Starting to change my mind about AI

  For a while now I have been waiting for the "AI bubble" to burst. I don't want it to happen, but what the hell is one supposed to think when companies that make up a large portion of the U.S. economy invest hundreds of times more than they can reasonably extract in a year for that? It's a fad, I thought. First it bubbles, then it bursts, then it settles to a shit version of itself, like the Internet did.

  But then it hit me. AI is not a tool, it's a resource. It's like water, or land or the Internet. Countries without Internet are done now, they can't affect anything, people from there can't do anything in the world because they would need skills they don't have, even if their abusive boyfriend/supreme leader would let them leave. When the Internet came to be, some people saw it coming, but most people just saw it insinuate and grow into their lives, upend and take over other stuff, only better, and they let it. No one had the foresight to hoard it. And the Americans have been trying to fix that for decades now.

  Artificial Intelligence is just the same. You need compute for it, you need power for it, and those things are expensive and politically sensitive, but it's not clear for a lot of people that what you need more than money and public support is thinking computers. It doesn't matter how much they lose in terms of finance, because finance too is done. Money is pointless. And this idea started even earlier, with Bitcoin. The concept is the same, if you think about it: your currency is a piece of compute. AI just took this to several orders of magnitude higher.

  OK, let me paint it in another way. Countries as animal species. Each of them have their characteristics, their strengths and weaknesses, they all try to survive and grow in a world where all of the other countries are as well. But they are animals, right? They evolve big teeth, large necks, fast legs. And one day here comes Man, with a brain. And it's not even one species of Man, there are more, slight variations of the thinking animal. The better the brain, the better their survival chances. The closer one species it is to you in intelligence, the higher the risk and threat from them. So the species of Man fight each other, one survives. The animals? What about them? They are not even part of the conversation.

  We're seeing the same thing, but with the thinking machine. The one that will have the better thinking machine would have complete supremacy and control. Not because better weapons, not because better people, but because better compute, which then affects everything and everyone. You hear this phrase already "AI is a multiplier". Instead of getting a muscle that is 10% stronger or a claw that is 10% longer, you get a spear that can fly through the air tens of times its own length, while keeping you out of danger. If the multiplier is high enough, it doesn't matter how weak, stupid or absurd you are. You just win by domination at scale.

  And yes, it's another scary concept. An even scarier concept than a financial bubble burst or a world war, because something that is 1000 times stronger doesn't do war with you, it just steps on you by mistake. But there is hope. And that hope is the opposite of "suveran AI", it's a world AI. The Internet resisted - somewhat - the enshitification process, the hoarding, the greed, by being international and free. A global AI. Maybe the one that will rule us all, who knows, but the point is we can't let a bunch of people own it and control it, even if those people are your people. Because they are people. They are just animals with a brain that now want to own a bigger brain.

  "Compute" is now the gold in a gold rush. Countries will move mountains to get at it. They will risk their existence and they will kill for it. If you are one million times more in debt that you can possibly pay but you have the computing edge, you win. Money has become meaningless. We are moving toward the "smart matter" concept where the value of any entity will be measured in how much mass and energy they have converted into computing hardware.

  There are a lot of good science fiction books that predicted this, but rarely talked about the transition phase from a world of dumb countries to a smart planet. It's going to be interesting, for sure.

  I predict that what will happen is a rush toward energy production. First renewables, then fusion, then probably fission because people now have a reason to do it other than the pyramid schemes they've been running to get forever funding. The grids will have to adapt, because there will be so much more power running through them. The computing centers will feed on this like leeches and spread like... like we spread out from Africa and infected every land. Your country will need to start work on this NOW. Borrow like crazy, train people, then just create the infrastructure for energy consumption that will dwarf what the Earth was consuming several thousand times over. If you thought fossil fuel global warming was bad, wait to see what all of that excess heat will do, so cooling infrastructure will also be a major asset.

  But all of this will be just a stopgap measure against being stepped on. Unless we make a truly global thinking infrastructure, so interconnected that hoarding it for just one group of people becomes impossible, we are going to see conflict at levels unthought of before.

  So yeah, I've changed my mind about AI. It will not burst, it will explode and take us all with it. Heed my words: energy, cooling and compute. NOW!