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AI boom has caused same CO2 emissions in 2025 as New York City, report claims
(www.theguardian.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Isn't it both? There are great use cases for global aviation (like visiting your family back home) and bad use cases (like sex tourism in a third world country). There are also great things you can do with AI and bad things.
Global aviation is generally more efficient than traveling by car is it not? Not accounting for the use of private planes.
Not really:
So you might be able to create a scenario where driving around in your american pickup alone produces more CO2 per km than sitting in a long-distance flight. But: If you're not sitting alone in your car and you're driving something reasonable, that flips.
And flying will cover longer distances. Yes, there are a lot of people driving to spain in the summer from the netherlands, but nobody is driving from Europe to Thailand or from New York to Bali or from London to Sidney. Flying is faster and you will cover more km. And that means that even if flying would be as efficient per km than a car, it will always be worse
Yes, I will concede to that. Supposedly LLMs help a lot in certain scientific research domains replacing tedious manual work.
The thing is, the prevalence of good vs bad scenarios are inversed between GenAI and aviation I would argue. Due to lack of legal regulation we see insane amounts of funding being given for the most greedy nefarious purposes, like the elimination of the working class or artists, privacy violations for the sake of control and literally weapons out of dystopian scifi.
It's really not the same.
A lot of the AI you hear about in the scientific community is likely not an LLM. It might use bits of similar technology behind the scenes but they aren't using chatgpt to fold proteins or develop new weather models. That's the problem with lumping everything under "AI".
Unless you're talking writing the papers afterwards, but that's back into using LLMs for paperwork that every industry is discussing.