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Writing about AI, destroying the planet for data centers, there's a lot of money to be made. That being said, AI seems kind of miraculous sometimes. Similar t

Writing about AI, destroying the planet for data centers, there's a lot of money to be made. That being said, AI seems kind of miraculous sometimes. Similar to cars. So enticing that we make everything else in the world worse in order to maximize the profit, make it indispensable, subsidize it, and make the dependency on it irreversible. And it's not even something to blame individual people for. Driving away from all the other cars to spend a weekend feels like freedom. Using AI to answer a question feels like a "bicycle for the mind". But in fact it's more like a car. It requires massive resources and creates perverse incentives, and the result is ineffective and corrupt. Both cars and AI are amazing technology and extremely useful, but using them is not an individual responsibility. It requires societal subsidy.

MSFT_Edging 4mo ago
Vonnegut said in his last living work that the greatest addiction modern people face is the drug of cheap oil. We got addicted to the convenience and overuse, and have started a mass extinction event because of it. The perverse incentives will come for us all.
- moritzwarhier 4mo ago
  It is exactly this thought, in the form of this sentence, that could replace almost all of my comments in this thread. It feels depressing, but I think the same. When thinking about the larger world, it becomes increasingly hard to ignore. And of course it is not new. There were "doomers" already in the midst of the 20th century, but it doesn't mean that they were wrong.
  - MSFT_Edging 4mo ago
    There's nothing the selfish hate more than hearing their "choices" have a net negative effect. They hate the "doomers", because it puts a damper on their little side-effect free party. Doomers are more often correct because it only requires bare minimum pattern recognition. It requires more effort to defend an action that will certainly be different this time. AI, Crypto, car-centric urban planning, cardboard suburbs in a barren field with bright green grass. You tell someone that their selfish choice to drive a pickup truck only to haul something maybe one time a year, they shit their pants. They can't stand it, they start personal attacks and ask "what about you??". They seem to know it's wasteful, damaging, etc but they deserve it for some reason.
nfw2 4mo ago
The environmental impact of answering a question on an obscure topic with ai model is less than an the impact of answering the question with an hour-long google search hunting for references or a drive to the public library.
- toasty228 4mo ago
  It's like saying if we didn't have cheap commercial flights people would travel by foot anyways and would consume more resources for food &co. than the plane would consume in fuel... 80% of generative AI queries wouldn't even exist as google searches.
  - moritzwarhier 4mo ago
    I do plenty of AI queries, both pragmatic ones and some for entertainment: witnessing talktotransformer was mind-bending already at the time! And since then, I've tried frontier models, local, coding agents, and use plenty of them on the regular. I awe at the capabilites of generative AI. I also enjoy sitting in or driving a car. I did not want to make a moral argument, unless you consider each and every form of utilitarianism as moralism.
  - nfw2 4mo ago
    To be clear, your position here is that insurmountable barriers to information is the preferable state of the world? One claim of the parent comment was that AI is ineffective. For the purpose of finding answers to questions, it is more resource-efficient than the alternatives, and, to your point, capable of answering questions that were impossible to answer via other means before. In what way is that ineffective?
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - 16bitvoid 4mo ago
      No, they're saying that 80% of genai queries (aka anything sent to an LLM; I won't speak on the validity of the percentage) are not things someone would search on Google. It's things like trial-and-error vibecoding, openclaw-like agentic loops, talking to chatgpt like it's a person, etc. In other words, most genai queries are not for getting "obscure information" or even getting direct information at all. It's about either getting it to do something you don't want to do yourself, or using it as a replacement for someone else (junior dev, therapist, friend, significant other, etc).
bloomca 4mo ago
I agree with your message but not sure about the conclusion. Cars themselves are commodified luxury available (in the US pretty much required) to everyone, and they do need to be subsidized, both in terms of infrastructure and the lifestyle they require. But with AI what is the exact price? My understanding is that R&D is extremely expensive, but running non-SOTA models is not that bad. We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications. Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand?
- moritzwarhier 4mo ago
  Thanks for asking an open question about my point. First, because I initially failed to answer your more closed questions (this paragraph is edited in): > We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications. Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand? I don't think there's a way around making the best of AI capabilities with minimum price and maximum control, and I'd agree this is met by on-prem data centers, just not in a rationally targeted way. Back to my original comment: Because it (my conclusion) was not so clear, and maybe I just wanted to highlight some observations without delivering a real argument for or against things [, I thank you for your open question]. The utility/leverage aspect for AI seems more esoteric than the one for cars because, apart from Chatbots, it's more hidden. And also, similar to cars (or many other phenomena of industrialization), yes, my first vague point was the subsidization of infrastructure. But also, the power gap: that's something not only associated with AI or cars, but with a lot of technologies we all hold dear: sewage, powerline, logistics, etc etc. What reminds me of cars in the current AI frenzy is the fixation on cementing infrastructure. And also, I think, a lot more people agree on, for example, some kind of universal right to, for example, clean water. But all of industrialization confronts people with questions of efficiency, inequality, and collective support. Most people would, for example, support a right to get a minimum amount of clean water when you are living and working in a tradionally inhabited space (if you're on the social-darwinist side) or at least not harming society (if you're more of a social democrat). And, similar to the buildup of car infrastructure, and the procurement of resources, space etc for maximum building, giant data centers can obstruct people in buying drinking water. Or walking outside (AI obstructs traditional methods of online collaboration).

