One of the many advantages I have over a dunce like Clayton Tucker (besides 40 IQ points) is that I am have been voraciously consuming science news and ‘hard sci-fi’ books for about 47 years now while he has been consuming communist drivel and nonsense for the last 18 years.
It’s hilarious to watch him panic over “problems” that some very smart people have pinpointed and have been working on for a LONG time.
Two of the greatest books I ever read in this area are “The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzweil (2005) and “The Ultimate Resource 2” by Julian Simon (1981, 1996)
Many sci-fi authors have been making predictions and plans for all of this stuff (AI and Singularity) since the 1980s, and several of them have been very accurate in their predictions.
The Ultimate Resource is a massive book, but well worth the read. His basic premise is that the human brain is the ‘ultimate resource’ and we have been overcoming problems that dummies like Clayton have been panicking about for hundreds of years.
Imagine back about 500 years ago, there was a Clayton Tucker type panicking about running out of wood to heat our homes. Then came coal – much higher energy density. But rest assured 200 years later, more panicky Clayton Tucker types got worried we’d run out of coal. Then came oil. Panicky Tucker types have been predicting that oil would run out since the 1980s. It hasn’t, as the human brain got more and more clever about extracting hard-to-reach deposits.
Then came nuclear, which can power our needs for thousands of years. Panicky Tucker types are scared of nuclear for no good reason. He can’t help it. He is a moron who doesn’t read anything but Bernie Sanders tweets.
Anyways, you get the idea. This progression has happened continually and in all areas for hundreds of years. Morons like Clayton Tucker have no clue how incredible modern life is and instead takes everything for granted. Instead of appreciating the incredible tech miracles we use every day, he’s on social media glooming and dooming about one thing or another. And he’s ALWAYS wrong.
Here is a chart of energy efficiency in computing. In case you are too stupid to understand this (like Clayton Tucker), please realize that the chart is a log scale. Thus it represents exponential progress as a straight line.
This chart shows the amount of compute power generated per kilowatt of energy expended. Back in 2008 (not exactly ancient history) 1000 watts yielded less than one teraflop of computation (one trillion floating point operations per second).
Now? We are closing in on 100 teraflops of compute per kilowatt. That is truly incredible. THAT is the ‘ultimate resource’ of human cleverness finding more and more efficient ways to run these machines. We are generating 100x more compute per kilowatt than we were just 17 years ago. Truly incredible.
[Also keep in mind the human brain only uses around 15-22 watts of energy as the highest intelligence on the planet. So imagine what is possible in the future.]
I have been watching the TOP500 and the GREEN500 religiously for decades. They publish new benchmarks every November and May. Their progress is inexorable and impressive. The human brain will continue to overcome these “impossible” problems as they have for centuries. Chicken Little douchebags like Clayton Tucker (and Paul Ehrlich) will look like idiots over and over as their fears never come to fruition.
Clayton can’t comprehend this because his brain is tiny, weak and shriveled. It is completely foreign to him that there are people out there who are about 10x smarter than he is and they know how to get things done. They don’t live at home with mother and post social media crap all day long. They go out and achieve. We all benefit from their efforts and genius.
I doubt Comrade Clayton knows this but we are now in the “exascale” age of computing. We broke the 1,000 petaflop (1 exaflop or one quintillion operations per second) floating-point operations per second barrier almost four years ago now.
As exascale computing advances, power consumption and efficiency become more and more important. The greatest human minds WILL find solutions to every problem. Granted, it will be mainly white and Asian males who solve these problems and certainly not Somalis or Haitians.
So stop worrying about fucking data centers. As long as meddling, Big Gov morons like Clayton Tucker are kept away from the real adults, we will continue to advance humanity and enjoy a higher standard of living going forward.