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Sometimes I feel as if environmentalists don't really understand the concept of entropy. You can't do anything without externality. It's literally impossible.
by throwaway22032 3y ago
Sometimes I feel as if environmentalists don't really understand the concept of entropy.
You can't do anything without externality. It's literally impossible. The framing of energy usage as being environmentally costly is tautological.
But there's a fundamental difference between turning on a light bulb and using some energy in the process vs. bulldozing a forest, burning a load of coal, etc etc. The method matters.
- dheera 3y agoHowever, I don't think we're anywhere even remotely within several orders of magnitude of entropy limits in the energy usage we use for AI models. I'm pretty convinced it shouldn't take several hundred megawatts to produce something like GPT-4. The human brain does it much more efficiently, and even that isn't near entropy limits.
- lm28469 3y agoDo you see a difference between burning a lake of petrol vs using it to power a billion car for a month? It's not just about using energy, it's about what you do with it
- ripjaygn 3y ago> You can't do anything without externality. It's literally impossible. The framing of energy usage as being environmentally costly is tautological. You're completely missing the concept of efficiency. Take the light bulb you mentioned, a filament bulb turns a very small fraction of energy used to light and the rest to waste heat. An LED is the opposite. That's why environmentalists successfully campaigned against filament bulbs instead of just shrugging saying 'entropy', 'energy usage', and 'tautological'. It also matters if the process releases greenhouse gases or not, because those have multiplicative effects on climate change.