Well yes and if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. I think it can reasonably be said we’re kinda spitballing here.
While I love Carl Sagan, you’re doing him a disservice by using that quote here. When talking about whether human beings will be replaced by AI, you have to consider all the resources that go into maintaining both. You can’t just hand wave that away by saying, “well, yeah, I guess, nothing means anything if you analyze it too deeply. Ultimately everything required the energy of the Big Bang, so we can’t draw any real conclusions on the energy needs of anything. The world’s just vibes bro.”
We’re not trying to get an exact figure. But when trying to predict whether AI will replace human labor, you have to make a reasonably fair comparison, otherwise your conclusions are completely worthless. Your entire point was that AI requires more energy to run than humans for a given task. If you think energy limitations are going to be the bottleneck for AI deployment, you need to make a fair comparison for the energy needs for both human and AI work.
Look at it this way. Let’s say I have an acre of land. I want to turn that land into as much mediocre writing as possible. I could do two things:
Use that land to grow food to feed mediocre human writers.
Put solar panels on that land to produce electricity to power an LLM.
Inevitably, I would be able to produce thousands of times more mediocre writing from that same acre of land with option (2) than (1). Biology is stupidly inefficient from an energy efficiency perspective.
Well yes and if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. I think it can reasonably be said we’re kinda spitballing here.
While I love Carl Sagan, you’re doing him a disservice by using that quote here. When talking about whether human beings will be replaced by AI, you have to consider all the resources that go into maintaining both. You can’t just hand wave that away by saying, “well, yeah, I guess, nothing means anything if you analyze it too deeply. Ultimately everything required the energy of the Big Bang, so we can’t draw any real conclusions on the energy needs of anything. The world’s just vibes bro.”
We’re not trying to get an exact figure. But when trying to predict whether AI will replace human labor, you have to make a reasonably fair comparison, otherwise your conclusions are completely worthless. Your entire point was that AI requires more energy to run than humans for a given task. If you think energy limitations are going to be the bottleneck for AI deployment, you need to make a fair comparison for the energy needs for both human and AI work.
Look at it this way. Let’s say I have an acre of land. I want to turn that land into as much mediocre writing as possible. I could do two things:
Inevitably, I would be able to produce thousands of times more mediocre writing from that same acre of land with option (2) than (1). Biology is stupidly inefficient from an energy efficiency perspective.