This is number 150 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT it to do?” an engineer asked me when I joined a publishing software company in the mid-90s. “It’s just code. You tell us what behavior you want and we code it.”
I was at the company to help enhance a new artificial intelligence publishing software. You just “threw content at the page and the program laid it out.” The first demonstration had blown me away. It was so cool. Change the layout from vertical to horizontal and the software automatically repositioned the content and made it look good on the new page.
It took me a while doing research and analyzing documents to discover what the reality was. It wasn’t artificial intelligence. It was just code. In fact, it was just a series of lookup tables that indicated what to do in each of the covered situations. Change the orientation: Look up these specs.
I was seriously disappointed. I set out to make that software intelligent. I developed several algorithms that would compute the correct size of the type, the correct line length for good readability, the right contrast when colors were changed or a graphic scheme was applied.
But it was still just code. It was marginally smarter code than the previous version. It no longer required a lookup table. It could compute the correct specifications. But it wasn’t really intelligent.
Computers were becoming more powerful, faster, and more intricate. We laughed and joked that there was more computing power in the first smartphones than had been used to send the first men to the moon in 1969. As computer power increased, so did the complexity of our software. We used the new core technology and larger storage capacity to make our software more powerful.
The world of artificial intelligence has also progressed since my rather elementary entrance in technology in the 90s. Sadly, no one seems to be out there seeking to rein in the bloat, as I’ve been working on my writing. When I think back on the early days of computing, I remember the warehouse-size room the early computers required to function—which had to be air conditioned because of the amount of heat generated by the vacuum tubes.
Then it all got smaller and we hold more powerful computers in our hands every day.
And then it got bigger.
You see, the artificial intelligence in use today requires vast server farms that cover acres and acres of land and consume billions of gallons of water to cool. Because at the heart, it isn’t intelligent. It’s still just code. The lookup tables in the form of Large Language Models consume as much power to train as it takes to run an entire medium-sized city for a year!
And where does that data in an LLM come from? It is simply harvested from the internet. After all, the internet is free and open. Everyone has equal access to the data stored “in the cloud.”
Except it’s not just “data.” Yes, what is stored on the internet is just “ones and zeroes.” Or other encoding. But those ones and zeroes represent the creative work of individuals. Artwork, photographs, writing, correspondence, music, videos, love letters, poetry, novels, journals, searches, computer code, web pages, cloud storage, email, mathematics, scientific experiments, drug formulae. It’s all available on the internet and AI learning has been exempt from respecting people’s ownership and privacy.
The various generative AI applications, collect your content without your permission and then sell it back to you in the form of chats and ‘creative’ works. That is done only after passing it through the massive heat-generating server farms that contain the LLM wall the AI uses to make its decisions.
And yes, it’s still just code—code running on thousands of computers to extract the data people generated and sell it back to them.
And none of that is fundamentally why I am opposed to the unbridled development of AI and server farms. Like the development of software over the past thirty years, the code bloats to fill the available processing and storage. As a person who remembers the days when one had to swap 400k floppy disks in and out of a single drive in order to store a document, I know I can’t even purchase a software application on a disk of any sort today. It has to be downloaded because only the internet has the capacity to run, install, and license the software.
We’ve abandoned the search for greater efficiency in coding and simply use all the capacity we can get for it. We no longer have the mental acuity to do the basic tasks we now assign to software tools. Our heads simply no longer work the way human intelligence was designed.
Enjoy!