this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
229 points (86.6% liked)
Technology
88677 readers
3181 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
whats extra funny about that statement is humans are insanely efficient
Is that even true? That might only be in relation to other animals, not to robots. Humans do a lot of useless things like fart and laugh. Robots don't. Even from an energy perspective, if a human takes 2,000 kilocalories to go about their day, that's 8,400,000 joules or 2.3 kWh. A laptop battery is around 75 Wh, so that's around 30 laptop batteries for 16 hours of activity, many of which might just be sitting down at a desk to think.
a laptop isnt capable of even a teeny tiny baby fraction of what a human brain can do. the only thing a laptop can do better than a human is calculating and data recall. the entire reason we made computers was to augment those weaknesses in our minds, because theyre so useful. but in terms of data processing, learning, prediction, planning, a laptop is basically an abacus being compared to a supercomputer, and thats being extremely generous to the abacus. human brains have had billions of years of evolution demanding more performant brains under severe energy restrictions. yeah we're way way way more efficient than any computer.
This is a post about AI. While a computer will probably not in the near future be able to simulate a human brain fully, artificial intelligence models are getting scarily close to being able to pretend to do everything that a human can do. That's what I was getting at. But of course, one should still not lose track of the overall point here that replacing the human experience with AI is completely missing the plot, even if it is "more efficient".
Except they run on Megawatts and we on like a handful of watts...
That's efficiency!
Megawatts to serve hundreds of thousands of users. The reason AI data centres are so wasteful with electricity is because a lot of the usage is not out towards anything useful but just wasted on things like generating Google Search summaries.