AIs, humans and our existential fight for the power grid ...
I’m spending a lot of time these days thinking about how we are at the very baby-beginning of something we can’t quite understand yet as humans.
We are building intelligent machines that are already smarter than us – so much so that we actually do not know just how they are getting to their answers. Think about that … we don’t know how the AIs we’ve built to date are getting to their outcomes.
And these are not even the so-called superintelligent machines – a form of AI that surpasses our own human intelligence across most domains.
This CNBC headline this week sums up my level of concern: Inventors of AI want everyone to stop building AI.
I recently spoke to two people also raising the alarm about this existential moment for humanity, but in different ways. First, Nate Soares, co-author of ‘If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies’, walked me through the case for why we need to slow AI development before it kills us all. This conversation was aptly timed, as a recent coalition of people ranging from computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton (“the godfather of AI”) to Meghan Markle to Glenn Beck called for a ban on superintelligence, demonstrating a rare moment of alignment on the stakes.
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But while the experts continue to debate each other about what might happen if we don’t regulate or slow the development of AI, climate journalist Lindsay Muscato has been documenting what is actually happening as data centers are already reshaping our physical world, straining our power grids, and hitting residents in various parts of America with rising energy bills.
Linsday’s reporting about the sprawling data center footprint is a reminder that the impact of AI on humanity is more than existential, it’s disruptive to rhythm daily offline life. While data centers generally employ just a handful of human people, their processing power requirements add the equivalent of literal whole new town onto an already taxed grid. Lindsay explains on the show why residents are experiencing higher energy bill costs, and how some are fighting back.
It’s clear through my own experience and work that the way we live now has forever changed. It is also clear that we are accelerating toward a new world of humans much more intertwined with AIs and that it is happening much faster than we imagined. And without a lot of guardrails regarding, well, humanity.
Given our current ways of governance have shown an inability to manage our physical and digital citizenry with respect to big tech and the surveillance state over the last quarter century, the reality of lining up all of the global tech players’ incentives toward the ‘public good’ seems pretty low.
We like to imagine the rise of intelligent machines as a far-off, sci-fi future. But it’s already here. Humming beneath our feet, pulling energy from our towns and training on the data we produce by the minute by talking into our chatbot companions. We are not going to wake up to a new AI world, and that’s because we are already in it.
My assumption is that if you are reading this you likely already believe that to some extent.