On Tuesday, in a long-ish tweet about his company’s values and goals, Open AI head Sam Altman tucked this nugget of info in at the very end:
That’s not just burying the lede; that’s burying the lede in an innocuous-looking desktop folder called “tax documents” to hide your Tutankhamun’s Tomb of porn. Still, Altman’s tweet is an indication that AI is ready to embrace its role as the next great innovation in wanking fuel. This is appropriate: Most of the technological advances of the last few decades have been not-so-subtle smut delivery devices. The internet did for porn what the printing press did for the bible. Smartphones made it possible to photograph your junk without having an awkward exchange with the one hour photo person at Walgreens. And now, AI is about to traverse bold new horizons in the types of shameful — though hot — filth at our fingertips. The future has arrived, and it has arrived in the form of a centaur 69ing a voluptuous Care Bear.
America is leading the way when it comes to computer generations of Avatar creatures getting fingercuffed by Woody and Buzz Lightyear. Unfortunately, we seem to be determined to lose the race on what will probably be the other emergent technology of our lifetime: green energy. Trump not only doesn’t have a 21st century energy policy; he arguably doesn’t have a 20th century energy policy, since he leans heavily towards energy sources from the 1800s. Trump has done everything in his power to discourage wind and solar energy, going so far as to halt a nearly-finished wind project and cancel the nation’s largest solar energy project. The latter action opens the door for groups to kill the project over wildlife concerns, specifically the desert tortoise, and I hereby assert that I will gleefully slay every desert tortoise in existence if that’s what’s needed to prevent environmental disruption on a global scale.
Stifling green energy is idiotic almost no matter what your priorities are. Solar and wind obviously reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but suppose that you don’t care about that: Suppose that you only care about short-term impacts and think that a scoche of ecological collapse will keep our grandkids from going soft. Okay — wind and solar still displace coal, which causes respiratory problems that kill thousands or even tens of thousands1 of Americans every year. Or maybe you just care about energy prices; in that case, we should obviously be expanding supply, including wind and solar. Or maybe your motivation is an Ayn Rand-ian philosophical commitment to government non-intervention in the market, the type of thing that Republicans talked about constantly back before they decided to back a guy who is basically Schlubby Juan Perón — in that case, Trump’s actions are evil of the highest order. The only reason to smite green energy projects that someone else is paying for is petty vengeance, but Trump’s cornucopia of vendettas — along with enough Diet Coke to kill a whale — are the only things animating him at this point.
There doesn’t seem to be a strong constituency for green energy. When voters are polled about their priorities, climate change typically ranks in the neighborhood of “reduce ice-cream headaches” and “make birds less uppity”. The right can’t shake its drill-baby-drill myopia, and the environmentalist left loves carbon free energy until you actually try to build a solar farm or a nuclear power plant, at which point they summon a million reasons why that particular project is a crime against nature. Normies hate high energy prices, but they don’t seem to grasp that those prices are largely driven by choices we make about supply, not by some big “ENERGY PRICES” dial on the president’s desk.
If only there was some nexis between green energy and porn. If only green technology was fueled by the same sub rosa desire to get our national rocks off that has driven the information age. The problem isn’t just that the benefits of green energy mostly accrue down the line to people other than ourselves; it’s also that none of the benefits take the form of of hot, sweaty, boundary-pushing fap fodder that will give America an orgasm so huge that evidence of it will be detectable in the geological record. Until there’s a direct link between green energy and the National Spank Bank, there are limits to how fast we can expect the technology to grow.
But good news: There is some connection between green energy and porn. AI needs a lot of energy; one estimate finds that by 2030, AI data centers will require more energy than the entire nation of Japan consumes today. That energy has to come from somewhere, everywhere…can we really afford to be ruling out potential sources of supply? I’d argue that we can’t; not if we want to see hot, triple-X depictions of three-breasted elf priestesses getting plowed by a super-jacked, half-human Teddy Ruxpin. If we want to experience a mermaid going down on the mom from Family Ties while an engorged Boba Fett pleasures himself in the corner — and go ahead and pretend that you don’t, but Sam Altman thinks that you do — then we need an “all of the above” energy approach. We must leave no stone unturned if we want porn that’s basically like if Industrial Light and Magic had been bought out by Larry Flynt.
I propose that people who care about the future run with this angle. Any time that a solar, wind, or nuclear project gets nixed for some dumb reason — or any time a governor of California vetos a geothermal bill in a clear sop to the desert tortoise lobby — that should be portrayed as a draconian policing of your erotic imagination. We should stop portraying green energy as a way to leave a better planet to our children — who are kind of spoiled brats anyway — and start portraying it as the tech that will allow our so-disgusting-that-we-dare-never-speak-of-them fantasies to be digitally realized. As messages go: You could do worse. And it seems hard to make the case for green energy less persuasive than it is right now.
AI Didn't Invent Dumb, False Bullshit
When people worry about AI, they typically worry about three things: 1) Job loss, 2) Misinformation, and 3) The possibility that superintelligence might unleash a mechanized hell that will be like Terminator 2 in terms of violence and like Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
You might wonder: Why am I saying “thousands or even tens of thousands of people” while linking to a study that estimated that coal power plants caused 460,000 excess deaths in the US between 1999 and 2020? (Which is 20,909 a year.) Two reasons: 1) I don’t want to hang my hat entirely on this study, which I haven’t vetted (though when I was at EPA, I saw this number calculated many different ways, and the conclusions was always in the ballpark of the numbers in this study), and 2) There were more deaths at the beginning of the timeframe than the end, so I don’t know how many people die per year in 2025.
This sounds like a topic for Paula Fox. I'm sure someone with her talents will be eager to explore the subject in depth.
I’m thinking The Matrix, but the connection is at the crotch rather than the head.