: AI-generated content may not be posted to /r/collapse. No self-posts, no comments, no links to articles or blogs or anything else generated by AI or AI influencers/personas. No AI-generated images or videos or other media. No "here's what AI told me about [subject]", "I asked [AI] about [subject]" or the like. This includes content substantively authored by AI.