While the mass adoption of AI has transformed digital life seemingly overnight, regulators have fallen asleep on the job in curtailing AI data centers’ drain on energy and water resources.
Against bunker oil shipping, coal power plants, diesel cars, cement, our consumate appetite for plastic, gas and oil based heating, air travel, cooling buildings to 19 C when the outside is 38 C, ammonia based fertiliser, fast fashion, maintaining perfect green lawns in desert environments, driving monster trucks with one passengers on 18-lane highways, dismantling public transport, building glass skyscrapers with no external shade, buying new TVs every second year etc etc I think AI’s reputation as a carbon emitter, especially considering most of Azure, CG and AWS runs on renewables, is overblown and used as a battering ram in a larger battle that comes from very real concerns about how AI is changing our society.
if each of those contributors to wrecking our planet points to the other causes as a justification to not limit their own damage, we’re fucked
it’s not AI. It’s large language models. Glorified statistical text prediction without any originality. It just appears to some naive humans as original because it regurgitates ideas to them that other people have had but they just hadn’t heard before
despite the misnaming, I agree that there’s a real concern that it makes the majority of users even more stupid than mankind on average already is :/
Against bunker oil shipping, coal power plants, diesel cars, cement, our consumate appetite for plastic, gas and oil based heating, air travel, cooling buildings to 19 C when the outside is 38 C, ammonia based fertiliser, fast fashion, maintaining perfect green lawns in desert environments, driving monster trucks with one passengers on 18-lane highways, dismantling public transport, building glass skyscrapers with no external shade, buying new TVs every second year etc etc I think AI’s reputation as a carbon emitter, especially considering most of Azure, CG and AWS runs on renewables, is overblown and used as a battering ram in a larger battle that comes from very real concerns about how AI is changing our society.
Yeah definitely believing that