Why AI is a disaster for the climate

blunderworld , 6 months ago

Can we make a single breakthrough in technology that doesn’t totally fuck our planet? That’d be just swell!

abhibeckert , 6 months ago

Um… doesn’t ChatGPT run on Azure? A world leader in sustainability that has been carbon neutral for over a decade?

BlackSkinnedJew , 6 months ago

The world it’s going to the fuck, isn’t news… just enjoy your life while it last. 🤣🤣…

bfg9k , 6 months ago

Off-topic: I had never seen ethernet cables labelled like that before with colour - number codes like resistors, that’s really cool and now I must have it

melroy , 6 months ago

it does look like resistor color codes

Mojojojo1993 , 6 months ago

Humans are. Already the worst. Ai is just a tool. Used by horrible humans

FaceDeer , 6 months ago

As I expected, the author made no attempt to calculate the carbon footprint of the human artists and other workers that these AIs can replace, or the carbon savings from productivity gains or other similar efficiencies. If a call center gets closed because the workers were replaced by AI that's a ton of commuting and such that's no longer needed.

Alexstarfire , 6 months ago

About what I expect out of mainstream media.

MysticKetchup , 6 months ago

Those people aren’t deleted from existence, they still produce just as much carbon they just don’t have jobs.

Productivity gains are meaningless when it just means that bosses will demand more work in less time

FaceDeer , 6 months ago

They may do something that doesn't involve as much commuting. They'll be doing something that wasn't being done before. Productivity gains means more work gets done, overall.

The point is that the author's analysis is simple-minded to the point of uselessness. If I were to object to building a hospital in a neighborhood because whenever a hospital is added to a neighborhood it results in a sharp increase in the number of people dying there, you'd rightly call me out for looking at just one specific number while ignoring the overall benefits. It's not like these AIs just pop into existence and spew CO2 like some sort of Captain Planet villain's pollution factory, the AIs are doing something and that has value.

LoafyLemon , 6 months ago

This is why I've been researching and working on FOSS AI systems. My own AI cannot fire me. ;)

autotldr Bot , 6 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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Answer: reach for the Gartner Hype Cycle, an ingenious diagram that maps the progress of an emerging technology through five phases: the “technology trigger”, which is followed by a rapid rise to the “peak of inflated expectations”; this is succeeded by a rapid decline into the “trough of disillusionment”, after which begins a gentle climb up the “slope of enlightenment” – before eventually (often years or decades later) reaching the “plateau of productivity”.

This hype has given rise to much anguished fretting about its impact on employment, misinformation, politics etc, and also to a deal of anxious extrapolations about an existential risk to humanity.

Which, in turn, means CO2 emissions on a large scale – about which the industry is extraordinarily coy, while simultaneously boasting about using offsets and other wheezes to mime carbon neutrality.

The implication is stark: the realisation of the industry’s dream of “AI everywhere” (as Google’s boss once put it) would bring about a world dependent on a technology that is not only flaky but also has a formidable – and growing – environmental footprint.

A study in 2019, for example, estimated the carbon footprint of training a single early large language model (LLM) such as GPT-2 at about 300,000kg of CO2 emissions – the equivalent of 125 round-trip flights between New York and Beijing.

Ways of seeingIn an intriguing blogpost, Om Malik describes why Apple’s fancy, soon-to-be-released headset Vision Pro will change photography.

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