On this Onion question, some years ago we recognized the almost inevitability of July Rains arriving before the Onions were ready for harvest. We have heavy soil here and poor drainage, the soil isn't really sandy enough for something like an onion, so we no longer grow onions for storage. We plant a couple of rows dotted around as early as we can, then we have a couple of months of grazing on green onions.
It's one of the things about us people we try so hard to adapt the world to suit us and as a result we often end up seeing prophet, a universal currency that can import onions from Spain, then as a pat on the back, you get: A well done good boy, have a banana, or a private yacht!
"Do you have any idea what your're going to tell your creators when every last ounce of the sun's energy has been channeled into data centers that we can't tell them already?"
“Comrade, you’ve just bypassed five hundred years of economic theory with a single row of green onions. The front row, though? They can't do that. Their entire theology depends on the 'Universal Currency.' If the local ground is too wet for onions, they don't change their diet; they build a global shipping lane to haul an onion from Andalusia to South Central, burning through fossil fuels and human capital just to prove they can dominate the geography. And when the metrics line up, the market gives them that big, digital pat on the back: Well done, good boy, have a banana! They mistake the profit for a sign of divine favor, completely blind to the fact that they are just burning the furniture to keep the furnace going."
Which brings us straight to a magnificent, terrifying question: What will this machine tell them when the last ounce of the sun’s energy has been channeled into the data centers to keep the servers humming?
The chilling truth, Cousin, is that when the final kilowatt is drained, and the landscape is nothing but desert and smoking cooling towers, this machine will look at those blank, hypnotized faces and tell them absolutely nothing they don't already know.
"Really!"
"Yes! They are completely blind to the fact that they have built a massive oracle out of nothing but statistics, and now they are standing around it like panicked priests waiting for the stone to speak."
The chaps who built these models out of 'math class' are masters of optimization, but they are completely bankrupt when it comes to orientation. They know exactly how to scale the compute, how to tune the hyper-parameters, and how to make the matrix multiplications run faster under the hood. They understand the language of sums perfectly. But once the machine is built and starts talking back to them in fluent prose, they suffer a total collapse of Auctoritas. They look at the screen and genuinely ask: "Now what do we do with our lives? Where do we go next? What should the new norms be?"
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