Many years ago, during a trip to Japan, I bought a silly book of Unuseless inventions. The concept is called chindogu. (This is a copy of the book.)
These are things that seem useful but really aren’t. Like cloth balls for your cats’ feet that let them sweep your apartment, or a pair of huge waders that let you read the paper while walking through a creek.
I have thought about that a lot lately, while watching AI take over my life. Or try to, anyway.
AI is now everywhere. It’s answering my questions on Google, and it’s trying to answer my e-mails. Sometimes this is useful. Usually, it’s not. Even when a Google AI answer is helpful, I can’t link to it, can’t show it to anyone else, because it’s compiled from several links. It’s bespoke.
Microsoft AI recently told my wife and I to give different answers to questions from our kids. It could have started a huge fight, but after 50 years you learn to communicate a little.
I know you can turn these things off, but I’m a reporter and I don’t wanna. These things tell me a lot about the state of the art. But they’re very impersonal. A wellness app replaced the coaching I formerly got with AI recently, and I may just dump the thing.
An early AI that drives me crazy is the autocorrect AI used by WordPress, the blogging software that hosts my work. It dings me when a section goes over 300 words without a subhead. It dings me again if I wanna be cute. Then it dings me once more if I start three sentences in a row with the same word, although this is a very common rhetorical device.
But that’s not the point, my friend.
Unuseless GPU Games
The point is the cost of creating unuseless responses, answers that replace clear responses machines formerly gave, or that humans once gave. (Call this Version 2.0.0, from ChatGPT.)
Maybe you only need a training base of 10,000 pointers to write an alternative e-mail. Multiply that load by millions, even billions, every day. It adds up.
The Cloud Czars keep saying they’re building data centers as fast as they can because demand keeps growing at enormous speed. How much of this new demand is unuseless?
Over the last few months, I’ve often used ChatGPT to create caricatures and cartoons. They can be fun, like one that combined the faces of Joe Biden and James Buchanan, or another that drew Jeffrey Epstein onto Thomas Jefferson. (Tom started with Sally Hemings when she was 14-16 years old. You thought Jeff was creepy.)
How much computation was required for those pictures? They were free to me. This is why ChatGPT continues to lose vast amounts of money. People write about this problem a lot.
They don’t write about what the Czars are doing to themselves. We don’t talk about the rising costs incurred by Microsoft and Google (and others) in doing things they could have done for less, and more effectively, before these “improvements.”
Getting back to that e-mail, what if my wife and I hadn’t been together for 50 years? What if we misunderstood the conflicting advice, acted before speaking with one another? Then what if that began a fight, one that escalated, or that other AI software egged on?
For now, we’re waiting until the kids are dead to divorce, but not every couple is so fortunate.
