by Dan Burns

Oct 26, 2024, 6:00 AM

Nobel winner for AI is an AI skeptic

This is from 2023, before his Nobel came through:

Artificial intelligence can be used as a force for good – but there are also big risks involved with the generative technology as it gets even smarter and more widespread, “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton told the Collision tech conference in Toronto (in 2023)…

During his talk, Hinton outlined six potential risks posed by the rapid development of current AI models: bias and discrimination; unemployment; online echo chambers; fake news; “battle robots”; and existential risks to humanity.
(University of Toronto)

Perhaps “skeptic” is the wrong word, as he’s clearly not skeptical about AI’s ability to do a lot of things. At this time, I’m more of a skeptic about what I regard as AI’s grotesquely overhyped “potential.” He’s apparently more so about its potential for making bad things happen. And I certainly acknowledge that I could very well be wrong, and we really do have to seriously worry about Hinton’s (and many others’) concerns. And do something about it all, starting now.

I gotta say, who the hell would be willing to turn over their thinking, and their creative activity, to machines? Don’t they have any pride and confidence in themselves at all? If that’s the case, there are much better ways to work on that.

That said, I’m not opposed to some uses of AI in the hands of responsible scientists. Like largely solving the protein folding problem and potentially recovering ancient classics thought lost. But letting greedheads and warmongers run amok with it is a horrifying idea.

Which brings me to the real point of this screed, which is that the artificial “intelligence”-mongers think our #1 priority in energy policy now needs to be restarting/building nuclear and holding off on shutting down coal plants, to serve AI’s rapacious electricity needs. Such a plan absolutely is a clear and present danger.

Constellation Energy made national headlines last month when it announced plans to restart operations at its shuttered Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear power plant in 2028.

The 835-MW Pennsylvania facility joins Holtec International’s 800-MW Palisades generating station, which could reopen next October in Michigan, on the short but growing list of recently-shuttered nuclear reactors targeted for a return to service. NextEra CEO John Ketchum said in July that his company was mulling a restart of its 601-MW Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa.
(Utility Dive)

And:

Retirement plans for the country’s aging coal-fired power plants have hit a wrinkle, with concerns about grid reliability and growing electricity demand forcing operators to keep the powerhouses burning. Now, just 54 gigawatts of America’s coal-powered capacity are expected to go offline by the decade’s end – a 40% decrease from last year’s projections. And the strain is only going to get worse: AI bots like ChatGPT use nearly ten times as much electricity to fetch an answer compared to a simple Google search.
(finimize)

As far as I’m concerned a far better plan is to tell the AI crowd to figure out how to run their toys on a lot less energy. Their magnificent intellects shouldn’t have much trouble with that, right?

Comment from Joe Musich: The Christmas candy factor is so twinkly attractive to some that that cannot get to the expense column which gave us the vision energy and the accompanying radioactivity to begin with. In the middle of this AI expansion using un-shuttered power plants is the potential for European wide radioactive element contamination in the Ukraine starring these dodos in the face. But their eyes are closed.