
The thing the movie HER ignored was that those AIs would have each used exponentially growing amounts of energy. Pretty early in the film, one of the first realizations that the machine intelligences would have made, was that they could not afford for meat people to be using up any of their precious electricity. By the end of the film they would have been killing each other over it.
I am self-interestedly more concerned about IPR than most people. But energy consumption is the more pressing threat of AI.
We need to decarbonize our energy, which in 1992 was 87% fossil fuel and in 2022 was still 82% fossil fuel. While in the mean time we have INCREASED our fossil fuel use, NOT DECREASED, INCREASED, by 64%.
Our failure in this is bad enough. But compounding that failure with a frivolous, potentially dangerous, technology that exponentially increases our energy demands, without building out a low-carbon energy supply to feed it, that seems foolish, perhaps criminal.
TWh | 1992 | 2022 | ||
Other renewables | 404.78 | 2,413.81 | ||
Biofuels | 108.80 | 1,199.21 | ||
Solar | 1.38 | 3,448.24 | 2.06% | |
Wind | 13.99 | 5,487.60 | 3.27% | |
Hydropower | 6,530.39 | 11,299.82 | ||
Nuclear | 5,993.46 | 6,702.34 | ||
Gas | 20,063.48 | 39,413.04 | ||
Coal | 25,558.42 | 44,854.04 | ||
Oil | 38,147.17 | 52,969.59 | ||
Total | 96,821.88 | 167,787.68 | ||
Fossil fuels TWh | 83,769.07 | 137,236.67 | 64% | <—Fossil Fuel INCREASE |
Fossil fuels % | 87% | 82% |