this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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What about the climate impact? You didn't even address that. That's the worst part of the AI boom, were already way in the red for climate change, and this is going to accelerate the problem rather than slowing or stopping (let alone reversing it)
That's a very solvable problem though, AI can easily be run off green energy and a lot of the new data centers being built are utilizing it, tons are popping up in Seattle with its abundance of hydro energy. Compare that to meat production or transportation via combustion which have a much harder transition and this seems way less of an existential problem then the author makes it out to be.
Also most of the energy needed is for the training which can be done at any time, so it can be run on off peak hours. It can also absorb surpluses from solar energy in the middle of the day which can put strain on the grid.
This is all assuming it's done right, which it may not and could exasperate the ditch were already in, but the technology itself isn't inherently bad.
That right there is the problem. I don't trust any tech CEO to do the right thing ever, because historically they haven't. For every single technological advancement since the industrial revolution brought forth by the corporate class, masses of people have had to beat them up and shed blood to get them to stop being assholes for a beat and abuse and murder people a little less.
It doesn't matter if AI is run on green energy as long as other things are still running on fossil fuels. There is a limit to how fast renewables energy sources are built and if the power consumption of AI eats away all of that growth, then the amount of fossil energy doesn't change.
All increases in energy consumption are not green because they force something else to run on fossil energy for longer.
We need to deploy solar and wind at a breakneck pace to replace the fossil fuel usage we already have. Why compound that with a whole new source?