Handling food waste is another issue.

Climate related shortage are coming soon for us (at the moment they only manifest as punctual price hikes - mustard a few years ago, coffee and chocolate more recently, etc...

https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/02/13/goodbye-gouda-and-...

https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/adverse-climatic-conditi...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/noelfletcher/2024/11/03/how-cli...

I don't know if the electricity going into compute centers could be put to better use, to help alleviate climate change impacts, or to create more resilient and distributed supply chains, etc...

But I would not say that this is "not a problem", or that it's completely obvious that allocating those resources instead to improving chatbots is smart.

I understand why we allocate resource to improving chatbots - first world consumers are using them, and the stock markets assume this usage is soon going to be monetized. So it's not that different from "using electricity to build radios / movie theater / TVs / 3D gaming cards, etc... instead of desalinating water / pulling CO2 out of the air / transporting beans, etc...

But at least Nvidia did not have the "toupet" to claim that using electricity to play Quake in higher res would solve world hunger, as some people claim:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2024/05/03/sam-altma...