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Its pretty ironic though. Last few years were focused on reducing CO2 output by reducing power usage etc. Now with all the AI hype we suddenly don't hear so muc

Its pretty ironic though. Last few years were focused on reducing CO2 output by reducing power usage etc. Now with all the AI hype we suddenly don't hear so much about that.

oytis 2y ago
But once we have AGI it will solve climate change forever. Probably.
- anticorporate 2y ago
  I hope this is /s
  - ajmurmann 2y ago
    Salvatore Sanlfilippo, here between known as Antirez, wrotea book about humans attempting exactly this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61657571 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61657571 Fun read!
- smallmancontrov 2y ago
  By killing all the humans? Or by setting up nice enclaves for the owners and keeping the rest of in squalor with a swarm of murderbots?
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  ...if AGI is even a meaningful concept. I'm deeply skeptical.
  - exe34 2y ago
    do you not believe human level intelligence is possible?
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      Human level intelligence is clearly not enough to solve global warming all by itself just by existing. What people mean when they say "AGI" is something different.
      - exe34 2y ago
        > What people mean when they say "AGI" is something different. what do they mean?
        ForHackernews 2y ago
        There's a lot of "singularity" hype among people longing for a machine-god they can worship.
        exe34 2y ago
        "singularity" isn't AGI, that's ASI. AGI would be more than enough for the rich to enslave/eradicate the rest of us from their world and halt further development that doesn't align with their interests.
    - hulitu 2y ago
      > do you not believe human level intelligence is possible? In humans ? /s
FloorEgg 2y ago
Solving CO2 output by reducing power usage never made any sense. Anyone with a zoomed out view on human history and technology trajectories would have had an intuition that our energy needs will continue to grow on an exponential curve indefinitely. And before anyone says it can't grow forever, it's unsustainable, etc... you're not thinking big enough. Just google kardashev scales. If your point is that "they used to say x, now they say y", my rebuttal is that 1) the exact same person/people? 2) it's common for people to be mistaken and then learn something new, and change their opinion. It might not happen in the middle of an internet argument, but it does happen, a lot.
- logicchains 2y ago
  >Solving CO2 output by reducing power usage never made any sense. Exactly. Any society that seriously adopted it and deliberately deindustralised would eventually just get taken over by a more industrialised neighbour.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  The thing is the human experience regarding tech is not very linear in this regard. Take my life, strip out the smartphone and it is the exact same experience as the 90s in regards to what I experience and my quality of life. Strip out the desktop and its the same as the 1950s perhaps. Car, home, grocery store, basically all the same and encompasses all of life right there. So it seems to me, given that much of life outside that distracting cellphone in your pocket is the same in terms of amenities affordances and available goods as it was in the 1950s, that there ought to be some efficiency gains made along the 75 years since. Then again maybe those efficiency gains are swallowed by more people globally being elevated from that great depression sort of desperate life we saw in this country in the 1930s and elsewhere today globally, into the prototypical 1950s lifestyle where a job begets housing, transport in some form, and the modern experience of stocked grocery stores of all goods instead of having to homestead or contribute to a village system for limited goods.
  - ajmurmann 2y ago
    This seems way off. Medical advancements have grown significantly since the 90s. Minimally invasive surgery was just starting. We've made huge progress at eradicating several diseases. HIV treatment and prevention has advanced leaps and bounds. Outside the US traffic fatalities dropped significantly (somehow in the US they went back up). In general the level of assistance and safety features you get in a modern car would have blown everyone's mind in the 90s. Fuel efficiency is way up. Induction stoves are so much better than electric stoves from the 90s without messing up your house's air like a gas stove. Medical imaging has made incredible breakthroughs. Innovations in shipping and logistics have enabled us to get more interesting food items like third wave coffee. We can watch the movies and tv shows we want and when we want rather than VHS recordings or whatever is on tv right now. Due to higher resolution we can actually have sports broadcasts with useful data. Many houses now have solar cells and batteries and pay little or nothing for their electricity. Amenities in houses are much nicer now. I'm sure I could go on and on with this for much longer. It's easy to not see our progress over time even though it's tremendous.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
They still talk efficiency on one end of the mouth. Now people are buying macbooks with what 24 cores to check email on a website for work. All because that macbook now trains models in the background for reasons that clearly help this average user and their average use case. I will say as an owner of one of these macbooks that I appreciate finally having a computer with a full workday of battery life. But still. 24 cores to run the same sort of workflow that was established 25 years ago. 2025 word still does exactly what word 98 did. Same email. Same excel. Same editors and IDEs. But of course an order of magnitude more resources squandered to do so. And we tell ourselves that we need such powerful laptops because probably 1% of users actually insist on pushing this laptop to its limits instead of just buying an unsexy desktop or renting server. When really we could have all gotten by still with the dual core macbooks I expect for most peoples use cases. I had one of those last 12 years myself before an unfortunate water spill.
- bunderbunder 2y ago
  That 24 core MacBook probably also consumes at least an order of magnitude less power while checking email than the 1-core computer you had 25 years ago. Heck, that MacBook probably consumes less power with all 24 cores blazing than the 1-core computer did just to check email. Modern notebook CPUs do a really good job of leaving cores that aren't currently needed in power save mode. That's what makes it possible for the battery to last for a full workday. Despite possibly also having less capacity than typical laptop batteries from 25 years ago.
- pjturpeau 2y ago
  And I still own my Core 2 Quad q9650 which will soon move from Windows 10 to some Linux distro to continue support side activities like children access to internet for homeworks, or alternative testbed machine.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
hulitu 2y ago
> Now with all the AI hype we suddenly don't hear so much about that. It is because AI will help us reduce CO2 output. /s