MSFT_Edging 4mo ago

Vonnegut said in his last living work that the greatest addiction modern people face is the drug of cheap oil. We got addicted to the convenience and overuse, and have started a mass extinction event because of it. The perverse incentives will come for us all.

moritzwarhier 4mo ago
It is exactly this thought, in the form of this sentence, that could replace almost all of my comments in this thread. It feels depressing, but I think the same. When thinking about the larger world, it becomes increasingly hard to ignore. And of course it is not new. There were "doomers" already in the midst of the 20th century, but it doesn't mean that they were wrong.
- MSFT_Edging 4mo ago
  There's nothing the selfish hate more than hearing their "choices" have a net negative effect. They hate the "doomers", because it puts a damper on their little side-effect free party. Doomers are more often correct because it only requires bare minimum pattern recognition. It requires more effort to defend an action that will certainly be different this time. AI, Crypto, car-centric urban planning, cardboard suburbs in a barren field with bright green grass. You tell someone that their selfish choice to drive a pickup truck only to haul something maybe one time a year, they shit their pants. They can't stand it, they start personal attacks and ask "what about you??". They seem to know it's wasteful, damaging, etc but they deserve it for some reason.

nfw2 4mo ago

The environmental impact of answering a question on an obscure topic with ai model is less than an the impact of answering the question with an hour-long google search hunting for references or a drive to the public library.

toasty228 4mo ago
It's like saying if we didn't have cheap commercial flights people would travel by foot anyways and would consume more resources for food &co. than the plane would consume in fuel... 80% of generative AI queries wouldn't even exist as google searches.
- moritzwarhier 4mo ago
  I do plenty of AI queries, both pragmatic ones and some for entertainment: witnessing talktotransformer was mind-bending already at the time! And since then, I've tried frontier models, local, coding agents, and use plenty of them on the regular. I awe at the capabilites of generative AI. I also enjoy sitting in or driving a car. I did not want to make a moral argument, unless you consider each and every form of utilitarianism as moralism.
- nfw2 4mo ago
  To be clear, your position here is that insurmountable barriers to information is the preferable state of the world? One claim of the parent comment was that AI is ineffective. For the purpose of finding answers to questions, it is more resource-efficient than the alternatives, and, to your point, capable of answering questions that were impossible to answer via other means before. In what way is that ineffective?
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - 16bitvoid 4mo ago
    No, they're saying that 80% of genai queries (aka anything sent to an LLM; I won't speak on the validity of the percentage) are not things someone would search on Google. It's things like trial-and-error vibecoding, openclaw-like agentic loops, talking to chatgpt like it's a person, etc. In other words, most genai queries are not for getting "obscure information" or even getting direct information at all. It's about either getting it to do something you don't want to do yourself, or using it as a replacement for someone else (junior dev, therapist, friend, significant other, etc).

bloomca 4mo ago

I agree with your message but not sure about the conclusion. Cars themselves are commodified luxury available (in the US pretty much required) to everyone, and they do need to be subsidized, both in terms of infrastructure and the lifestyle they require. But with AI what is the exact price? My understanding is that R&D is extremely expensive, but running non-SOTA models is not that bad. We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications. Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand?

moritzwarhier 4mo ago
Thanks for asking an open question about my point. First, because I initially failed to answer your more closed questions (this paragraph is edited in): > We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications. Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand? I don't think there's a way around making the best of AI capabilities with minimum price and maximum control, and I'd agree this is met by on-prem data centers, just not in a rationally targeted way. Back to my original comment: Because it (my conclusion) was not so clear, and maybe I just wanted to highlight some observations without delivering a real argument for or against things [, I thank you for your open question]. The utility/leverage aspect for AI seems more esoteric than the one for cars because, apart from Chatbots, it's more hidden. And also, similar to cars (or many other phenomena of industrialization), yes, my first vague point was the subsidization of infrastructure. But also, the power gap: that's something not only associated with AI or cars, but with a lot of technologies we all hold dear: sewage, powerline, logistics, etc etc. What reminds me of cars in the current AI frenzy is the fixation on cementing infrastructure. And also, I think, a lot more people agree on, for example, some kind of universal right to, for example, clean water. But all of industrialization confronts people with questions of efficiency, inequality, and collective support. Most people would, for example, support a right to get a minimum amount of clean water when you are living and working in a tradionally inhabited space (if you're on the social-darwinist side) or at least not harming society (if you're more of a social democrat). And, similar to the buildup of car infrastructure, and the procurement of resources, space etc for maximum building, giant data centers can obstruct people in buying drinking water. Or walking outside (AI obstructs traditional methods of online collaboration).