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Comment by aaronsimpson | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago at an AI conference (might've been NeurIPS), there was a paper on considering environmental impact as an important facet in AI safety/responsibility. I've been thinking about it for a long time, and this only makes me think more. At what point do we consider carbon emissions relative to compute as a valid concern?

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Compute going carbon neutral is largely the same as the electric grid going carbon neutral. So IMO, it’s not worth focusing on specifically in the long term.

Something about environmental problems causes people to focus on vary narrow types of harm rather than the major ones like habitat destruction. Domestic cats kill ~5 orders of magnitude more birds than windmills, yet somehow bird strikes of windmills is in the public continuous. I think it comes down to the inability to really grasp the difference between large numbers combined with specific harms used as distractions.

+1 to this. I only recently learned that concrete/cement production is major factor of co2 emission that significantly bigger than a meat production for example. Sounds like modifying this production method is more effective way to fight global warming than me start to be vegetarian.

The impact of meat on global warming is mostly through methane, not CO2. So comparing its CO2 emissions to concrete industry CO2 emissions is not an appropriate comparison, you should compare "CO2-equivalent of all meat-related greenhouse gases" to the CO2 emitted by concrete industry CO2.

See https://computingwithinlimits.org/2021/ , https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10597

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