8 Comments
Apr 2Liked by Pandreco

So — artificial intelligence is really just a recycler of aimless thoughts on energy transition? Garbage in - garbage out? No analysis required, just repetition? Just wait until one of these bots runs for public office!

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Having read several policy papers from the current illiberal regime, I think ChatGPT is already embedded.

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Excellent. With how difficult it is to build anything now in the West, it beggars belief to think this can happen. Or, if it does, power gets bid up significantly higher.

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Thank you @Matt - completely right - even if the political will was light-years ahead of the "elets keep Diablo Canyon open a bit longer and restart Pallisades" and was thinking about 20-30 yr horizon, the build out of big nuclear would be slow due to there being no domestic industry to fall back on... so that points to higher electricity prices and/or there is a risk that a lot of the AI moves to be near cheap and abundant power... you know, Siberia, China :-)

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AI isn't even accurate about mere facts. Our daughter Julia Angwin has been studying this. Here's a recent article.

(The idea that AI can have "hallucinations" is perhaps the most frightening.)

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Thanks Meredith, when you look at the fundamentals of a lot of "machine learning" it boils down to statistical regressions and cluster analysis... (George will know more about this!) so the Large Language Models are simulating answers by chosing statistically likely words and placing those words in an order that fits yet more stats. There is no "inteligence" to it as such - hence we see the ability to hallucinate and fabricate.

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Mar 27Liked by Pandreco

Love this. You kill me. The thesis "In the financial/economics worldview, energy and resources are almost infinitely abundant and scarcity is simply fixed by price signals." is coming to an end, we absolutely need a better economics grounded in basic energy physics. Something to which you agree, and have said before yourself. Some future opportunity in that I believe.

Regarding AI, love your work here too. Personally I refuse to use chatGPT because it has 'appropriateness' filters that wont allow you to use certain words, or ask certain question. As it is in my nature to write and say inappropriate things, I simply cant use chat GPT, or any other current AI. So I don't. AI takes the fun out of life.

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