voluble

How so?

I think there's a reasonable, rational position somewhere between the ai hype cringelords on the one hand, and the egotistical humanists on the other who refuse to believe that ai could ever match human output. I think it's hard to look at what has happened over the past 5 years and have any confidence that ai will be constrained to some trivial, manageable ceiling.

I understand the skepticism people have around claims of the transformative power of ai. Some of those claims are just companies trumpeting their own products, and these breathless tech articles about how this or that tool is going to change everything, it's tiring. But I think that can numb us to the signs that something transformative and irrevocable is actually happening.

Even if we assume that current ai is at its limit of progress (it isn't), if an agent costs $10k/year and works 24 hours per day, there is a far greater tolerance for mistakes than a worker who costs $50k and wants vacations and benefits, and sleep. Gates makes this point, and I think it's strong.

Layoffs due to ai replacing human work are happening in the tech sector already, which I think is arguably a canary in the coal mine situation.

Generative AI hasn’t produced anything that exceeds human capability in any field

Chess is an early and canonical example of ai doing exactly that. The speed at which it can complete human-like tasks far exceeds human capability. It's hard to talk about the enormous problems with ai if we accept it as an undifferentiated point in the march of technological progress.

I think (comically) Gates uses the word "cognition" to mean, the business output of an individual white collar worker. In that realm, today, ais are faster, more durable, more scalable, more easily put into parallel than humans, they work around the clock and they're cheaper.

I don't like ai. Still, I think Gates is absolutely right that ai is going to swing a wrecking ball into white collar work and there's no government or industry plan to deal with the human impacts of that.

Wrong. Potentia-Viridi BESS isn't built yet. Why are you posting things in this thread that are factually incorrect?

Alberta has 11 of these storage systems too, which I suppose you'd bring up if you knew anything. It's great that battery storage exists but imagining that it will be able to supply ai compute facilities is naive.

Nuclear fusion plant in Washington

Oh sorry I didn't know nuclear fusion was solved tech.

My friend, you're dreaming. You're way out over your skis talking about these things.

They’re going to be built somewhere

This is also an incorrect assumption, and a premise that people and municipalities all over North America are rejecting. What do you make of that?

500 megawatts across an entire province to be built out over the course of a few years.

I can't understand where your optimism comes from.

You're in this thread hoping that paradigm shifts in battery tech, AB building refineries, and using what you incorrectly assumed is 10GW of unused headroom in the power grid, all for ai compute facilities.

I'm not sure why you're gunning so hard for ai compute facilities to be built in Alberta specifically, and your unsophisticated understanding of the way energy works makes it hard to take your position seriously.

You're aware that the wind isn't always blowing, and the sun isn't always shining, right?

It's critical to understand the difference between MC and TNG. You should learn about them before going off on people. It's clear you don't understand how the energy grid works.

I said 10GW generation not capacity, pay attention.

Thousand acre ai compute facilities offer significant drawbacks and no tangible benefits to Alberta.

Personally I’d like to see all datacenters require 100% renewable power going forward, but that’s not realistically happening.

Do not expect that to ever happen. Meta's facility will use 1GW of power. Right now as I write this, Alberta is generating a total of 10GW. There are something like 25GW of proposed data centre projects in the queue for the province. Renewables cannot and will not be used for facilities that use this much power. It's impossible.

Bars with overpriced drinks hate this one weird trick:

1oz Campari - $1.10

1oz Red vermouth - $0.75

1oz Gin - $1.50

1 orange peel sliver - $0.1

Ice

100% premium ingredients. A dalmation could prepare it. $3.45 cost, sell it for double @ $7.

I know it's an unc take, but I just don't understand where the appetite for $20+ cocktails comes from. Maybe I'm just poor, like the person said below.