VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
41m ago
Partly it's happening, just slower than you think
This is always the case with technology: it can take a surprising amount of time to replace existing infrastructure even when new technology is clearly better. Existing equipment was expensive and still works, teaching staff new workflows has overhead, and the impetus to actually change things is often low. OPM was still processing paper records for employee retirement until very recently. How many industrial machines are still running DOS out there?
I can imagine AI being both transformative and seemingly-ubiquitous, but still not reaching all the dark corners of the workforce for a generation or two.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
52m ago
You may grumble at an auto factory, but you do, at least, understand why cars are necessary. Even if you personally don't own a car and rely on public transport to get everywhere, it's obvious that there's real public demand for cars, on the basis of their obvious usefulness. You might not want a factory near you, but you understand why there need to be factories somewhere. LLMs have not cleared that hurdle.
I don't think you're completely wrong here, but in this case the comparison to make if you think AI will be extremely useful would be if the anti-car urbanists started showing up to protest your car factory. Sure, you might not want it in your neighborhood, but you buy a new (to you, at least) car every so often and don't want them to become scarce resources, and people show up to protest every single car factory on the basis of "induced demand" traffic claims, "just walk, bruh", accident statistics, and a demand that you commute by never-to-be-finished passenger rail instead. They are convinced cars have no real use, and it'd be rather frustrating to normies if they doubled car prices without delivering any of the promised better alternatives first.
How to tell which framing is more relevant seems difficult from inside the situation.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
Texas is an interesting case there because ERCOT has long-term (2032) forecasts expecting peak grid demand to rise from 91GW (last month) to 370GW. More than 4x! I'm frankly not sure where they expect energy to come from, but solar (and battery storage), wind, and natural gas have been growing pretty fast for years now. But probably more important is that someone is at least thinking about the distribution infrastructure to do so.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
IIRC YouTube spends a surprising amount of processing power transcoding uploaded video, to the point where Google has developed custom ASIC hardware to do so.
I guess I don't know how AWS lays out their physical locations, but "all EC2 hardware in one building" would extremely computation heavy, whereas S3 would not be. But perhaps they're intermingled for some reason. AWS and Google also have a lot more institutional experience building these things, which probably smooths out some of the wrinkles.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
13hr ago
Surely there's a town with a data center they can go ask how good it was for them?
Are these new datacenters really that different from the ones we've been building for literally decades? AWS and Google have had giant server farms longer than anyone was really looking at machine learning like today. Heck, I remember people complaining about the NSA's data center in Utah slurping up all our emails, not its water usage. Complaining about this seems a new idea, but I don't recall too many complaints about the facilities previously. On the other hand, maybe it's like fracking, which wasn't new a decade ago, but really took off at scale.
On the gripping hand, I'm really not sure who's paying for all these new data centers, how they intend to pay the bills if AI tokens are fully commoditized, or why they're being put close to neighborhoods. AWS has existed in multiple locations (they don't disclose exact addresses, but it's probably not a single building) for a long time, and doesn't seem to have garnered quite the same level of complaints.
If it helps, if you held this retroactively today, I'm still not sure how I'd personally vote. I get a lot out of the Internet, but I do sometimes wonder if it's worth all the downsides.
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