Its pretty ironic though. Last few years were focused on reducing CO2 output by reducing power usage etc. Now with all the AI hype we suddenly don't hear so much about that.

oytis 2y ago

But once we have AGI it will solve climate change forever. Probably.

anticorporate 2y ago
I hope this is /s
- ajmurmann 2y ago
  Salvatore Sanlfilippo, here between known as Antirez, wrotea book about humans attempting exactly this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61657571 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61657571 Fun read!
smallmancontrov 2y ago
By killing all the humans? Or by setting up nice enclaves for the owners and keeping the rest of in squalor with a swarm of murderbots?
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
...if AGI is even a meaningful concept. I'm deeply skeptical.
- exe34 2y ago
  do you not believe human level intelligence is possible?
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    Human level intelligence is clearly not enough to solve global warming all by itself just by existing. What people mean when they say "AGI" is something different.
    - exe34 2y ago
      > What people mean when they say "AGI" is something different. what do they mean?
      - ForHackernews 2y ago
        There's a lot of "singularity" hype among people longing for a machine-god they can worship.
        exe34 2y ago
        "singularity" isn't AGI, that's ASI. AGI would be more than enough for the rich to enslave/eradicate the rest of us from their world and halt further development that doesn't align with their interests.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > do you not believe human level intelligence is possible? In humans ? /s

FloorEgg 2y ago

Solving CO2 output by reducing power usage never made any sense. Anyone with a zoomed out view on human history and technology trajectories would have had an intuition that our energy needs will continue to grow on an exponential curve indefinitely. And before anyone says it can't grow forever, it's unsustainable, etc... you're not thinking big enough. Just google kardashev scales. If your point is that "they used to say x, now they say y", my rebuttal is that 1) the exact same person/people? 2) it's common for people to be mistaken and then learn something new, and change their opinion. It might not happen in the middle of an internet argument, but it does happen, a lot.

logicchains 2y ago
>Solving CO2 output by reducing power usage never made any sense. Exactly. Any society that seriously adopted it and deliberately deindustralised would eventually just get taken over by a more industrialised neighbour.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
The thing is the human experience regarding tech is not very linear in this regard. Take my life, strip out the smartphone and it is the exact same experience as the 90s in regards to what I experience and my quality of life. Strip out the desktop and its the same as the 1950s perhaps. Car, home, grocery store, basically all the same and encompasses all of life right there. So it seems to me, given that much of life outside that distracting cellphone in your pocket is the same in terms of amenities affordances and available goods as it was in the 1950s, that there ought to be some efficiency gains made along the 75 years since. Then again maybe those efficiency gains are swallowed by more people globally being elevated from that great depression sort of desperate life we saw in this country in the 1930s and elsewhere today globally, into the prototypical 1950s lifestyle where a job begets housing, transport in some form, and the modern experience of stocked grocery stores of all goods instead of having to homestead or contribute to a village system for limited goods.
- ajmurmann 2y ago
  This seems way off. Medical advancements have grown significantly since the 90s. Minimally invasive surgery was just starting. We've made huge progress at eradicating several diseases. HIV treatment and prevention has advanced leaps and bounds. Outside the US traffic fatalities dropped significantly (somehow in the US they went back up). In general the level of assistance and safety features you get in a modern car would have blown everyone's mind in the 90s. Fuel efficiency is way up. Induction stoves are so much better than electric stoves from the 90s without messing up your house's air like a gas stove. Medical imaging has made incredible breakthroughs. Innovations in shipping and logistics have enabled us to get more interesting food items like third wave coffee. We can watch the movies and tv shows we want and when we want rather than VHS recordings or whatever is on tv right now. Due to higher resolution we can actually have sports broadcasts with useful data. Many houses now have solar cells and batteries and pay little or nothing for their electricity. Amenities in houses are much nicer now. I'm sure I could go on and on with this for much longer. It's easy to not see our progress over time even though it's tremendous.

kjkjadksj 2y ago

They still talk efficiency on one end of the mouth. Now people are buying macbooks with what 24 cores to check email on a website for work. All because that macbook now trains models in the background for reasons that clearly help this average user and their average use case. I will say as an owner of one of these macbooks that I appreciate finally having a computer with a full workday of battery life. But still. 24 cores to run the same sort of workflow that was established 25 years ago. 2025 word still does exactly what word 98 did. Same email. Same excel. Same editors and IDEs. But of course an order of magnitude more resources squandered to do so. And we tell ourselves that we need such powerful laptops because probably 1% of users actually insist on pushing this laptop to its limits instead of just buying an unsexy desktop or renting server. When really we could have all gotten by still with the dual core macbooks I expect for most peoples use cases. I had one of those last 12 years myself before an unfortunate water spill.

bunderbunder 2y ago
That 24 core MacBook probably also consumes at least an order of magnitude less power while checking email than the 1-core computer you had 25 years ago. Heck, that MacBook probably consumes less power with all 24 cores blazing than the 1-core computer did just to check email. Modern notebook CPUs do a really good job of leaving cores that aren't currently needed in power save mode. That's what makes it possible for the battery to last for a full workday. Despite possibly also having less capacity than typical laptop batteries from 25 years ago.
pjturpeau 2y ago
And I still own my Core 2 Quad q9650 which will soon move from Windows 10 to some Linux distro to continue support side activities like children access to internet for homeworks, or alternative testbed machine.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

hulitu 2y ago

> Now with all the AI hype we suddenly don't hear so much about that. It is because AI will help us reduce CO2 output. /s