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The only realistic way forward is trying to make energy generation greener (renewables, nuclear, better efficiency), not fighting to decrease human consumption.
This being said, I think that the alternatives are wishful thinking. Better efficiency is often counterproductive, as reducing the energy cost of something by, say, half, can lead to its use being more than doubled. It only helps to increase the efficiency of things for which there is no latent demand, basically.
And renewables and nuclear are certainly nicer than coal, but every energy source can lead to massive problems if it is overexploited. For instance, unfettered production of fusion energy would eventually create enough waste heat to cause climate change directly. Overexploitation of renewables such as solar would also cause climate change by redirecting the energy that heats the planet. These may seem like ridiculous concerns, but you have to look at the pattern here. There is no upper bound whatsoever to the energy we would consume if it was free. If energy is cheap enough, we will overexploit, and ludicrous things will happen as a result.
Again, I actually agree with you that advocating for degrowth is hopeless. But I don't think alternative ways forward such as what you propose will actually work.
So the question is, at which point would the aggregate production of enough energy to cause climate change through waste heat be economically feasible? I see no reason to think this would come after becoming "immortal post-humans." The current climate change crisis is just one example of a scale-induced threat that is happening prior to post-humanity. What makes it so special or unique? I suspect there's many others down the line, it's just very difficult to understand the ramifications of scaling technology before they unfold.
And that's the crux of the issue isn't it? It's extremely difficult to predict what will happen once you deploy a technology at scale. There are countless examples of unintended consequences. If we keep going forward at maximal speed every time we make something new, we'll keep running headfirst into these unintended consequences. That's basically a gambling addiction. Mostly it's going to be fine, but...
Using Claude Code during an hour would be more realistic if they really wanted to compare with video streaming. The reality is far less appealing.
I think I was biased by the fact that this argument was used in an HN comment where people tend to be heavy users of LLM based agents.
I have a hard time believing that streaming data from memory over a network can be so energy demanding, there's little computation involved.
The European average is 56 grams of CO2 emissions per hour of video streaming. For comparison: 100 meters to drive causes 22 grams of CO2.
https://www.ndc-garbe.com/data-center-how-much-energy-does-a...
80 percent of the electricity consumption on the Internet is caused by streaming services
Telekom needs the equivalent of 91 watts for a gigabyte of data transmission.
An hour of video streaming needs more than three times more energy than a HD stream in 4K quality, according to the Borderstep Institute. On a 65-inch TV, it causes 610 grams of CO2 per hour.
https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/it-medien/netflix-d...
It's the devices themselves that contribute the most to CO2 emissions. The streaming servers themselves are nothing like the problem the AI data centres are.
It's probably a gigabyte per time unit for a watt, or a joule/watt-hour for a gigabyte. Otherwise this doesn't make mathematical sense. And 91W per Gb/s (or even GB/s) is a joke. 91Wh for a gigabyte (let alone gigabit) of data is ridiculous.
Also don't trust anything Telekom says, they're cunts that double dip on both peering and subscriber traffic and charge out of the ass for both (10x on the ISP side compared to competitors), coming up with bullshit excuses like 'oh streaming services are sooo expensive for us' (of course theyare if refuse to let CDNs plop in edge cache nodes in your infra in a settlement-free agreement like everyone else does). They're commonly understood to be the reason why Internet access in Germany is so shitty and expensive compares to neighbouring countries.
The ecology argument just seems self-defeating for tech nerds. We aren't exactly planting trees out here.
If you tried the same attitude with Netflix or Instagram or TikTok or sites like that, you’d get more opposition.
Exceptions to that being doing so from more of an underdog position - hating on YouTube for how they treat their content creators, on the other hand, is quite trendy again.
I'm not sure about that: The Expanse got killed because of not good enough ratings, Altered Carbon got killed because of not good enough ratings and even then the last seasons before the axe are typically rushed and pushed out the door. Some of the incentives to me seem quite disgusting when compared with letting the creatives tell a story and producing art, even if sometimes the earnings are less than some greedy arbitrary metric.
The point is the resource consumption to what end.
And that end is frankly replacing humans. It’s gonna be tragic (or is it…given how terrible humans are for each other, and let’s not even get to how monstrous we are to non human animals) as the world enters a collective sense of worthlessness once AI makes us realize that we really serve no purpose.
Sources are very well cited if you want to follow then through. I linked this and not the original source because it’s likely the source where root comment got this argument from.
Yeah, I'll not waste my time reading that.
Leaving the source to someone else