I posted a similar topic early today but worded it wrong that was my mistake. I’m genuinely curious how people have reached to this point and what they hope to achieve after. I understand getting rid of AI/LLM is the obvious one. What do you think we should do to get to that goal or your personal goal.
Sounds like you are the one being played.
Transport, food and heating are not required because they are fun or nice to have. They are means to survive.
Energy and water consumption of data centers are different because the product (AI slop and best guesses) is NOT required to survive.
Sorry for existing (not sorry)
Do me a favour. Go look up the energy use per person for me in Germany, Spain, or the UK. Then go look up the energy usage per person in the USA or Canada and tell me again how necessary it is that transport, food, and heating are required energy use at the levels that currently happen in North America. You can repeat that same look from the “good” countries I listed to even lower use areas like Lithuania who still manage to heat and feed themselves on even less.
The way we live here is wasteful beyond belief, and the total value of that waste makes global AI energy usage look like a rounding error on one of the decimal points.
I’ll even make it easy for you by giving you a link to a page that has these values. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
You are still arguing a moot point.
Could and should we, in the western world, be more sustainable? Absolutely yes!
But do you think, that even MORE energy consumption for something as useless and flawed as current AI systems are is in any way justified?
Even if it is just a blip on the radar compared to energy that is used to survive, it is still more load that comes on top of current usage.
How much sense would it make to undertake efforts to reduce the energy that is used to live while at the same time using more energy to power data centers that mostly benefit some guys who bet on the usefullness of AI, even against common sense?
You aren’t allowed to be this upset about AI power usage while at the same time almost completely accepting the individual choices you’re making to waste 100s of times more power. There’s a term for this, Hypocrite.
The scales you’re suggesting are just not even close to each other. We could build 10x more AI datacenters, and we (the population of the world) would still end up saving significantly more energy by eating meat one fewer day per week and eating vegetarian that day instead. I’m not even kidding.
The things we could do by adjusting our diets, choosing more appropriate housing sizes, cohabitating more, walking, biking, public transit. Individually every single one of those dwarfs the amount of energy used by AI by orders of magnitude.
It’s the equivalent of yelling at your kid for leaving the LED bulb on in their bedroom all day, when you drove them to school and picked them up and it’s only a mile away. One driving trip, one day, uses more energy than that bulb does if left on all year.
I am not ‘allowed to be upset’? Lol, ok. Sounds like you see youself as some sort of moral police.
Call me a hypocrite if it makes you feel better but you are just skirting my point that the energy usage of AI is something that is unnecessary, just like the glowing LED lightbulb in your empty kitchen.
This makes you come across as either daft, or as someone who argues in bad faith.
Ever heard the saying “Penny Shy and Pound Foolish”
It’s literally what you’re doing right now.
I did, but please, enlighten me on the foolishness that you see here.
As I did write, I do agree that we as a species need to be more sustainable. But please give me one reason why wasting even more energy on AI is in any way shape or form benefitial.
You are trying to pinch a penny (reduce the power usage for something absolutely tiny) while ignoring your own choices that cause much larger wastes (large detached houses, car culture, meat heavy diets)
If you can’t understand how that’s a problem, your education has failed you.
I think you need to blame your own education, as you cannot seem to have much reading comprehension.
Additionally, you seem hellbent on defending AI without even highlighting its uses, while loading blame on humanity as a whole.
Can our choices help reducing energy usage? And should we tackle those issues? Absolutely!
Is the additional energy usage of AI worth it? Absolutely not!
But I don’t have the time nor the crayons necessary to explain you the world, so let us part ways with the understanding that different people have different views on the topic.
There is a point there, though.
American cars are much less efficient than European ones.
The amount of water required for AI data centres worldwide is more than an order of magnitude lower than the water required for just corn in the US alone. Only a small fraction of which actually gets used for food.
The average energy usage per person in the US is nearly three times higher than someone in the UK.
The environmental cost of data centres is absolutely a concern, but we shouldn’t forget the US alone wastes more energy and resources than are used by data centres worldwide.
I’ll reply to this because I think it fits in refuting your greater point:
No, there isn’t.
I, as a mere peasant, have only the power to vote for a better system. Something I often don’t even have as we have a dualopoly of right wing political parties in America, and probably won’t ever have a fair election again regardless at this point.
The billionaires who are putting up these AI data centers, poisoning our water at unprecedented rates, spiking electricity usage and costs at unprecedented rates, polluting our environment at unprecedented rates, are doing this entirely at their own will. They have the power to create major change. They’re using that power for evil.
This is a false equivalence. Especially when you remember its the same hyper-rich fucks that made America rely on cars, and made our cars inefficient gas guzzlers.
I don’t know what you think my greater point was, maybe you’ve accidentally conflated me with another poster.
My point actually is that these are not unprecedented rates. These are entirely precedented rates. This is gross capitalism destroying the world as gross capitalism always does. What you’ve lost sight of, though, is the respective scale of things.
As I said, the US alone needlessly wastes vastly more energy and water than the entire world’s usage of AI consumes. For energy, it’s several times more, for water it’s orders of magnitude more.
You make out that solving these massive problems is impossible, so instead you’re railing against AI. Which of course is your prerogative, but just remember that there are much bigger wins out there.
When we try to solve any of them, they literally send the military at us. Which is federally illegal, but you know, rules for us, not for them.