Open ended crying about electricity doesn’t make sense in the absence of specifics.
A big company like Microsoft probably wasted more money on pentium 4s 15 years ago. Electricity is just another resource - if the numbers work, burn away.
A big company like Microsoft probably wasted more money on pentium 4s 15 years ago. Electricity is just another resource - if the numbers work, burn away.
I know we’re nowhere near the following scenario, this is just to illustrate how things can go wrong even if the numbers tell you to “burn away”:
Image we have computronium with negligible manufacture cost, the only important thing is the power cost to use it.
Imagine you’re using it to run an uploaded mind, spending $35,805/year on energy.
The 50% of Americans earning more than this [0] are no longer economically viable, because their productivity can now be done at the same cost by a computer program.
Doing this with the current power mixture would be disastrous, doing it with PV needs about 1400m^2 per simultaneous real time mind upload instance (depending on your assumption about energy costs and cell efficiency, naturally).
In a more near-term sense, there are plenty of examples where the Nash equilibrium tells each of us to benefit ourselves at the expense of all of us. Not saying that is the case for Deep Learning right now, but can (and frequently does) happen.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but, it turns out we are living in the middle of an ecological catastrophe, and it also turns out that means that electricity is a resource we are going to have to conserve.