- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/32465427
Datacentres consume just 1% of the world’s electricity but may soon demand much more. Their share of US electricity is projected to more than double to 8.6% by 2035, according to BloombergNEF, while the IEA projects datacentres will account for at least 20% of the rich world’s growth in electricity demand to the end of the decade.
“This idea that the lower cost of renewables alone will drive decarbonisation – it’s not enough,” said Daly. “Because if there’s a huge source of energy demand that wants to grow, it will land on these stranded fossil fuel assets.”
Tech companies have resisted pressure to provide detailed data on their AI energy footprints,
The IEA estimates that AI could boost technically recoverable oil and gas reserves by 5% and cut the cost of a deepwater offshore project by 10%. Big oil is even more bullish. “Artificial intelligence is, ultimately, within the industry, going to be the next fracking boom,” Mike Sommers, head of the American Petroleum Institute, told Axios.
At the same time, the oil and gas industry says AI can cut its carbon intensity, for instance by analysing satellite data to spot methane leaks. But even here, critics say there is a gap between digital insights and corporate actions.
Shew, what a headline. Keep in mind that AI is not just all LLM. I’m not sure how much more juice we can squeeze out of LLMs, but we’re just scratching the surface with other prediction models.
The ability to have smart cars that improve fuel efficiency by adjusting to traffic conditions may very well compensate for the increased electricity demand created by data centers.
New chemistry models may finally help us produce batteries that can meet the demands of a renewable energy grid.
We’re standing at a precipice. What we’re doing as a society is not working today - it’s not sustainable. And I’m not shy to say that I’m one of the few here on ActivityPub that think we may be able to leverage AI to dig us out of this hole we’ve started to dig ourselves in. But, in order to do that, we need clear heads, with clear goals and the incentives to encourage others to execute on them.
What we’re doing right now, just complaining about what’s not working isn’t going to save us.
That just reads mindblowingly stupid for me after only one semester of the “automatic guidance of trains” subject with a few simple methods of numeric optimization. And I wasn’t studying very well, to say the least.
The rest of what you write feels as if you’d missed the whole “digital computer” thing and what it already allows us to do since 1970s and that is being done since 1970s.