It has been said that to the lobsters in the kitchens, the sinking of the Titanic seemed like a miracle.
And now, for their progeny generations later it may all prove to have been a cruel hoax.
Ahem. From Forbes, January 19:
There is a lot of gibbering about AI destroying humanity and it’s an obvious reflex. The first published work of fiction I ever had published at the tender age of 19, in 1982, was about AI and was pretty much along those lines. We’ve all grown up with HAL, the Forbin Project, the Terminator and a host of other such Frankenstein stories. However, a metal Arnie or a soft voiced HAL is not the risk.
The classic worry beyond extinction is redundancy: AI is going to put us all out of a job. But it is not.
One of my loves is to metal detect for artefacts in fields. There are lots and people ask why. The answer is 95% of the population worked in the fields over the full length of history, minus the last couple of hundred years. Big empty fields of today were small fields peppered with cottages filled with workers living walking distance from their jobs. That was the status of all humanity until artificial muscle was invented and they all lost their jobs, their homes, their communities, their way of life. Imagine being there when that happened. Woe, thrice times woe. Yet here we are about as unkeen to milk cows, shovel pig poo and suffer 20% child mortality as can be. Thank you artificial muscle for that release.
AI will do the same.
The new jobs will be as far from our dull routines as cutting grass with scythes and wringing the necks of chickens and making blood sausage is to us in our current existence.
The problem for us, was likely considered the problem for society then. Where are we going to get all that energy from? Because what is going to kick off is an explosion of energy consumption in a AI arms race with no natural ceiling.
There is infinite demand for intelligence.
For investors that is an infinite demand for AI hardware. This mean infinite stock prices for the AI players. My choice is AMD, which is valued at a fraction of Nvidia’s sales yet is definitely in contention with Nvidia in technology. You might put some chips down for Intel too.
The point is that all things feeding AI will be in huge demand and that will back out to straight gigawatts. Just like crypto was going to boil the oceans, AI uses basically the same tech, which is energy in, hot air and numbers out… lots and lots of hot air. That process has a supply chain from raw energy, right up through commodities, to infrastructure, to computing and everything else feeding the AI ecosystem which will simply dwarf everything else....
....MUCH MORE
So, long electricity producers and butter it is.
