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Generative AI could generate tons of e-waste by decade's end
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoOne Person's Trash is Another Crypto Miners Treasure.
- wildrhythms 2y agoBut have you considered all the money to be made storing and running ads on that e-waste?
- ForOldHack 2y agoEven in death, old TVs still command attention.
- drewbeck 2y agoFortunately we will just be able to ask AI what to do about it. I’m sure it will come up with something.
- pimlottc 2y agoIt keeps telling me to allocate more resources to making paper clips
- lagrange77 2y ago"Oh, thank you for pointing that out, you're totally right! My previous answer would have killed humankind as a side effect. Here's an updated version of the solution: ..."
- louwrentius 2y agoThe current AI craze doesn’t feel like it’s really about AI. It’s Silicon Valley being desperate for (growing) growth and shareholder value. Another obvious aspect it that it may help do work that could be done by people, thus helping to keep the worker class - that’s you! - subdued, fighting amongst yourselves. Meanwhile the ‘good stuff’ can only be offered by those large companies, who have the power to make them ‘good enough’ thus making the rest more dependent. It’s been a while since 2007, all the incentives are there to keep the ball rolling, but it will stop at some point. Then we IT people with six figure salaries will learn that we should have listened more to David Graeber.
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoDon't you think people will get bored of it? I am starting to. Apple has a few new cool AL based components in iOS 18. But one of the ones they've spent the past year harping on is the Cowboy frog emoji generator.
- digging 2y agoGetting bored of it isn't the same as having no use for it. This stuff is 2 years old; we haven't figured it all out. Even if all development on the actual models stopped now, we'd still be seeing new uses of LLMs emerging for years to come.
- ForOldHack 2y agoWe have no use for crypto-currency or Carriages. In 1910 there were 240,000 carriage manufactures in the U.S, only 4 years later, there were 5. There are still 2. Technology does that. It does not matter how old... If its useless, its useless. Did we figure a use for the appendix?
- wongarsu 2y ago> Did we figure a use for the appendix? We did. It's a kind of safe house for gut flora. Not as important to modern humans, but it allows some of your gut flora to survive dysentery, cholera, etc. It's also a place for your immune system to get acquainted with the beneficial bacteria in your gut flora, and seems to fulfill a number of other roles in the immune system More to the point of AI: this may also be like the dotcom bubble. Lots of hype that far outstrips the capabilities of the technology, but the technology is ultimately useful and impactful. Few companies survived the dotcom crash, and a lot of the tech companies with the biggest impact were only founded in the decade after the crash, when the technology was more mature and expectations more realistic
- digging 2y ago> In 1910 there were 240,000 carriage manufactures in the U.S, only 4 years later, there were 5. This makes no sense. Carriages weren't invented in the 1900s. They were displaced by a new technology. LLMs are not the carriages of our world, they are the cars. > We have no use for crypto-currency You have no use for it, but a lot of people do (not just for speculation).
- xnx 2y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41974159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41974159
- Synaesthesia 2y agoFunny because "e-waste" is also how I would characterise the content that these generative AI models output.
- ForOldHack 2y agoSaying AI will generate tons of e-waste is redundant. AI is waste.
- stavros 2y agoI really don't understand the utter lack of imagination on HN lately. Here's an amazing technology that nobody could even fathom existing five years ago, and people's take is "AI is waste". Like, really? If you've used ChatGPT and it didn't do anything useful for you, I'm sorry, but the problem was between the keyboard and the chair.
- xanderlewis 2y agoWell, I can understand it. It is an amazing (in the literal sense) technology, and yet after playing with it you come to realise it doesn't really deliver what it promises and is more of a demonstration of the power of enormous amounts of data than it is some kind of breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Also, it's probably mostly a backlash to the constant hype and outrageous claims of impending doom or utopia rampant on Twitter and Reddit; HN seemed to be nothing but AI/LLM talk for pretty much the whole of 2023. What does ChatGPT do for you?
- stavros 2y agoIt writes my code, it explains concepts or context or phenomena to me, it takes notes, it handles my calendar, it generates images, it does boring jobs, along with a very long tail of ad-hoc tasks. I don't know about the claims, but "the claims are exaggerated" is very different from "AI is waste".
- 2y ago
- jiggawatts 2y agoThese “generates e-waste” articles are political hit pieces. I hope we’re all intelligent enough to recognise the absurdity of the statement. In case it is unclear, a similar article was going around the Internet a few years ago complaining about the “tons of e-waste created by Apple Airpods”. Yes, that’s true in the sense that Apple was producing “tons” of e-waste annually… two of them. One ton wouldn’t be “tons”, you see, so the article was technically correct in the dumbest and most nakedly deceptive way possible. Waste is about inefficiency. It implies no or negative utility. There’s a hint of huge landfills and truck after truck of bulky stuff filling that up. AirPods and AI chips are the opposite of inefficient! They’re some of the smallest, densest, most concentrated and space-efficient products ever made by man. To invoke the word “waste” in juxtaposition to these things is so absurd, so contrary to their essential nature that it’s clearly a deliberate falsehood, signalling membership in a group by its absurdity. It’s like the official statements on RT that yet another oligarch “fell out” of a window. Everyone knows what really happened there. The claim of defenestration is a coded signal telling the listeners a very different message to the verbatim text. Someone who is scared of AI wrote this article or had it written on their behalf. It’s the product of a Luddite, or someone whose job is about to be replaced. “Stop the efficiencies! My career as a copy editor is at risk! I mean… it’s surely wasteful to optimise my job away with a chip that’s a mere square inch in size and weighs a gram!”
- Nullabillity 2y ago> AirPods and AI chips are the opposite of inefficient! They’re some of the smallest, densest, most concentrated and space-efficient products ever made by man. Even if we were to take these claims at face value... none of these things imply that the thing is useful.
- jiggawatts 2y agoThey’re more useful than mine tailings or household waste, both of which are generated at a scale many orders of magnitude greater than AI-specific chips. Even as discarded waste, electronics tend to be more useful to recyclers because they contain copper.
- 2y ago
- 94b45eb4 2y agoIt’s a race to create an AI good enough to solve the e-waste problem before the e-waste problem becomes such a large problem that it prevents AI advancement.
- soco 2y agoIt's a race to ignore all this, calling it "woke snowflake worries lol", and enjoying the short term economical benefits of AI making the shareholders happy. And I'm not even sarcastic.
- ForOldHack 2y agoUntil of course, "Demon Seed" comes true.
- Yoric 2y agoSo far, I haven't seen any sign that LLM/GenAI could be used to solve e-waste. It's definitely an impressive technology, but seems to be much suited at generating porn than at solving global issues.
- meta_x_ai 2y agooh look another article that brings the HN luddites come out of their woodwork and spew "hurr durr AI hype/bad/waste"
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]