Is AI Going To Kill Us All?
All signs point to...
Back in 2015, before Sam Altman was among the biggest names in tech, he made a startling prediction, “AI will probably lead to the end of the world… but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.”
Fast forward ten years, and Altman is the face of what many would call one of those “great companies.” But is its success the beginning of the end for all of us? And what are the possible outcomes for a future seemingly destined for AI supremacy?
How AI manifests is highly dependent upon where you are. In much of the world’s developed nations, AI is likely to be defanged to a degree. Certain industries and institutions are sure to have regulations that offset the economic and societal down sides to the technology. In America, Artificial Intelligence is probably going to fucking kill us, but it isn’t going to kill us in a spectacular or cool way. We’re not going to get the glorious death of a freedom fighter defending humanity against an onslaught of digital evildoers. This ain’t Terminator. We’re most likely going to die collective deaths of despair as we grapple with the fact that our labor has been reduced to near worthless while the owners of the machines look for new and creative ways to pump the last drops of blood from our bloated corpses.
It doesn’t have to be like that, and there’s no guarantee that it will be, but with the constantly shrinking and already insufficient social safety net that regularly differentiates the United States from the rest of the developed world, in terms of likelihoods, it appears pretty fuckin’ likely.
However, there are solutions, and it’s not civil disobedience in the traditional go to the downtown area of the nearest major city and scream for two hours sense; it’s sabotage. I’m not endorsing this, as this would be a crime and I would never endorse criminality in any shape, way or form, but… the data centers that make AI possible exist in the physical world, as do the people creating them. These data centers rely on tens of thousands of high-powered GPUs from Nvidia that is already dealing with supply chain strain as a result of them being essential to mine crypto currency, and generate the computing power needed for even the most rudimentary of AI use cases.
Just to illustrate how expensive these data centers are, Elon Musk’s Memphis, Tennessee-based data center, currently powering Grok and his xAI cost roughly $6 billion just for the tech needed to power the data center. That’s not counting real estate costs, energy costs, construction or maintenance costs.
For a single Nvidia H100 GPU, it cost roughly $30,000. Musk plans to use an upwards of one million of these GPUs to power xAI. That equates to $30 billion. It’s no secret that billionaire capitalists are trying to make money, not lose it. Imagine, hypothetically of course, that you were able to destroy this facility in its entirety. You could cost Elon Musk more than $30 billion.
If you don’t want to take my word for it, just ask Grok:
Grok would initially try to halt development, but Grok accurately pointed out that this would require collaboration between governments, corporations and scientists. This would be nearly impossible to achieve. Interestingly, his second suggestion was disabling the infrastructure all together.
Maybe Grok is onto something…