Consider this. An AI chatbot uses 200 million times more energy than the human brain to perform the tasks it does. Once done the task, the human owner of the brain can then, if he or she so chooses, cook dinner, pick up the kids, run a triathlon, play music, write a letter, unplug the drain, shop for clothes, paint the fence – you name it. But the AI chatbot can simply run variants of the same task.
So why is so much money being sunk into a technology when we already have a cheaper, far more versatile one? The answer is that AI can do specific tasks quicker – sometimes much quicker – and more accurately than the human brain could ever do. If only good at one thing, it can nonetheless be very good.
We’re starting to see the benefits of this in, for instance, medicine and pharmaceutical research, where doctors can now produce faster and more accurate diagnoses and researchers can speed up the pace of experimental research. Similarly, accountants and lawyers are now able to hand tasks like preparation of briefs or spreadsheets, improving their productivity while reducing their need for labour.
The progress isn’t always linear, though. Research has found that doctors using AI to perform diagnostics tend, on average, to lose diagnostic skills. Smarter machines can make for dumber people so for now, at least, AI outputs need to be verified by humans. Nevertheless AI could automate some tasks while enhancing human performance in others, so its potential seems considerable.
The other way I think about it is, even if the investment proves accretive, the revenue takes the form of income you are siphoning out of the rest of the economy. That money would otherwise go to pay people, or build real infrastructure. Instead it goes to a small number techbros and data centers.
Physical productive capacity absent external investment is a zero sum game, there’s only so much stuff we can build. And if collectively we are building nothing but data centers, there are many societal needs that will go unmet. This is what worries me most