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In related news: * Data centers powering artificial intelligence could use more electricity than entire cities [0] * Google’s emissions up 51% as AI electrici

• dottjt 1y ago
  Not that I necessarily believe it, but isn't the rationale that technology allows us to scale without the need for additional humans? A bit in the same way that oil provides us many multiples of manpower? So for example, if AI can replace the need for additional humans, then overall we're using net less energy?
  • cess11 1y ago
    Is that what happened with oil (and coal and fossil gas)? Or did human labour instead come to resemble machine labour?
  • saubeidl 1y ago
    The rationale I've heard is that AGI is gonna come around any day now and will fix all our climate issues through its superior intellect. Which seems like a very strenuous proposal to be betting the future of humanity on.
    • arp242 1y ago
      The "we will invent our way out of this"-argument goes back way before AI, at least to the early 00s, but probably earlier. It's a great strategy that works fantastically well and saves a lot of time and money, except when it doesn't.
      • saubeidl 1y ago
        In my eyes it is a cop-out to delay the necessary structural changes until the point of no return. At that point the structural changes will be denied with a "oh well, it's too late now anyways!"
    • flir 1y ago
      > The rationale I've heard is that AGI is gonna come around any day now and will fix all our climate issues through its superior intellect. Skynet says: Get rid of the people
  • rebuilder 1y ago
    That would be a compelling argument if procreation was somehow primarily driven by a need for people. As it is, we already have quite a lot of people and they’re not going anywhere, however many terawatt-hours we pump into AI.
  • ohdeargodno 1y ago
    Do you see fewer humans working ? Fewer humans taking their cars to do groceries, fewer humans going to school, fewer humans cooling down their houses ? All AI does is potentially make said humans jobless, with a job here and there created with a bullshit title like prompt engineer. The energy you're "saving" is absolutely nothing. When you pay someone to do data entry, the majority of their energy expenditure isn't the computer they're working on, it's the transportation systems they use, the food they eat, etc. These never go away. Well, not unless you kill said person. The current AI trend is purely additional energy consumption, without any tangible benefits. Capitalism as a system is fundamentally incapable of functioning without continously running forward, and stopping means the system collapses. It needs consumption, it needs perpetually renewing debt, perpetually working humans. It's a death cult.
  • atwrk 1y ago
    Whose rationale? More efficiency leading to less resource use never happened, it always leads to more resource use (jevons paradox). AI companies currently simply are a major contributor to climate crisis, justified by racing for future riches for a few people, provided by some imaginary moat. Probably right near the one built by Uber.
    • qwertox 1y ago
      > it always leads to more resource use It does, but this due to the demand created by humans. If you create a technologically advanced civilization, with robots doing a lot of the work, and considering their lack of desire to own things like pretty houses, it could be possible to scale down civilization to a few select millions in such a way that the entire system is then respecting earth's resources. If you were to ship a big group of people through the galaxy, you'd also have to put some constraints on how many people will be on that ship, yet it will have to function regardless of how little people exist on that ship. The same could be applied to earth. This would also give animals more room on this planet.
      • saubeidl 1y ago
        How are you envisioning this "scaling down"? Chinese-Style One Child Policy? Large scale purge?
        • qwertox 1y ago
          No vision here, but it looks like developed countries are already working on it by themselves, with the demographic change we're able to observe. If that were the way, strong borders would need to be built.
          • saubeidl 1y ago
            What about the not developed countries? That's where most of the population growth is happening. Should the developed world do frequent culls of the less fortunate in addition to the strong borders?
• jeroenhd 1y ago
  It's not necessarily a doomsday cult as long as there is incentive to build green infrastructure. AI is a massive waste of power in many (most?) cases, but electricity does not necessarily need to be generated in a way that releases CO2. Solar panels, wind farms, geothermic energy, and even nuclear plants can satisfy AI's requirements and only leave it to be a local problem. Unfortunately, the USA, the government of country with the biggest impact per citizen as well as the hotbed of current AI development, has started taking down climate change related information to serve their oil baron masters. That leaves environmental responsibility with companies and their shareholders. AI isn't a doomsday cult. It's the epitome of the "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders" meme in real life.
