John Loeffler is having a serious freakout over so-called Artificial Intelligence (a serious misnomer), but it's not just about the possible disruptive effects of the technology per se, or even mostly about that.
I don't think Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is a bad guy, or that he has nefarious plans for Nvidia, but the most consequential villains in history are rarely evil. They just go down a terribly wrong path, and end up leaving totally forseeable, but ultimately inevitable ruin in their wake.
While the star of the show might have been Nvidia Blackwell, Nvidia's latest data center processor that will likely be bought up far faster than they can ever be produced, there were a host of other AI technologies that Nvidia is working on that will be supercharged by its new hardware. All of it will likely generate enormous profits for Nvidia and its shareholders, and while I don't give financial advice, I can say that if you're an Nvidia shareholder, you were likely thilled by Sunday's keynote presentation.
For everyone else, however, all I saw was the end of the last few glaciers on Earth and the mass displacement of people that will result from the lack of drinking water; the absolutely massive disruption to the global workforce that 'digital humans' are likely to produce; and ultimately a vision for the future that centers capital-T Technology as the ultimate end goal of human civilization rather than the 8 billion humans and counting who will have to live — and a great many will die before the end — in the world these technologies will ultimately produce with absolutely no input from any of us.
It turns out that Nvidia's new product, a cluster of processors called Blackwell, draws 15 Kilowatts of power, and Huang expects to sell millions of them. That would certainly make his shareholders rich, but, as Loeffler writes:
I always feared that the AI data center boom was likely going to make the looming climate catastrophe inevitable, but there was something about seeing it all presented on a platter with a smile and an excited presentation that struck me as more than just tone-deaf. It was damn near revolting.
Yep. They don't care.
1 comment:
For millennia our most powerful inventions weren't powerful enough to upset the order of things. Now we know that they have been since the end of the eighteenth century (fossil fueled power). We take far more provisions for our safety when we create nitroglycerin than when we make gunpowder; now our inventions are like that but at a global scale.
Where are the adults in the room?
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