#nogenAI #noDataCenters #UK #Scotland
Hi all, if you agree that we need to #saveThePlanet instead of helping big companies steal our autonomy and support facism while stealing our water, air, art and jobs, please sign All of these petitions to reject Date Centres for genAI in the UK:
change.org/m/opposition-to-dat…
(and I say this as a scientist who loves computers and computational models, especially when they help us understand the brain, but this is not it) #Petition
Opposition to Data Centres in the UK · Movement
The UK is experiencing a backlash against the rapid expansion of hyperscale and AI data centres. Driven by Big Tech's power-hungry AI ambitions, the opposition centres on strain to the national energy grid, massive water consumption for cooling, and …Change.org
whoosh
in reply to El Duvelle • • •Those who think that machines and software can come close to substituting for the human brain .... haven't been giving theirs sufficient exercise.
They're clearly atheist, yet apparently not communist. .... ?inverts?
El Duvelle
in reply to whoosh • • •@whoosh I'm sure it's technically possible to mimic a human (or any other) brain given infinite time and resources to research it. Does it have anything to do with having a religion or not, I don't know? I guess you mean that a religious person would think only their "god" can inject a "soul" inside something and they think you need that soul to be human?
the thing with the LLMs / genAI is their goal is not at all to understand how a real brain works, they're just doing averaging-out / statistics and not in a neuromimetic way, but because they're called "AI" by marketing they're hijacking resources that could otherwise go into actual brain research.. all that just to give more control to for-profit companies, anyway, it makes me sad
whoosh
in reply to El Duvelle • • •Religion aside, we know that something other than humans created the universe, the planet, biosphere, ,and our brains. We can never *know* what that was, or how, or why; but yet it happened, it is true and real.
We can hypothesize; perhaps it can be revealed to the best of our ability to comprehend something of it. But the odds are that it is less finite than we are, and less constrained than our experience or imagination.
And yes, the marketing push was most distasteful, especially as it doubles down on more disruption of the ecosystem upon which we, and it, depend.
El Duvelle
in reply to whoosh • • •@whoosh isn't that "something" just the laws of physics and biology - together with whatever matter was there at the start of the universe (I don't know what the latest theories are)?
I'm not sure I understand the "less finite" argument but I agree that understanding the human brain as humans is quite difficult. Given all that we've managed to learn already about the worId though, and brains, I think we'll eventually be able to understand enough of the parts of it that matter that we can either replicate it or agree that replicating it is practically impossible. But genAI is going to hinder this process rather than help it..
whoosh
in reply to El Duvelle • • •>"the laws of physics and biology - together with whatever matter was there at the start of the universe"
I'd say 'energy' and a specifically creative energy at that.
I once inquired "if biology emerged from chemistry; and chemistry from physics, what preceeded?" and the confident immediate response was 'mathematics'. ;-}