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Comment by macleginn | Hacker News Reader

‘Sustainability: The use of AI must be assessed with the goal of mitigating environmental and social risks and enhancing CERN's positive impact in relation to society and the environment.’ [1]

‘CERN uses 1.3 terawatt hours of electricity annually. That’s enough power to fuel 300,000 homes for a year in the United Kingdom.’ [2]

I think AI is the least of their problems, seeing as they burn a lot of trees for the sake of largely impractical pure knowledge.

[1] https://home.web.cern.ch/news/official-news/knowledge-sharin... [2] https://home.cern/science/engineering/powering-cern

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Humans have poured resources into the pursuit of largely impractical pure knowledge for millenia. This has been said of an incredible number of human scientific endeavors, before they found use in other domains.

Also, the web was invented at CERN.

All this impractical knowledge people accumulated over centuries gave you cars, planes, computers, air condition, antibiotics, iphones, and, in fact, everything you have when human kind left the trees. So I would rather burn this 1,3 terawatt on this than on, say, running Facebook or bitcoins mining.

That is equivalent to a continuous draw of 150 MW. Not great, not terrible.

Far less power than those projected gigawatt data centers that are surely the one thing keeping AI companies from breaking even.

I presume that this policy is not about building data-centres but about the use of AI by CERN employees, so essentially about marginal cost of generating an additional Python script, or something. Don't know if this calculation ever makes sense on the global scale, but if one’s job is to literally spend energy to produce knowledge, it becomes even less straightforward.

How did that turn into "not great, not terrible"? That's still 300,000 homes that could otherwise be powered. It's an enormous amount of electricity!

And all we get out of CERN is… the entire modern economy.

Their ledgers are balanced just fine for a while.

This is a very silly argument. The energy expended should be justified on its own (scientific!) merits. The fact the web happened to be invented at CERN has almost nothing to do with the fact that they burn through terajoules of electricity every year.

> The energy expended should be justified on its own (scientific!) merits.

Is the scientific merit of such a thing always immediately apparent?

In your opinion, what would instead justify the total cost of devoting 10'000 people's lives to basic research?

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