Turns Out There's Another Problem with AI-It's Environmental Toll | Hacker News Reader

Turns Out There's Another Problem with AI-It's Environmental Toll

theguardian.com

13 pointsikue9 comments

These people would rather stunt humanities growth than come up with alternative energy solutions.

Notice how they always complain but never actually suggest solutions, like setting up more modern nuclear power plants or funding fusion R&D.

No, they are just looking to sell doom and clicks so to them solving the problem would actually put them out of work.

Implying that energy use is by definition environmentally damaging is about as close to a doom cult as you can get.

Yeah it is like Windows shaming users for increasing carbon emissions for using the Performance power setting.

I’ll take you one further. It’s generally understood in economics that the more expensive item generally has higher environmental costs. Which has implications that you can’t really spend your way to a cleaner future. It is a dismal science.

I agree with the first part of what you're saying to an extent - it makes sense that higher monetary cost items have higher costs in general - that's pretty much just describing scarcity.

I don't think your second statement logically follows though, because environmentally damaging costs are not all equal.

As a thought experiment, being able to extract a bunch of X mineral from a 500 mile deep quarry might be both extremely expensive and extremely environmentally damaging in that localised area, but if the mineral can be used to generate a bunch of clean energy or capture carbon or whatever, then in net it can work.

Oh, sure. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I completely agree with the implication that you can't spend your way out to a cleaner future. I mean, you could certainly spend a lot of money today to avoid spending money in the future, which is a category that your example of clean energy could fall into.

I was being slightly tongue in cheek, but what's a little depressing, is that when I look at analysis of things like carbon sequestering, it's really hard to end up carbon positive when factoring everything in. These kinds of things tend to then add credence to the idea that you can't spend your way to a cleaner future.

It would be great if all these people trying to make a career out of sustainability would actually work on solving the problem instead of just complaining about it. The environmental cost of data centers is common knowledge already and the call to action at the end of the article is "idk think about it I guess". Even the scientist they interviewed had no recommendations.

This is the main take away I always get from these types of articles. The question is usually:

    Why is this software using so much energy and by implication having a negative impact on the environment?

and not the more logical:

    Why do we have to pollute so much to produce energy?

We have more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways to produce energy, software that uses energy doesn't care where that energy comes from, so if it's environmentally friendly, great!

> Why do we have to pollute so much to produce energy?

Because sadly in 2023 governments do what makes them popular, instead of just doing what is right.

> Why is this software using so much energy and by implication having a negative impact on the environment?

Because if the problem isn't being solved we have to work round it. That AI puts people out of work is a double whammy.

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