You sure? That’s basically all that’s being discussed.
There’s nothing in this article I haven’t heard 100 times before. Open any mainstream news article or HN/Reddit thread and you’ll find all of OP’s talking points about water, electricity, job loss, the intrinsic value of art, etc.
> It's common, if not inevitable, for people who feel strongly about $topic to conclude that the system (or the community, or the mods, etc.) are biased against their side. One is far more likely to notice whatever data points that one dislikes because they go against one's view and overweight those relative to others. This is probably the single most reliable phenomenon on this site. Keep in mind that the people with the opposite view to yours are just as convinced that there's bias, but they're sure that it's against their side and in favor of yours. [1]
Simplified comparisons like these rarely show the full picture [0]. They focus on electricity use only, not on heating, transport, or meat production, and certainly not on the CO2 emissions associated with New York’s airports. As a rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate, a flight from Los Angeles to New York with one seat is on the order of 1,000,000 small chat queries CO2e.
Of course we should care about AI’s electricity consumption, especially when we run 100 agents in parallel simply because we can. But it’s important to keep it in perspective.
[0] https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...
It’s not just being discussed, it’s dominating the conversation on sites like Hacker News. It’s actually hard to find the useful and informative LLM content because it doesn’t get as many upvotes as the constant flow of anti-LLM thought pieces like this.
There was even the strange period when the rationalist movement was in the spotlight and getting mainstream media coverage for their AI safety warnings. They overplayed their hand with the whole call to drop bombs on data centers and the AI 2027 project with Scott Alexander that predicted the arrival of AGI and disastrous consequences in 2027. There was so much extreme doom and cynicism for a while that a lot of people just got tired of it and tuned out.
Mention anything about the water and electricity wastage and embrace the downvotes.
The more interesting questions are about psychology, productivity, intelligence, AGI risk, etc. Resource constraints can be solved, but we’re wrestling with societal constraints. Industrialization created modernism, we could see a similar movement in reaction to AI.
Well, that's just it. Those extentitential risks aren't even proven yet.
Meanwhile, threats to resources are already being felt today. "just overhaul our infrastructure" isn't an actionable solution that will magically fix things today or next week. Even if these don't end up being big problems in the grand scheme of things doesn't mean they aren't problems now.
It's almost like humans evolved from prehistoric times eating meat. Wild discovery, right?
> And we have cheap ways of producing electricity, we just need to overhaul our infrastructure and regulations.
Why don't AI bros lobby the changes? Much harder than selling snake oil and getting rid of programmers, I guess.
Wait until other countries jump in the bandwagon and see energy prices jump.
Currently it is mostly the US and China.
And RAM and GPU prices are already through the roof with SSDs to follow.
That is for now with ONLY the US market mostly.
And those “net benefits” you talk about have very questionable data behind it.
It’s a net loss of you ask me.
RAM and GPU prices going up, sure ok, but again: if you're claiming there is no net benefit from AI what is your evidence for that? These contracts are going through legally, so what basis do you have to prevent them from happening? Again I say its site specific: plenty of instances where people have successfully prevented data centers in their area, and lots of problems come up (especially because companies are secretive about details so people may not be able to make informed judgements).
What are the massive problems besides RAM + GPU prices, which again, what is the societal impact from this?
I spent some time thinking of a better word than "evil" before typing this comment. I can't think of one. Doing something bad that harms more than it helps for the purposes of enrichment and power is simply put: evil.