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The author doesn't mention decarbonizing electricity in the first few paragraphs. He simply claims ML is driven by fossil-fuel electricity, when in reality the
by WhompingWindows 7y ago
The author doesn't mention decarbonizing electricity in the first few paragraphs. He simply claims ML is driven by fossil-fuel electricity, when in reality the electricity mix for computation is increasingly green over time. Since computers don't need anything except electrons to run, it's all about power sector emissions here, and that's a bright spot in climate relative to transportation, industry, and agriculture emissions.
It'd be far more effective to have a Renewables revolution which pushes the scale of wind, solar, and batteries much higher. That would be far more cost-effective than a Luddite revolution which would ban computationally and data intensive practices in all the most valuable companies.
- kordlessagain 7y agoThe author also doesn't mention black holes, but there's a huge one at the center of our galaxy which will gladly do away with us and all our problems. Electron arguments aside, computers need matter and a lot of that matter in them is rare, which requires things like strip mining and other non-Earth-friendly activities. If we manage to pull off a walking/talking/joke cracking AI, it and its little AI buds will likely demand every erg of power they can get. Sorta like my dog at dinner time. Also, the amount of compute we are creating is accelerating at a non-linear rate, which is why there was a discussion about Bitcoin using so much energy at such and such a point in time in the future. The speed of networking is not increasing at the same rate as compute.
- vertis 7y agoThe article didn't really make that argument though. It could have gone into things like your strip mining example and that would have been better than a lot of the arguments used.