2 ms·

I read the original comment a few times but could not make sense of it, the first sentence especially. Could you explain the argument?

• bruckie 3y ago
  The argument is that you can't say activity A increases or decreases net energy demand without modeling whether there are activities B, C, D, ... whose energy demands will decrease if activity A happens. The implication is that AI may save more energy than it consumes. One made up possibility: maybe you can spend some energy on AI to optimize a supply chain, and that saves 50x as much energy every year after the supply chain is optimized. The driving example was just that: an example. Driving obviously consumes energy, but what if, for example, you're a home energy efficiency contractor, and you're driving to a job to insulate a house, and that's going to lead to a net decrease in energy much greater than the energy you consumed to get there.
  • cuu508 3y ago
    Thanks!
• tomoyoirl 3y ago
  Original poster seeks to articulate that the real cost of AI (whether dollars or energy budget) is best understood not by the price on the sticker alone: tasks not performed by AI might be performed another way, or other tasks might be performed in their stead. Those tasks also have costs. Economic analysis of this should take that into account, and deal with the marginal cost. Original poster laments the lack of models (not AI models) of the alternatives, models that would be used in any well structured attempt to assess this marginal cost. Poster then offers fragments of a parallel scenario (in which he drives his car) and in which models might also be used. Details of this scenario are not clear to me, but presumably there was some alternative? Unclear.