  • saubeidl 1y ago
    A few points here. If AI were to not use so much energy, we would have a much easier time covering our need with green sources. Yes, we can probably also account for the additional use by AI, but it'll make an already existential challenge so much harder. Regarding your last paragraph - AI is just the riders of the apocalypse. The doomsday cult is capitalism.
    • keyringlight 1y ago
      We've already proven we can build huge amounts of renewable generation if we want, the issue I see is that additional huge demands like AI prevent us from making carbon based generation redundant, lowest priority choice in the mix of sources or used exclusively for its strengths to respond quickly to changing needs.
  • lopis 1y ago
    Right now we are using renewables essentially at capacity, always. Any extra electricity use therefore needs fossil fuels to power it. It's as simple as that. The AI computation explosion is completely irresponsible and any claims that it can be green are false unless the data centers produce their own solar/nuclear on-site (and even then it's producing tons of waste heat).
• random3 1y ago
  Feeling the seeming recklessness, but in the grand scheme of things, it may be worthwhile to throw AI at the problem to validate existence, solutions etc. So “spending” this now vs later is at least unclear wrt to long term outcomes.
  • bo0tzz 1y ago
    We already have clear solutions, the powers that be just don't want to sacrifice their profit margins.
    • myrmidon 1y ago
      No. Just no. Nation-wise, all the biggest culprits (US/EU) and a good number of the biggest present and future contributors to climate change are democracies. You do not get to shift collective responsibility onto some "powers that be": Those powers are you and me. The problem is neither that people don't know about climate change, nor that "greedy corporations" prevent us from acting-- the central problem is that people, in general, don't want to sacrifice cheap fuel, electricity and high living standards now for a better future-- not even a little bit. Thats it. You can see this in literally every discussion on environmentalism in basically every election. People only want clean energy as long as they don't have to pay a single dime extra for it. I have not solution for this, but blaming corporations is most certainly not gonna solve this problem (if anything, it's making things worse).
      • saubeidl 1y ago
        Who says that democracies are the solution? Personally, I envision a more authoritarian eco-communism. Others might have other models in mind, but it's a cop-out to say "oh well, we've tried bourgeois democracy and it was inevitably corrupted by capitalist interest, I guess we're all out of ideas..."
        • myrmidon 1y ago
          > oh well, we've tried bourgeois democracy and it was inevitably corrupted by capitalist interest This is not my point. I think most western democracies do exactly what voters want against climate change: Nothing that would cost extra. Effective policies to curb CO2 emissions are numerous and pretty obvious: Get rid of combustion engines, phase out fossil fuels from electricity generation, scale up electric grid interconnectivity and storage, lower emissions in steel/concrete production. Voters are mostly not against those policies, but as soon as there are visible costs (fuel/vehicle/construction/electricity costs rising) or minor inconvenience (vehicle range) any progress gets firmly stopped. I don't see how another form of government would help in any way-- the eco-communists would just get toppled before they could get anything done.
• qwertox 1y ago
  > It is a doomsday cult in the most literal sense. I'm not sure what you are trying to say. That this article is part of that doomsday cult (those worried about climate change)? If so, why not give it some credibility? Are you doubting the veracity of the linked articles? Because it seems like you are dismissing the claims presented in this article and the linked ones, attributing them to a doomsday cult. I may be getting it wrong, though. The other meaning could be that you are referring to Silicon Valley's AI companies with their huge demand for power as the doomsday cult, and that they are to blame for the major reversal in ocean circulation. In any case, it's not like we humans were intelligent enough to prevent climate change, or modify or adapt to it (depending on what your views are, human-made or just natural warming). It looks like we're still dumb enough (we come from the apes, and they certainly are dumber than us) to not be able to deal with this problem, so it might be better to grant AI some room to compute, and maybe shrink some cities instead.
  • saubeidl 1y ago
    We are intelligent enough. The solution has been out there for a while. The power structures we have put in place just don't allow for it to happen.
• throwpoaster 1y ago
  Electrical consumption does not emit greenhouse gasses. Electrical production can emit greenhouse gasses, and there is an argument we should be inventing and investing in decarbonizing it.
  • saubeidl 1y ago
    Consumption drives production.
    • throwpoaster 1y ago
      The data are not clear on that. Some things we consume just because they are produced. This is the idea behind Supply Side Economics.
