If money is being spent on this instead of adtech, so be it. Fake it til you make it, energy folks.
We need less e-gold. We need less Facebook and Google and streaming services.
We need less ai scrapers and cloudflare in front of everything.
We are burning up the planet for bits.
It's insane.
Go ahead and look it up, you might be overstating the problem by a bit.
Not to mention all the brainwaves that could be devoted to something that matters instead of being occupied by a screen full of attention grabbers.
Remember though, most of HN users are funded from ad revenue
Deal with the reality that is here: those things will keep chugging along, finding sources of energy that are abundant while not burning fossil fuels is our best bet for the near/mid-term future... It's probably much easier than amassing enough political capital to destroy huge money-making machines with extreme power behind them.
No, I don't like the waste from Bitcoin mining, exploding AI bubble, etc. either but it is what it is.
I am counting dozens of social media comments a day now proclaiming the "AI Bubble Burst" will "save us all". Save us from what, exactly? Do people need a new villain character? Does this one just happen to be something the media can easily caricature and create a mystical scare over?
The sun is going to consume the earth. Life won't last here forever. I'd rather we build cool shit and pull our species (or its descendants) off-world sometime in the next two thousand years. (Given that we don't know the nature of dark matter and energy, that our instruments are quite primitive, and that our civilization is quite new, I'll forego prognostications about the end of the universe.)
Life on earth is a third the age of the universe. We're ancient. By our present understanding, intelligent technological life is shockingly rare in the galaxy. There are at least a few hundred "hard steps" from abiotic soup to us now. (Just a few: if we'd been stuck in the ocean, we wouldn't have scientists able to conduct chemistry in an aqueous environment. If we'd had decomposers during the carboniferous, we wouldn't have vast reserves of easily accessible fuel for industrialization. If we didn't have a Jupiter configuration, Earth would be bombarded with asteroids. If we had a different Jupiter configuration, the dinosaurs might not have gone extinct and we might not have gotten water at all.)
Life here will end. There's nothing to "preserve" apart from our biosphere's species diversity and carrying capacity. We can do that and build data centers.
There are far worse evils to concern yourself with than AI. This is a manufactured distraction.
It's sort of similar to somebody saying "hey, you're bleeding really bad, maybe we should get you to a hospital," and them rejoining with "nobody lives forever." Cool if you think you're action movie star, but stupid in real life.
Materialist nihilism is so passe.
Previously, the New Yorker with near identical headline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45953568