To be fair, AI is the fastest growing segment; 70% of new datacentre capacity is for AI. The main question is whether one things that demand will keep growing exponentially, whether there will be a "pop", whether people will increasingly choose "cheap models for the same capability" over "better models at the same price", and whether Jevon's Paradox will consume all of the efficiency gains (~100x in just a few years in terms of power and cost for a given model capability). These lead to very different long-term pictures. One can only really talk about the situation as it stands today, and to a lesser degree, over the next 1-2 years. Beyond that is pretty speculative, and it depends greatly on your assumptions.

That said, if one's assumptions are "AI is massively successful, Jevon eats all efficiency gains and then some, and people keep choosing the latest and greatest models", then one also has to assume the side effects of that scenario: massive increases in the economy, massive increases in tax revenue, and massive increases in the ability to solve the world's problems. So even if you assume a scenario where AI scales to consuming several percent (or more!) of the world's primary energy, you're also assuming a scenario where the world has vastly more resources to dedicate to fighting environmental problems (if it so chooses). Honestly, the real environmental threat in that scenario isn't the AI itself; it's that if the whole global economy is growing so much thanks to AI, then overall consumption of goods and services is correspondingly growing, with all the environmental consequences that entails.

And also to be clear, this is in no way to dismiss the sorts of challenges / threats imposed by AI - disruptions, wealth concentration (particularly if proprietary models win over open models, and if no political action is taken), humans using AI in warfare, humans using AI to manipulate other humans, etc etc.

It was a humorous way to bring attention to the fact that a large corporation primarily concerned with profits is unlikely to be heavily focused on safety. He was not being literal and I think you know that.

A shitload of corporations who are losing money hand over fist on AI and are under pressure to make it profitable are building and reopening a shitload of nuclear power plants.

I think the phrase is "what could possibly go wrong?" Followed by a laugh track and a general order of evacuation lasting 10 years ala Fukushima.

And before you start trying to apologize for Fukushima I will remind you that the city in question was evacuated for 10 years, engineers warned the CEOs about the coming tsunami and earthquake and outlined expensive safety precautions that would have prevented the disaster and finally and perhaps most importantly the public blamed the engineers.

They're just doing a shakedown. After some money changes hands to the right people all will be forgiven.

It is possible that the companies in question will just wait it out and see if Trump loses in 2028.

But with the Trump administration it's always about soliciting bribes.

Selling your own stock does not create a GAAP profit.

ED: "That's more than all datacentres combined " - that was supposed to be deleted, but I didn't proofread :P

Video gaming was 347 TWh/yr in 2024, and growing fast. That's more than all datacentres combined in 2024 was 415 TWh, and 485 TWh in 2025, but the majority of that is crypto (mainly Bitcoin), not AI. AI in specific in 2025 was 155 TWh (that's for both inference and training, all AI tasks combined) (It's quite trivial to show that it can't be much more than that because there simply haven't been enough servers produced). Total global primary energy in 2025 (not just electricity, but also including e.g. transport fuels, heating, etc) was ~177,000 TWh. I'll repeat: AI is a blip.

Also, I'm not sure why you thought you couldn't look up these numbers?

Just like taxi cab drivers will. Internet is fast enough now that you can pilot vehicles remotely.

A very small number of jobs requiring physical presence will continue to exist but they will pay very very little because there will be so many desperate people fighting for the small amount of work that is left. It's supply and demand and there's a huge supply of labor and did not much demand.

We could create more demand through government spending but good fucking walk with that. Because we allowed the government to become so hopelessly corrupt while we indulged in moral panics and freaking out about drag queens and trans girls the money from that just goes straight to the top. A good example is one of the Trump officials funneled half a billion dollars to a Trump donor that she was asking to pay off her credit card bills.

When people are faced with this corruption they just throw their hands up and say everybody is corrupt so who cares who I vote for but then they turn around and vote for right-wing politicians who are openly corrupt every single time. And good luck getting somebody to understand the nuanced difference between using the occasional insider stock tip versus sending half a billion dollars of corrupt contracts to your buddies...

The real problem is about 60% of the country thinks and operates at the level of a 12 year old and I don't know what the fuck you do about that. That was fine when most people were just dirt farmers but it just doesn't fly in a modern mechanized society.

There's a wide variety of ways to structure stock so that you can give out worthless stock to people while keeping the valuable stock for yourself. If we had a properly regulated stock market that wouldn't be the case but if we had a properly regulated stock market then SpaceX couldn't have been forced into the NASDAQ even though it has no clear path to the profitability number is needed for the valuation given.

It's all just a scam to steal our retirements. So given that when the scam is done and they have all of our money sure they can give out some worthless stock for a dying company.

Elon Musk is a crook. If a crook offers you something of value then you can bet they have a plan to steal from you.

You should have learned this sometime between the 5th and 6th grades or whatever the equivalent is in your country. Take a moment and make a phone call to whoever didn't teach you that and yell at them for not teaching you how to defend yourself from charlatans and crooks. Whoever it is they deserve it.

The first are just fine. They teach you a variety of skills for running a business typically a mix of accounting, some management and a bunch of statistics. It's just a specialized degree focused on the skill sets needed to run a business.

The one that is a problem are the kind of schools Mitt Romney went to.

What Romney's School taught him is how to break the law without breaking the law. It was a detailed program to teach him how to fleece the public without getting in trouble. That is a very different curriculum then what most of your MBAs walk away with.

Basically the Epstein class gets an entire type of education that is completely beyond anything you would assume is reasonable. It's a focus on the legal aspects of business and teaching people what they can get away with when they're ripping people off.

I don't think we should abolish that degree I think we should abolish the legal system that makes that degree valuable.

Also modern factory automation means that I won't be any jobs. Go look up stuff like how the old steam controller is assembled. The Gundam factory is pretty crazy too there's like three people that are responsible for manufacturing every single Gundam model kit on the planet.

Years ago I remember a sleeping bag company going out of business because they couldn't compete with the larger companies. But at their peak they made something like a third of the sleeping bag sold in the country and they did that with technology from maybe 20 years ago and about 120 or 130 employees.

We should be talking more about how automation has hollowed out the middle class but I don't think anyone has a solution for it. It would be one thing if magic machines automated all the work away but that's not what they did. A shitload of jobs have been automated but a lot of people still need to work. But we are rapidly approaching the time when we have a large population of people for who there is absolutely no useful work. At the same time there's a population of people who we really do need to do work and there isn't a lot of overlap between the two. The people whose jobs got replaced by machines aren't really capable of doing all that much more. They didn't suddenly become super genius mathematicians or doctors or something.

So we're going to basically have a rather nasty fight between a shitload of people who we don't have any place for in society and a shitload of people who are needed to do what work is left. And I do not see how that fight resolves itself especially with the Epstein class egging both sides on

But it won't save your retirement money.

Patrick Boyle over on YouTube has a good video on it. SpaceX's IPO is a scam to loot your 401k.

This is a distraction from the largest heist in human history

If the CEOs listened to the engineers and built a proper break wall and had off-site generators.

Which cost money.

Money the CEOs wanted in their pockets.

It doesn't matter what the safety issues are. Nuclear always has them. They cost a ton of money to mitigate. CEOs want that money and they will get it at your expense

AI is a blip on global carbon emissions. Videogaming itself is a much larger power consumer.