The environmental impact of answering a question on an obscure topic with ai model is less than an the impact of answering the question with an hour-long google search hunting for references or a drive to the public library.
Neither did I want to say that a car is always more wasteful than some alternative.
But defaulting to the behemoth is inefficient, unless everyone is driven to do it: then it's in some way reasonable.
By adding "corrupt" and "dependent", as well as the economic terms, I wanted to offer a broader critique and create an analogy, not just talk about energy usage on its own.
What I had in mind was: it's easier to go many places that are a mile or less from me, by car. Because everything is obstructed by cars. And I'm atrophied by lack of movement. Best would be to drive somewhere to move/walk.
People already do that in masses.
And doing shopping by car, because everything else seems unbearable, also takes away your time, apart from wasting energy compared to more, smaller shops that would be reachable by foot, bycicle etc.
I guess you know the argument.
Today, people's thinking atrophies because their LLM is probably right in their summarization of some Wikipedia article, plus 2-3 other random sources.
Or so.
Using the Wikipedia search function is not expensive.
But, I mostly had a bigger picture in mind than what is the cost of inference.
I am concerned about the environmental impacts that AI poses, but they don't seem to me to be so catastrophic. Solar and battery tech has made enormous leaps in the past couple decades, and we will need to pivot to clean energy future irrespective of AI.
*This said, I have become gradually more alarmed over the past decade at the lack of epistemological rigor in the general public, as made apparent through the rise of social media. I don't know that AI becoming a truth-seeking crutch for people wouldn't be more good than bad.
Oh my god, no. I also want the benefits of automobiles! They are strictly more capable than, say, trains. That's where I would derail the discussion completely when going into details, but no, I am not against cars as a technology.
Apart from all the ethical and social arguments (logistics, ambulances, the elderly, etc etc). But that's not where I wanted to go.
I was making a leap here simply because of the whole complex around prisoner's, dilemma, the commons, state economy, and so forth.
Since at least ~100yrs ago, I guess cars and streets as the primary mode of transportation have also "won the vote" / are what the majority wants, so it's also an interesting analogy for diminishing returns maybe.
Building out more car infrastructure is certainly not controversial where there is absolutely none but there are commercial or residential buildings.
Anyway, lots of associations are worth considering here IMO. The ultimate limiting capacity here, when disregarding all environmental or health concerns, is simply space and the positive externalities (cities etc) around existing infrastructure.
> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing...
> we make everything else in the world worse in order to maximize the profit
> destroying the planet for data centers
Hand wringing about AI datacenter's environmental impact is well and good. We should keep the data centers accountable for their consumption and waste.
I just wish the same people had been upset the last 20 years with poor water resource management in a lot of areas (the west US especially) with urban, ranching and farming development.
> That's true, and I am not anti-AI.
Me neither!
80% of generative AI queries wouldn't even exist as google searches.
I awe at the capabilites of generative AI.
I also enjoy sitting in or driving a car.
I did not want to make a moral argument, unless you consider each and every form of utilitarianism as moralism.
One claim of the parent comment was that AI is ineffective. For the purpose of finding answers to questions, it is more resource-efficient than the alternatives, and, to your point, capable of answering questions that were impossible to answer via other means before. In what way is that ineffective?
If we want to get really pedantic, every generated token is the answer to the query: what's the next most probable token in this sequence of tokens?
When I post this http request containing this reply, you could say my machine is querying the server to ask "what did you do with the message I just gave you", but then query stops having any useful semantic value to distinguish it from "request"
Regardless, this is tangential. I don't disagree that a lot of LLM use is not in pursuit of knowledge, but enough of it is for me to think that preferring LLMs not to exist is a hard position to defend, at least without making the case for existential doom.