I was focusing on how to make my leftover chicken palatable for the five minutes Gary spent ranting about Elon Musk. According to Gary, Musk has a plan to build a robot-operated satellite factory on the moon.
That’s why I was a little distracted when he stopped ranting and I said, “Maybe Elon’s just talking. Maybe he’s trying to distract us because that old part of one of his spaceships fell into the moon today.”
And then the seven-year-old version me who lives in my head said, “You live in science fiction but you sound bored about it!”
6 responses to “Modern day quote”
It’s a solid formula: have a grotesque, malicious, pro-Nazi, xenophobic-riot-encouraging CEO (who refuses to turn off the CSAM machine he built) as Public Representative of Cool Stuff (who also does stuff like Regularly Fake Technology by having his “robot-controlled” samples be human-controlled instead and then wave it off as “it’ll be robot controlled by next year” which it then isn’t, such that you can never 100% believe that it has in fact accomplished the cool thing it accomplished): then you end up being less interested in the potential Cool Stuff.
(Zuckerberg: also not someone you can either look up to or trust to use technology for the good of humans rather than predators of either the sexual or financial sort; Bezos: ditto; Altman and Thiel: yikes. It’s basically all supervillains. So, look, if more of the science fiction was straight-up cool instead of an endless string of discoveries which end up being “even if it looks cool at first, odds are good it’s hard-core dystopian in its goals and methods,” then a lot of the new stuff would be a lot more exciting?)
(it is AMAZING that LLMs can now generate outputs that conform to English sentence structure *and yet* they ruined it by making it a plagiarism machine that uses a ton of water and energy to give people results that are frequently confidently inaccurate *and* that cause brain attrition and a reduction in empathy for human beings. It would be SO SO COOL if it were not society-destroying and likely economy-crashing but it is really hard to get excited about something that’s already making it hard to interact with some relatives who don’t understand that *ChatGPT makes stuff up* [and also that’s wrecking customer service at a bunch of places; I had to argue with a chatbot and then with an employee who was copying/pasting stuff out of an AI entity before the human actually checked with another human and said “oh. Yes, you’re right.”] and that is using up water in areas that are already in high drought and that has strong odds of taking down our retirement fund before we hit 60. I would be SO EXCITED about this… if the downsides weren’t like this!)
KC – Why aren’t the servers run by satellites in the Antarctic? Then they woukdn’t need as much water to stay cool. Or … would they always run just as hot and melt the Antarctic? But how could they run as hot if they start off colder?
I’ve been away on vacation and not paying much attention to the news. This one leaves me gobsmacked.
Common Household Mom – What concerns me is that it fell on the dark side. I thought they had a calculation that knew precisely where it was.
If Musk’s crash trashed the crater that the astronaut recently named for his wife, I will be MAD. Not surprised, but MAD.
Re: Antarctica: shipping costs, huge amounts of electricity availability, needing to purchase the land, needing fiber cables to get the data center info in and out, and while each data center has very few full-time jobs associated with it (fewer than any other industrial building type that is actually in-use, including storage, I think?), it does still need a few people and occasional visiting specialists to keep it ticking along.
Why they’re building them preferentially in drought-ridden areas: it’s cheaper to get low-water land already near main data backbones with electricity available [even if the city nearby needs to increase their infrastructure or give residents brownouts when it’s hot and both datacenters and humans really want power]; land that has enough water is more often already being used for something if it’s not in a flood plain (I do not blame them for not wanting to build in a flood plain; that is perhaps the one “okay, yeah, look, fine, that *is* too expensive, to get your data center wiped out every 10 years” thing I’ll concede Some areas with drought problems also have … morally pliable… government officials who will give them major tax cuts and publicly say the tax cuts are to “encourage local industry and local jobs” which adds up to something like “whoever’s needed to actually build the thing, and then… maybe 2-4 jobs long-term per data center (the government officials sometimes get things for themselves out of the deal as well, though, which should be illegal but…).
I guess there’s also the pollution cleanup that the community pays for, technically that’s probably also local industry…
(We got a datacenter a year or so ago. It had runoff that seeped across the road into a pond surrounded by houses. The fish died.)(Citizens were allowed to vote beforehand, but not on *whether* to allow the datacenter, only on whether to give it the concession to allow it to run lines and bring power in from outside the city instead of requiring it to use city power, so if we vetoed that, we’d be opting into brownouts and a data center and voting *for* it meant we were opting into not-brownouts-but-data-center so… The press releases afterwards touted how willing, based on this vote, citizens were to have this data center as a neighbor, but: y’all. That wasn’t what we got to vote for…)
KC – my god, if he ruined Dead Wife Crater he would be run off the planet.