Hacker News Reader

Comment by riskable | Hacker News Reader

I wish people would get off the "AI is the worst thing for the environment" bandwagon. AI and data centers as a whole aren't even in the top 100 emitters of pollution and never will be.

If you want to complain about tech companies ruining the environment, look towards policies that force people to come into the office. Pointless commutes are far, far worse for the environment than all data centers combined.

Complaining about the environmental impact of AI is like plastic manufacturers putting recycling labels on plastic that is inherently not recycleable and making it seem like plastic pollution is every day people's fault for not recycling enough.

AI's impact on the environment is so tiny it's comparable to a rounding error when held up against the output of say, global shipping or air travel.

Why don't people get this upset at airport expansions? They're vastly worse.

View on HN

The answer to that is simple: They hate AI and the environment angle is just an excuse, much like their concern over AI art. Human psychology is such that many of these people actually believe the excuse too.

It helps when you put yourself in the shoes of people like that and ask yourself, if I find out tomorrow that the evidence that AI is actually good for the environment is stronger, will I believe it? Will it even matter for my opposition to AI? The answer is no.

> The answer is no.

You don't know that. I don't know about you (and whatever you wrote possibly tells more about yourself than anyone else), but I prefer my positions strong and based on reality, not based on lies (to myself included).

And the environment is far from being the only concern.

You are attacking a straw man. For you, being against GenAI, simply because it happens to be against your beliefs, is necessarily irrational. Please don't do this.

> I prefer my positions strong and based on reality, not based on lies (to myself included).

Then you would be the exception, not the rule.

And if you find yourself attached to any ideology, then you are also wrong about yourself. Subscribing to any ideology is by definition lying to yourself.

Being able to place yourself into the shoes of others is something evolution spent 1000s of generations hardwiring into us, I'm very confident in my reading of the situation.

> Subscribing to any ideology is by definition lying to yourself.

What a bold claim.

An ideology is a set of beliefs, principles or values. Having beliefs, principles or values is not lying to oneself.

Keeping beliefs despite being confronted to pieces of evidence that negate them is.

And yes, of course I'm attached to some ideologies. I assume everybody is, consciously or not.

Also, you might want to double-check what "by definition" means, nothing in the definition of ideology reads "concerns people lying to themselves".

> Then you would be the exception, not the rule.

Citation needed. And if you can't back this up, the claim is just your intuition. A belief. Which is not worth much to us.

> Having beliefs, principles or values is not lying to oneself.

The lie is that you adopted "beliefs, principles or values" which cannot ever serve your interests, you have subsumed yourself into something that cannot ever reciprocate. Ideology by definition even alters your perceived interests, a more potent subversion cannot be had (up to now, with potential involuntary neural interfaces on the horizon).

> Citation needed

I will not be providing one, but that you believe one is required is telling. There is no further point to this discussion.

I can't make any sense of your first paragraph. And again, please look up "by definition".

> I will not be providing one, but that you believe one is required is telling

Telling what? That you have the burden of proof?

Suit yourself though.

> There is no further point to this discussion.

I'm afraid I agree with you here. Good day / good night.

People are allowed to reject whatever they want, I'm sorry that democracy is failing you to make slightly more money while the rest of society suffers.

I'm glad people are grabbing the reigns of power back from some of the most evil people on the planet.

Of course they aren't polluters as in generating some kind of smoke themselves. But they do consume megawatts upon megawatts of power that has to be generated somewhere. Not often you have the luxury of building near nuclear power plant. And in the end you're still releasing those megawatts as heat into the atmosphere.

> Why don't people get this upset at airport expansions?

We do too, don't worry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com