“Our Ecosystem’s Finite Resource, and Data Centers”: A Salon for The Societal Effects by Artificial Intelligence
In the summer of 1956, a group of academics, scientists, and engineers gathered for two months on the Dartmouth College campus at Hanover, New Hampshire to, in the words of attendee Dr. John McCarthy, "concentrate on a problem of devising a way of programming a calculator to form concepts and to form generalizations..." The four organizers, Claude Shannon, John McCarthy, Nathaniel Rochester, and Marvin Minsky, were titans in their fields of Computer Science, Information Theory, and Cybernetics. What resulted would later be coined by Dr. McCarthy as "Artificial Intelligence:" the beginnings of a field that now includes many types of activities that are associated with Human Intelligence: Learning, Reasoning, Perception, and Decision-Making.
And yet, some of these men come with heavy baggage: institutional racism and sexism defining their meaning of “intelligence,” and one with future association with the worst of the worst. Marvin Minsky was the beneficiary of Jeffery Epstein’s first $100,000 donation to MIT in 2002, for the direct purpose of funding his artificial intelligence research. Epstein would begin a decade’s long parternshimp with Minsky, later organizing artificial intelligence conference, private dinners, introductions to wealthy patrons, and more. Minsky is on record having attended gatherings with Epstein in 2011, as a convicted sex offender, in December of that year. He was described as of one Jeffery’s “closest friend” in 2013, and visited him in Florida prison in the same year. All of this establishing the basis of Epstein’s credibility as a funding backer in prestigious science and academic circles via connections to MIT’s AI and Media Labs
Now, we are inundated with the revolutionary software concept of Large Language Models. And yet, the public feels at wit's end with the results: how can something deemed as revolutionary as electricity cause such friction and degradation of quality of life in the sphere of the personal life? The effects of the marker’s mark run deep.
Join us for an evening of conversations around a collection of over 200 published articles on the development of Artificial Intelligence to speak authoritatively on the terms of this new phase of technology. Each event in the series will focus discussion round fields of life pursuits to allow deeper reflection on how we live with this new tool.
"Our Ecosystem's Finite Resources, and Data Centers" is the topic of the fourth installment (“THE ENVIRONMENT") because of the response the world community have given (and continue to give) in the wake of artificial intelligence tools. There is only one Earth (despite pure gossip of data centers “at-scale” in space) with veritably uncountable resources, each with their own rate of replenishment. With the recent conversations of grid reliance with record energy bills, how we choose to engage matters. The Pre-Training stage of artificial intelligence manufacturing is the most energy consuming portion of the pipeline (2-3 months of intense energy consumption) while the singular text query is the equivalent of half a second on a microwave oven. Already a.i. tools are powering the next generation of drug and materials discovery empowering pharmaceuticals, will sustainable energy be next?
Light refreshments of snacks and canned drinks will be provided.
Join us Monday, November 30th at 5:30p, for the fourth installment: THE ENVIRONMENT—“Our ecosystem’s Finite Resources, and Data Centers.”
Admission is $30 per person, $10 for HCM Members, and free for veterans, seniors, students. All events proceeds to go the Hart Cluett Museum.
Other Series Dates:
December 14: Community—"Technological's Role in Belonging and Connections"