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Comment by holyra | Hacker News Reader

what about the environmental impact of AI, especially agentic AI? I keep reading praise for AI on the orange site, but its environmental impact is rarely discussed. It seems that everyone has already adopted this technology, which is destroying our world a little more.

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The environmental impact of AI replacing a human programmer is orders of magnitude lower than the environmental impact of that programmer. Look up average US water consumption and CO2 emissions per capita.

And then add on top the environmental impact of all of the money that programmer gets from programming - travels around the world, buying large houses, ...

If you care about the environment, you should want AI's replacing humans at most jobs so that they can no longer afford traveling around the world and buying extravagant stuff.

So you mean that human programmers who were replaced by AI are dead by now?

"You'll be fine digging trenches, programmer", they said.

Seriously, though:

...so that they can no longer afford traveling around the world...

This is either a sarcasm I failed to parse, or pure technofascism.

on top of that for sure all programmers AI is replacing are all extravagantly traveling around the world (especially ones in America that make the most dough and 90% do not have a passport)

Yes the environmental impact of an AI agent performing a given task is lower. However we will not simply replace every programmer with an agent: in the process we will use more agents exceeding the previous environmental impact of humans. This is the rebound effect [0].

Your reasoning could be effective if we bounded the computing resources usable by all AI in order to meet carbon reduction goals.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

>The environmental impact of AI replacing a human programmer is orders of magnitude lower than the environmental impact of that programmer. Look up average US water consumption and CO2 emissions per capita.

The programmer will continue to exist as a consumer of those things even if they get replaced by AI in their job.

But he will no longer have that much money to spend on environment damaging products.

this is genocidal, on a human-wide scale.

Environment impact is overstated. If you've ever looked at the numbers vs your daily carbon impact, you'd realize this.

I believe the orange site's consensus was that it's approximately one additional mini fridge or dish washer worth of consumption on average. You've got users who use these tools barely 1k tokens per week. Assuming it's all batched ideally that's like running an LED floodlight for a minute or so. The other end of the spectrum can be pretty extreme in consumption but it's also rare. Most people just use the adhoc stuff.

All environmental impacts are equal, but some of them are more equal than the others!

This comes from a dystopian book (Animal Farm). What is your point?

If you read the book, my point should be crystal clear - that environmental impact which aligns with The Party goals (shareholder profits) the best, is painted the least concerning of all.

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