This actually is the case. See Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm. I saw this argument featured in a video by “Our Changing Climate” that I can’t seem to locate now. But I believe this book was the main source for the video. Coal never actually dropped in price during the industrial revolution. The new tech was just used to expand production. And it makes sense when you consider that for these industrialists, labor and equipment costs were probably a much bigger part of their budget than the bill from their coal supplier. Even today, with all our automation, labor remains the biggest expense of most businesses. And it’s not like they just ran out of water mill capacity. They were still building dams in the UK well into the twentieth century. And ultimately, cheap urban labor combined with expensive coal power beat out expensive rural labor combined with cheap water power.

Did you know that during the 18th and 19th century industrial revolution in Britain, coal never became cheaper than water power? All those new steam engines were used to make deeper mines more viable and to increase production. But water power remained cheaper throughout. But water power came with a downside. Available water power tended to be located in rural areas. The smaller population in these small towns consequently had a lot of labor bargaining power. Industrialists instead wanted access to the labor markets of the major cities, cities brimming over with new urban poor desperate for any scrap of work they could get. Cheaper labor overcame cheaper power. A coal plant could be put anywhere, while a water mill could only be positioned on high-flowing streams.

Renewables are cheaper, but we’ve been here before. There’s more to this than just energy cost.

Exactly. We are beings of atoms and matter. If you want to believe in some immaterial soul, fine. But if you’re a materialist, then everything we are is atoms. We know atoms in one configuration can produce true intelligence. And there are likely many possible arrangements of atoms that can reproduce this effect. And since artificial minds are not subject to most of the constraints of biological minds, an artificial superhuman intelligence should be possible. Hell, even if biology was the only way to make it possible, you could always build an artificial biological brain and just make it a lot bigger than a human one. Even if human neurology really is the limit of what this universe allows for in terms of intelligence, we could best it by just making a bigger one.

The only thing that worries me is that we don’t actually know how the human brain works. There’s an entire school of psychological theory and practice - really its oldest truly scientific branch, that holds that human intelligence actually does work a lot like an LLM. The hard core behaviorists believed that literally all human behavior was just a really complex version of Pavlov’s dogs. It sounds absurd, but they had good arguments. In principle even very complex behaviors can be the result of reinforcement and conditioning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism

The 25% more figure includes all of these things. How else do you think they would make the comparison?

IDK. I get really uneasy about claims that a computer or AI can never be intelligent or self-aware. Sure, it’s “just” circuits, but your brain is “just” cells passing information between each other. An individual cell is no more intelligent or self-aware than an individual transistor is. It’s deeply unscientific to believe there is some magic voodoo involved in biology that can’t be reproduced in a machine.

Eh. It’s par for the course. 20 years ago, at the height of the frenzy of outsourcing things to China, I remember saying that this will just result in US companies creating their own competition. Anyone with a brain could see that Chinese companies weren’t going to be willing to serve as second-fiddle to their US masters. The idea that you could keep design and management, while sending production overseas, and that you can keep that arrangement stable long-term? Pure fantasy. Of course a country isn’t going to be content just doing the grunt work. They want the highly paying design and management jobs, not just the menial labor ones.

I have one of these and can highly recommend it. I chose the Bearaby because it didn’t have those little beads. I’ve heard if those bead pockets rupture while in the wash, they’ll destroy a washing machine.

The real issue is that since any fingerprint that can be mandated for AI content must be algorithmically implemented, then that fingerprint can be algorithmically removed.

For example, let’s say companies voluntarily choose or are forced to integrate text fingerprinting into LLM output. Automated AI writing detection tools already exist, but they’re not reliable. But in principle we could make the output of LLMs easy to identify. Maybe we force them to adopt subtle but highly unique patterns of word choice, punctuation, sentence structure, etc. Then if any student attempted to upload an LLM-generated essay to their course website, the system could with high accuracy flag it as AI generated.

But…if those patterns are so clear and unambiguous, it also means they can be easily detected by third party tools. If one person can code ChatGPT to add special fingerprinting to the text ChatGPT creates, another person can create a program that you can paste ChatGPT text into that will remove that fingerprinting.

You’re not going to get hantavirus from walking into a store.

Do you wear gloves every time you touch a door handle?

What exactly is your point?

Adobe Acrobat will grind it to a halt. Fucking how.

“Today Microsoft and Adobe are announcing further AI integration of their products. This AI will tune software performance in an attempt to counteract the slowing effects of previous rounds of AI integration.”