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• https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawlNCQ69-zALiIBb87L1PQ6ZpJ-tEHsWtzc commented on Artificial Stupids
  I didn't want to make a long post even longer, but heating and cooling indeed make up a large share of energy consumption by housing and buildings in the United States. The good news is that A) The energy requirements can be substantially reduced just by improved insulation, or far more dramatically (for new buildings) by more substantial design revisions: structural or earth-based heat sinks, passive cooling, orientation to smooth temperature fluctuations, etc. B) Climate control can be carried out using mostly thermal energy, relatively little electrical input needed. Even air conditioning can be run on purely thermal input (absorption...
• brucecohenpdx commented on Artificial Stupids
  I wish I could find my slide rule. I expect it got lost in a move somewhere. But I have a solar-powered calculator that's been running for at least 15 years now; that'll do the job. The thing about relatively simple devices like calculators, personal computers, tablets, and such is that even if Moore's Law pukes out in a couple of design generations, their use of power will be pretty low both because of transistor size and because of more efficient designs which are coming in to help out with the high current leakage of the last few generations, and...
• valentinej commented on Artificial Stupids
  Not necesarily. It all depends on the energy and capital (equipment cost) requirements of running an AI mind. For instance, if your energy bill for running 100 AI minds is higher than the wages and associated costs of an equivalent human work force, you'll choose man over machine. This might well be true if you imagine an AI execution framework as akin to the current generation of distributed supercomputers, with tens of thousands of cores and AC requirements measured in tons of ice. But even in that sort of environment, being able to duplicate a hundred experts would likely...
• valentinej commented on Artificial Stupids
  Strongly disagree. You're still imagining a beefed up expert program instead of a self-guided organism faced with the intractable difficulty to interact with a world. Reactivating a 5 year old copy would simply give you an entity busy with future shock until it has changed enough to be (in its own eyes, not in your eyes) capable of dealing with the world around it. What task are you trying to solve? Future shock is only a problem if you're employing these AIs to interact with the world at large. So, sure, despite the obvious appeal, powering up your Lyndon...
• Moderator Alan commented on Artificial Stupids
  On the other hand, mass migrations do happen. Check the ancestry of the majority of North Americans, for example. And of the majority of Australians, too. (Noted: not all those NA ancestors wanted to migrate. Or be migrated.)...