You equate 'consciousness' with the brain's ability to store long term memories. I'm not sure if that definition fits.
Has anyone been able to determine at what age the brain gains this ability? I have a few vague memories from my early childhood, but I can't remember just how old I was when I experienced them.
"Childhood amnesia" its called. Around 3 is usually when people start to be able to remember anything at all, and then 4.5-5 years your memory becomes more normal. I definitely have at least one memory verifiable from before 4, possibly a few more if I did some sleuthing with people who knew toddler me, but all of them are attached to pretty major life events.
Your post implies that every employee of a successful company is entitled to a share of whatever wealth that company generates.
As a career programmer, I worked for several companies. Each time I took a job, I negotiated what I thought was a fair salary for my wages. Some companies also gave me stock options and one gave me founder's stock. When a company had a good year, they often gave generous bonuses.
Only when I took great personal risk, did I expect to share the rewards that come with a successful company. I was always grateful when I got more than I agreed to work for, but I never felt entitled to it.
A janitor working for a 10x company should not feel entitled to 10x of the salary as another janitor working down the street for another company that is struggling.
That's not quite what I'm saying. You may very well have been paid fairly for each job you've taken, assuming that the value you generated for the business was not substantially higher than your salary.
But hiring people who are compensated fairly does not make someone a billionaire. If you generate $300,000 of value per year and I pay you $200,000, then I'm only making $100,000 profit off your work. I could hire more employees, but value does not scale linearly indefinitely. Doubling my number of employees does not guarantee I double my profits.
No, if I want to become a billionaire within my lifetime, I need an asset that generates far more money than it costs to buy and maintain it. In other words, I need employees who will generate millions for every thousand I pay them.
Now you might well argue that I'm taking a risk. How do I know if an asset or an employee or a team of employees is undervalued? Not every bet is going to pay dividends. However, while this is true, I don't think this makes it ethical. If I'm a venture capitalist looking to make it rich (or richer), the fact that I'm taking a risk doesn't change the fact that ultimately I'm looking for people who I can pay far less than they're worth.
Why is it unethical? I'm both a freelance engineer and a business owner that sells software, and I've both sold my labour for equity/revenue share, and for a flat hourly rate.
If I charge a client $50k for some software and they made $1 million profit from it, good for them? As long as they pay our mutually agreed upon rate on time and there was no hostile negotiation, why should I feel suddenly entitled to more money if that wasn't in our contract? How do I know how much of the value is from my work and not their marketing or idea?
What you're saying seems as crazy as me saying that someone who bought my software for $99 and used it on a multi-million dollar project is being unethical unless they give me more money. How on Earth does that make sense? Should I be forced to switch to a royalty model? What if I make more selling copies at a flat rate, what if I don't want to have to investigate the finances of thousands of customers and have to deal with that whole trouble?
For me it's the same thing regardless of whether I'm selling my labour or a product. I can choose whether to accept a flat hourly rate, equity, or a mix of both, and usually the better deal is the hourly rate.
If I find a way to hire a software engineer for market rates (say, $200k/year in the US) and get $2M revenue from their work, good? They can ask for a raise or a bonus, we can renegotiate, they can leave if they're unhappy, but I'm not obligated to give them more money than was in our agreement anymore than they're obligated to give me their salary back in the project fails.
There's an argument that if someone agrees to a bad deal, that's their own fault. Where I think it becomes unethical is where there's a significant power imbalance that disadvantages one side.
Suppose I buy a painting from a flea market for $100, get it evaluated by a specialist, and then discover it's actually worth $100,000. In this example I have no inherent advantage over the seller; neither of us knew the value of the painting at the time it was sold.
Now suppose a famous TV antique dealer stumbled across that painting instead, and immediately realizes its true value. The seller recognizes the dealer, and the antique dealer offers to buy the painting for $25. The seller, trusting the antique dealer's judgement, agrees to the discount.
Would you say in both examples everyone acted ethically? This is a genuine question, as I can certainly see the argument that using the assets you possess to secure yourself the best deal possible is just business, and yet I would personally see the antique dealer in the second example as being exploitative.
When it comes to companies there's a similar disparity in power. An employee requires money to live, while someone founding or investing in a company often has enough of a financial safety net that they won't starve if the venture fails. Equally, any would-be billionaire is explicitly looking for employees who generate vastly more value than their cost. You don't get rich by paying people what they're worth; you get rich by underpaying them and pocketing the difference.
The other problem, and one you've touched on, is how do we assess the value of an individual employee? This is obviously not easy, and businesses also have no incentive to work it out or reveal that information to their employees even if they knew. On the contrary it benefits employers to keep their employees as much in the dark as possible.
Aside from the ethical problems there's a practical one. The very existence of billionaires implies that a significant number of people are undervaluing their work. It's a pricing problem that the market isn't solving, and is only getting worse.
