The hungry I.

"AI development could be slowed by a huge demand for electricity," reports WSHU in Connecticut, and it's an interesting development in this weird new world of artificial intelligence. 

Connecticut and other states would have to significantly improve their energy infrastructure to keep up with the electricity needed for AI computing, said Chetan Jaiswal, a computer science professor at Quinnipiac University and an AI researcher.

“For example, a single chip running for nine days uses more than 27,000 kilowatt hours. An average household uses approximately 10,000 kilowatt hours annually,” Jaiswal said.

And that's a report from tiny Connecticut, far from the fantasy land that is California, where so many high-tech companies dwell, and where the government thinks that medieval tech like sun and wind will somehow cough up enough power for all of this. 

I have done some work in the last year looking at business startups, and many of them are pasting AI on their business plans the way Dot Com was bandied about in the nineties. It was the special sauce necessary to bring in the investor lettuce; then on to the IPO; then on to the giant bubble. Will that happen again? Yeah, probably. 

I don't even know that most of us are that impressed with artificial intelligence to date -- it seems to be a little crazy and even stupid. Is it worth all the hullabaloo? It's already helping lazy students get by, but worse, it's literally destroying science publishing. Science publisher Wiley is closing nineteen journals in its Hindawi subsidiary because of manuscript fabrication by so-called paper mills using AI. This is a terrifying development in the field. 

At least in the Dot Com revolution, when things shook out we had the Internet -- not an unmixed blessing, no, but for most people something of value. What will the AI revolution yield? Garbage research and a bottomless hunger for energy seem to be the whole of its useful product to date. 

What first popped to my mind with that energy-hungry-AI story was this unnerving quote from the third book of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, which takes place in England: 

"It is the beginning of what is really a new species--the Chosen Heads who never die. They will call it the next step in evolution. And henceforward, all the creatures that you and I call human are mere candidates for admission to the new species or else its slaves--perhaps its food."

--The Director, That Hideous Strength 

In Lewis's 1945 novel, the monsters are organic; in our time, the "new species" is electronic. But what are we to be, but its slaves? Either by maintaining it technically where it can't maintain itself, or by providing its energy. It won't eat us, but it doesn't have to -- it will eat our energy, which we also need for food and homes and transportation. The more idiot humans cut back on our means of generating power by fossil fuels and nuclear energy, the less there is all around, and AI will need a bigger cut every year. Our energy costs will skyrocket yet more, because the wealthy investors will demand that AI get all the power it needs. 

It's a sneaky path to Doomsday that I wouldn't have expected, although in a way C.S. Lewis did. He was well aware of the kind of scientists who revile humanity and see it as an impediment to a better world. He knew that these were the very modern geniuses who could lead to our destruction, congratulating themselves as they too were fed to the fire.