Poll shows Americans are increasingly alarmed by AI's ecological footprint
aljazeera.com
aljazeera.com
where's the outrage? there is lower hanging fruit with more return on effort
But I think a better question is, why aren't the Chinese increasingly alarmed by AI data centers and their impact on the environment? Or are they?
Some other initiatives that incline me to believe the CCP has an amount of care and concern for their people are the trash incinerator build out and the health care ambitions. Generally speaking though, on average, the non-West countries seem far more optimistic about the future with Ai than we do.
Sure but decades will leave them very very very very far behind in the AI race so they'll still have to experience price increases before then. Plus even if they do build capacity that has cost that has to be recouped somehow.
one "very" for every month?
They are deploying renewables on a scale that is hard to fathom, they have plenty of electricity across all sources for Ai, EVs, and Robots. What they aim to be is fully renewable (no fossil fuels) within a couple of decades
No, you missed the point and you're now conflating AI capability with infrastructure cost.
they are already ahead on both fronts as well as have the lower costs and deployment times for new energy creation, transmissions, and battery storage, in short, they are crushing it on energy infra
If you need water for example for data center cooling no amount of renewable energy is going to change that (I'm speaking generally, of course you could cool more efficiently or use something else), and so as China continues to build more and more as they are today they will also see impacts related to energy cost and environmental impact just like anywhere else in the world. It may manifest slightly differently, but even if Chinese energy production costs were half of what they are in the US it still costs money to build those things and you can't run them at a loss, well you can and China might, but we saw how that turned out in the housing market most recently.
My comment about building stuff decades out is that there is an intersection (imagine a graph with two lines trending in the same direction but with different slopes) where you have to increase performance to keep up, America is doing that at high cost as you can see, and so China will have to build more and build more now to keep up with scaling (there are so many underlying assumptions for these conversations it's hard to even talk about it) which will then raise energy prices and have environmental effects now, not later.
I'd recommend reading what someone is writing and engaging with that. It's a good thing to do.
you are missing important facts and say the things about China that are common to say but untrue, i.e. a trope
Bad example and not at all relevant here in any context, let's set that aside.
> we are typically not in the position to judge our own tropes
In that case you can't recognize these tropes because you yourself would be entrenched in your own trope of recognizing tropes where they don't exist.
If you don't want to talk about this topic that's totally fine, but this other stuff is super boring.
this is asking (rhetorically), for those who care about the environmental impacts of human activity (like I do), why not put that energy towards more fruitful targets? Why get so outraged at one thing, but not the things that are worse?
I do think we need to regulate data center operations, but it is nowhere near as bad as the worst offenders. I suspect the answer to my questions here are that this is the first time Americans have felt like they are being heard in a long time, so everyone is doubling down, regardless of bigger pictures.