Every company, from the small business to mega-corps, needs to extract more value from their employees than the produce; otherwise it will likely go bankrupt.
Even within successful companies, it is a challenging task to figure out just how much value each employee produces. Some positions are required, but do not produce revenue. Sometimes whole departments are a sunk cost.
It is up to each employee at review time, to argue that the value they produce is far greater than their salary; in order to negotiate a raise. No one is automatically entitled to anything extra, just because the company had a good year.
Yes, a company needs to extract more value than it pays its employees, if only to cover its other costs. The problem is when employees are significantly underpaid compared to what they produce.
Negotiation clearly doesn't work in the general case, otherwise we wouldn't have billionaires. There's too much of a power difference between an employer and employee, and companies have a clear incentive to keep it that way.
Just because only 1 in 500 makes it to a billion, does not mean the other 499 are failures. Plenty of startup founders turn a few million into much more.
If someone has an idea that 'only' makes them 20 million, I would call that a great success; even if it takes dozens of years to get there.
We all learned this back in first grade. The kids that behaved in class and did their homework did not command most of the teacher's time and effort. It was the problem children who refused to follow the rules and needed constant praise for every bit of actual effort that they put into their studies; that got the teacher's attention.
Just like with politics, you see large numbers of people dividing up into two different camps. Pretty soon every statement that raises a legitimate concern about AI will be seen as 'hating AI' and every observation about how AI helped in a particular situation will be seen as coming from an 'AI fanboy'.
On the graph, you can clearly see the seasonal demand for power during the summer months as air conditioning kicks in. The electricity production for gas mimics this as well each year. But the solar output does not seem to have a spike each summer. Why is that? You would think that solar output would be significantly higher when the summer months are here.
It's global data, "here" is not US, and it's solar+wind, not only solar. Summer months have a different definition depending on hemisphere and solar production maximums depend heavily on latitude.
Just because a data center is way outside your neighborhood; doesn't mean it can't have a direct impact on you personally. Electrical and water resources used can affect your utility bills.
But there is also some hype about just how much it will affect you, that is not necessarily true.
What makes a data center an 'AI data center' vs other kinds? I am sure that certain workloads are better suited for a particular server rack vs another; but can't a data center built for other computing needs also do AI and vice-versa?
Data center mech eng here - from our perspective it's higher rack densities typically due to GPUs. It's certainly possible to have high densities due to CPUs as well but I've seen a significant spike in rack densities in the last couple of years which has caused a switch from air cooling to liquid to chip.
One side effect of higher density is less footprint on the building to exhaust the heat, which is one reason (the main one being efficiency) that cooling towers and indirect evaporative cooling are favoured over air cooled condensers which leads to large amounts of water consumption.
Cooling towers are also much quieter than air cooled condensers which is a significant factor near any residential areas. It would be great to see more use of data center waste heat for process or district heating to save on water consumption.
Another issue with AI training in particular is huge (multi-MW) swings in power consumption at the start and end of each training run which must be a nightmare for the sparkies.
The distinction is scale. "AI Datacenters" are a new level of scale with new levels of power consumption and heat generation. Sure you could run regular compute and w/e in them but it's not practical to build these mega sites for regular compute. GPU Compute / AI workloads require network/interconnect bandwidth and latencies where distance matters so you're forced to solve problems you wouldn't otherwise have to. Those problems are mostly solved with money.
This strikes me as a combination of semantics and false equivalence. You might as well argue that a new crowd of people illegally dirt-biking in a public park isn’t a meaningful change because people with baby strollers are have also technically been violating the “no vehicles” sign for years.
> Riot Platforms has initiated a large-scale, 1 gigawatt development to expand its Bitcoin mining and hosting capabilities in Navarro County, Texas with its new Corsicana Facility.
> Development of the Corsicana Facility has begun with an initial 400 megawatts of capacity on a 265-acre site. The substation was energized in April 2024 and mining operations have begun.
> In 2008, the city of Rockdale lost about 80 percent of its workforce following the closure of the Alcoa steel plant. Today, the old Alcoa plant is occupied by Riot Blockchain’s Whinstone facility, believed to be the largest single Bitcoin mining operation in North America. As an industry that relies on high levels of electricity, the company was drawn to the facility due to its existing power infrastructure, including valuable high-voltage transmission lines and large substations.
I remember playing Digger on my IBM PC clone sold by AT&T (6300) back in 1987 or 1988.
I also remember that the game speed was set to some factor of the computer's clock speed. When I later tried to run the same game after I upgraded my hardware, the game went so fast, you could not even play it.
Has anyone been able to determine at what age the brain gains this ability? I have a few vague memories from my early childhood, but I can't remember just how old I was when I experienced them.
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