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Comment by amjnsx | Hacker News Reader

Will we see as much outrage about this as Bitcoin has received about its supposed energy use?

I'm sure there will be some, but even if one takes most of the AI claims as exaggerated, current machine learning is orders of magnitude more useful than bitcoin ever was.

I suspect so. I've been seeing increasing amounts of outrage about it over the last several weeks, anyway.

This is the wrong moment in history to dramatically ramp up our power usage. We need to be doing the opposite of that, and we've already had a few big ramp-ups over the last several years.

Disagree, now is the best time to be increasing energy production and expenditure — it is the hallmark of development of a civilization. Using less energy means the stagnation of our civilization.

How are we going to advance our technology without spending more energy?

The scale of energy usage today are fractions of what it will be in 20, 50, 100 years…

We must build big, build now.

The problem is that increasing energy usage has environmental repercussions. Until we figure out how to deal with that, increasing energy usage strikes me as being extremely self-destructive.

> How are we going to advance our technology without spending more energy?

Ignoring the question of whether or not advancing our technology should be our top priority, how are we going to do that if we keep pushing the world into a state that is hostile to human life?

Hopefully. Internet as it is is bad enough power wise for very little extra utility compared to some less bloated setup.

How many office buildings could an AI datacenter replace? I think the offices would use many times more power and water.

Dunno but I believe the power of using LLMs to turn the light off and on might outweight much of the gains. No clue about proportions.

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