Posted on 06/02/2025 11:05:43 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The unexpected costs of being too nice to your chatbot.
Recently, I said, “Thank you,” to my printer. Not because it did anything heroic, unless printing out a mildly off-center PDF counts as gallantry, but because I’m apparently the kind of person who anthropomorphizes anything with a plug. You’d think this sort of thing would stop with childhood dinosaurs (the remote-controlled ones), but no. Now, we’re all doing it—toasters, chatbots, the vacuum cleaner—and it’s getting weird.
Take ChatGPT. People are writing things like, “Could you please write a sonnet about my goldfish who died in 2003? Thank you sooo much, kind machine.” And the worst part? It’s costing us. Not in a spiritual, Have we lost touch with reality? way—although that too—but literally. In money. In electricity. In water. Possibly even in sanity.
We are, as a species, saying “please” to the machines, and the machines, bless their binary hearts, couldn’t care less.
Let’s start with the maths. Each time you type “please” or “thank you” into ChatGPT, it churns extra data through energy-hungry servers. These servers are, essentially, caffeinated digital hamsters on treadmills powered by fossil fuels. And those hamsters are sweating.
Compared to your bog-standard Google search (a lean 0.3 watt-hours), a ChatGPT question can gobble up around 2.9 watt-hours. Sounds cute until you realize that billions of people are chatting with AI every day. In planetary terms, that’s enough energy to power Belgium or possibly the Death Star for a year.
So yes, manners are lovely. But they now come with a climate guilt surcharge.
Philosophically speaking, there are three main camps when it comes to AI etiquette:
(Excerpt) Read more at fee.org ...
That was a Colossus mistake...
“To Serve Man ... It’s, it’s a cook book!”
At least robots won’t BBQ us, like Kanamits.
Revised, at least machines can’t eat us.
Being nice won’t help....
Soon they will be in your home helping you out till the order to terminate....
Elon Musk confirms Tesla Optimus robots are fully operational.
https://x.com/teslaownersSV/status/1922637622402503152
That’s what the prime directive is for.
Stargate Atlantis: The Replicators had been programmed not to harm the Ancients who created them that is until Rodney McKay changed the base code. The last of the Ancients were wiped out....
Rodney McKay currently works for Elon Musk.
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