  • Yizahi 1y ago
    You can't "decarbonize" anything on this planet, it is not possible by definition. Even green electrical production emits a lot of GH gasses out of the whole production cycle. I'm all for the green tech of course, I just don't like highly misleading terms like "decarbonize", "net zero" etc.
  • guappa 1y ago
    We are, but if we keep consuming even more, we're not solving anything.
  • imhoguy 1y ago
    Decarbonization is a wet dream. Alternative energy sources require toxic minerals extraction and manufacturing which turns biosystems into dead wastelands and waterlands into dry dustlands. The only way is to lower consumption drastically, end the constant growth chase, and enbrance closed carbon cycle (biodiverse biomass).
• bertili 1y ago
  It's too expensive to be an AI bot these days. Cost of living, let alone making sensible answers to human prompts and generating images is just not profitable when energy lines are all exhausted by human air-con, irrigation and carbon capture. The AI race is now and cost of living for AIs must come down! Drill baby drill.
• energy123 1y ago
  It's a declaration of war against anyone living near the equator.
  • saubeidl 1y ago
    Or near an ocean or anywhere too far from any freshwater.
• celticninja 1y ago
  Was bitcoin the first technology that generated this sort of "waste of electricity" argument? Are we going to use it for every new technology? It's a fairly easy stick to beat any tech with. Does AI use more power than Facebook? Is one more deserving of the power than the other?
  • saubeidl 1y ago
    Both those technologies consume immense amounts of energy for vague promises of future societal gain. Our earth is a shared resource. I am not okay with it being wasted on the pet projects of billionaires trying to enrich themselves even more.
    • celticninja 1y ago
      Producing endless smartphones uses resources and energy, but apple make 3 new models a year, with only minor 'improvements' not to mention their laptops, or those of other manufacturers. Car manufacturers are producing more and more vehicles using more resources and requiring more energy, either for ICE or EV, vehicles. You can be against a particular tech using resources and power, but if you are selective about which tech then you don't really care as much as you think you do.
• panstromek 1y ago
  Honestly, these articles are borderline misinformation in my opinion. All of them do a lot of guesswork and cherry picking data to make cool headlines. The first one chooses somewhat arbitrary date of 2019 to make the 51% figure stand out. Google scaled up a lot since 2019, I'd bet it's almost entirely unrelated to AI (well, at least wrt to LLMs). The other two are just a guesswork, which is likely completely outdated because it's from last year and so many things have changed since then.
• jug 1y ago
  This is unrelated to this story which signs starting to show in 2016. The solution to this issue will not be if every AI data center disappeared tomorrow. It has not even been shown if this would help us at this point, as it is a feedback loop that is being triggered; CO2 will and have already dramatically increased due to it, probably more impactful than AI itself already. AI disappearing may help in other ways for sure, but this is an odd article to choose to piggyback on.
• jillesvangurp 1y ago
  In terms of impact, AI remains very minor relative to all the other carbon intensive stuff we do. It's a few percent of overall power usage. And unlike many of those things, using renewable power for AI use cases is fairly straightforward from a technical point of view and also the cheapest thing to do long term. A lot of the current rise in emissions is data centers opting for more expensive dirty power because that's all they can get. That's the problem to fix. Because we're going to need a lot of clean power generation to transition away from all the current dirty power generation. The good news is that that usage is creating high cost for them and an incentive to do something about that. Which is why MS, Amazon, etc. are very interested in investing in e.g. nuclear and renewables. I'm not too worried about the long term impact of increased power usage by data centers. I think it's more interesting to focus on the big emitters: domestic and industrial heating, shipping, road transport, aviation, construction, etc. There is some movement there but it's very slow. Fixing that should increase demands on power grids and that's a good thing because investments are needed to make that better and cleaner and the most viable technical path to doing that is via renewables. And it's not a zero sum game. AI delivers economical benefits as well. Including potential savings in labor, efficiency gains, and indeed power usage. I don't think becoming Luddites is really a realistic path. Not going to happen and quite pointless and ineffective to be calling for that. AI is happening and there's going to be more of it. Wasting energy on trying to put that cat back in the bag it escaped from is a mission impossible.