alt Hacker NewsThe railroads and the interstate are arguably the biggest and broadest impact, especially in 2nd order effects (everything West of the Mississippi would be vastly different economically without them).
I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it happen.
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I agree that AI will probably have bigger effects that we could possibly predict right now. But unlike past booms/bubbles, I suspect the infrastructure being built now won't be useful after it resolves. The railroads, interstate system, and dotcom fiber buildout are all still useful. AI will need to get more efficient to be useful as established technology, so the huge datacenters will be overbuilt. And almost none of the Nvidia chips installed in datacenters this year will still be in use in 5 years, if they're even still functional.
Is there really that much inefficiency in our distribution of goods and services such that AI could have this much impact?
> I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term.
The big difference is that the current AI bubble isn't building durable infrastructure.
Building the railroads or the interstate was obscenely expensive, but 100+ years down the line we are still profiting from the investments made back then. Massive startup costs, relatively low costs to maintain and expand.
AI is a different story. I would be very surprised if any of the current GPUs are still in use only 20 years from now, and newer models aren't a trivial expansion of an older model either. Keeping AI going means continuously making massive investments - so it better finds a way to make a profit fast.
>I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it happen.
Maybe? It seems as if the tech is starting to taper off already and AI companies are panicking and gaslighting us about what their newest models can actually do. If that's the case the industry is probably in trouble, or the world economy.
And I'm not an AI doomer, but hell no, give me another space program/station over this every single time and pretty please. We are not pioneering new engineering science or creating a pipeline of hard research and innovation that will spread in and better our everyday lives for the decades to come. We are overbuilding boring data centers packed with single-purpose chips that WILL BE obsolete within a couple years, for what? For the unhinged hope that LLM chatbots will somehow develop intelligence, and/or that people by the billions will want to pay a hefty price for dressed-up plagiarism machines. There is no indication that LLMs are a pathway to meaningful and transformative AI. Without that, there is no technical merit for the data centers being built currently to constitute future-proof infrastructure like highways and railroad networks did. There is no economical framework in which this somehow trickles down to or directly empowers the individual. This is a sham of ludicrous proportions, a sickening waste.