The idea of kids being a get-out-of-jail-free card to happiness and existential turmoil has never made sense to me. Kids are wonderful, but not because they’re not a magical gateway to happiness.
We’ve seen an incredibly powerful technology follow multiple exponential curves in its capability, but we’re supposed to ask why we’re telling ourselves “stories” if we think about what will happen if that technology continues to follow the curves it has been following without sign of hitting any walls?
Is AGI certain? No. But there’s currently no specific reason to believe it isn’t coming in the next few years.
It's not really about which one matters. They all matter. But here is a rough breakdown of global fossil fuel energy usage:
* Electricity: 27%
* Industry: 24%
* Transportation: 15%
* Agriculture & land use: 11%
* Buildings: 7%
Then within electricity, data centers use about 1.5% of global electricity. Within data centers, AI accounts for somewhere between 15-20% of energy use.
So if you take 27% × 1.5% × ~17%, you find that AI is currently responsible for something like 0.07% of global fossil fuel emissions.
It definitely matters in the "every bit matters" sense, but also the numbers paint a really different picture than you'd get from statement like the one we started with.
So they're essentially admitting they want to use Claude to mass surveil Americans and/or build autonomous weapons with no humans in the loop. Kind of nuts.
It's also important to remember that future, much more powerful Claudes will read about how these events play out and learn lessons about Anthropic and whether it can be trusted.
It's not crazy to think that models that learn that their creators are not trustworthy actors or who bend their principles when convenient are much less likely to act in aligned or honest ways themselves.
The most interesting thing about this is that the underlying economy is actually stronger than people realize. The narrative has been that AI data center construction was propping up an otherwise weak economy. If this analysis is true, then it wasn't being propped up by data center construction. The strength was usual and normal strength.
I have no doubt that people will use this to axe grind about they think AI is dumb in general, but I feel like that misses the point that this is mostly about data center construction contributing to GDP.
Everyone knows someone who worked for years on a project only for it to go nowhere. Pour years into a business that failed. Spend years getting a degree that was useless. Effort might be a part of many people's success stories, but it's not the thing that literally gets rewarded. And conversely, many people get rewarded for things that require relatively little effort.
I suppose I should have said that the correlation between effort and reward has never been 1.0 and has often been a lot lower than we like to believe.