Paying growing electricity bills shouldn’t concern you, because electricity doesn’t matter. We are headed to Earth 2.0. In any other era of human history, a company losing twenty five billion dollars in a single year would be considered a financial catastrophe and a warning sign of an imminent collapse. Under normal market conditions, the law of the ledger is absolute and if you spend more than you earn for too long, you vanish. But we are no longer living under normal conditions. We are witnessing the birth of a special case that renders the traditional price to earnings ratio obsolete. The current state of artificial intelligence is not a business cycle but a civilizational transition, and the investors currently pouring hundreds of billions into data centers and silicon are not looking for a quarterly dividend. They are funding a secular salvation. To understand why losing money doesn’t matter in this context, we have to look back at the Apollo Program. When the United States spent over two hundred billion dollars in today’s money to put a man on the moon, no one was asking about the ROI on moon rocks. There was no business plan for the lunar surface because the objective was existence and supremacy, not retail sales. The Apollo mission was a statement of what humanity could achieve when it decided to transcend its terrestrial limits. Today, projects like the five hundred billion dollar Stargate infrastructure are the new Apollo missions. The goal isn’t to sell a more efficient chatbot; the goal is to reach the ultimate prize of artificial general intelligence and eventually superintelligence. Investors, sovereign wealth funds, and governments are currently motivated by something that looks less like venture capital and more like a religious or ideological movement. They understand that reaching ASI is the gateway to a world of post scarcity, the end of all known diseases, and the potential for the kind of everlasting life that was once only promised in the Bible. We are effectively building the infrastructure for a technological Second Coming. In this light, a hundred billion dollar loss isn’t a failure of accounting; it is a tithe paid toward the creation of a utopia. This is why we must embrace the high costs that the critics complain about. The staggering electricity demands that strain our grids and the eye watering costs of HBM and RAM are the price of our transition. We should view this as a form of temporal suffering. Just as the ancients endured the hardships of the desert to reach a promised land, we are currently enduring the friction of high energy prices and the massive burning of fiat currency to reach a state of grace where labor is no longer a requirement for survival. If we succeed, the concept of a profit and loss statement will become a relic of a primitive age. When intelligence becomes as abundant and cheap as air, the trillions of dollars spent today will seem like a bargain. The mission is too important to be governed by the fears of short term investors. We are slaving for the last time to create the thing that ends all slaving. The salvation of AGI is worth every watt of power and every cent of paper we can burn to get there. Would you like me to find some specific community-led subreddits where this “Techno-Optimist” perspective is currently gaining the most traction? submitted by /u/Amphibious333
Originally posted by u/Amphibious333 on r/ArtificialInteligence