alt Hacker NewsI agree wholeheartedly. It irks me when people critique automation because it uses large amounts of resources. Running a machine or a computer almost always uses far less resources than a human would to do the same task, so long as you consider the entire resource consumptions.
Growing the food that a human eats, running the air conditioning for their home, powering their lights, fueling their car, charging their phone, and all the many many things necessary to keep a human alive and productive in the 21st century are a larger resource cost than almost any machine/system that performs the same work. From an efficiency perspective, automation is almost always the answer. The actual debate comes from the ethical perspective (the innate value of human life).
Replies
I suspect you may be either underestimating how efficient our brains are at computing or severely underestimating how much energy these AI models take to train and run.
Even including our system of comfort like refrigerated blueberries in January and AC cooling a 40° C heat down to 25° C (but excluding car commutes, because please work from home or take public transit) the human is still far far more energy efficient in e.g. playing go then alpha-go. With LLMs this isn’t even close (and we can probably factor in that stupid car commute, because LLMs are just that inefficient).
Not ALL automation can be more efficient.
Just ask Elon about his efforts to fully automate Tesla production.
Same as A.I. Current LLM-based A.I.s are not at all as efficient as a human brain.