Despite the typical complaints about "X new thing harming the environment!!!", LLMs are as friendly as it gets, it

1. Consumes a minor amount of electricity (Data centers is only 2% of US electricity use, and currently AI is maybe only 5-10% of that). Its trivial compared to say metal smelting.

2. Consume water for cooling.

That's it, there is 0 direct pollution generated from AI, and even the water use is very minor compared to say farming, and can be improved via more water efficient cooling techs.

The main concern is the scaling speed. As LLMs scale up 10x, 100x, 1000x, those previously very minor electricity costs can quickly become grid impacting in a decade.

I can't buy this kind of argument anymore. How about the external effect of AI steering the entire semiconductor industry to increase GPU/NPU capacity?

This kind of argument is actually totally valid. But only if you subscribe to the current meta of widely accepted handwaving.

Externalities are never a part of capitalist math. Non-trivial consequences can never hurt if one never looks further than their own nose.

> we are only talking about $16-50k for electricity, that seems pretty small

I suppose this depends greatly on how you view the utility of LLMs. In a capitalist sense, sure—there's great utility here persuading VCs to part with their coins and jobs to be replaced with correspondingly larger profit margins. But the opportunity cost of not solving major problems most of humanity can agree on seems nearly incalculably large. Not that capitalists give a shit.

This is a process of exploring new technology. Research is expensive and probably doesnt always yield immediate returns, but when it does you get infinite returns.

Imagine how not obvious the first machines must have seemed at the start of the industrial revolution. You only have to feed a man and he can work, but a machine requires iron, oil, water, fuel, engineers, operators. The up front cost for exploring early digging machines must have been absurd. And im sure some people at the time thought: "Wow we could be spending this money on bread for the poor instead."

Arent you glad we didnt.

If we had spent the money on bread for the poor instead, we wouldn't be facing an existential threat created by our lack of understanding of the consequences of our actions, and our collective inability to respond to that effectively.

Consider the world before industry...

You really want to have 10 kids and have 50% or more of them die before 10 years old? You want a world before penecillin and antibiotics? No computers? No travel. Women getting marrried off at 15 immediatly pregnant. Most of the world in absolute poverty. Destroyed by a single bad season. Mass famines, plagues, tribal warfare that sweeps over your village. No clean water and soap. malnutrition.

These are just non problems for huge portions of the planet now.

What if investing in AI tech like LLMs eventually allows knowledge workers to be more productive with fewer resources, and therefore ultimately frees up more people to focus on the so-called major problems?

Maybe we can invest more human hours in speeding up the path to zero emissions and energy abundance, or re-planting deserts, or cleaning up forever chemicals / microplastics, or helping at-risk kids, etc etc.

not disagreeing, but sidenote, many of the issues causing the human issues may be semi orthogonal to the level of technology going forward. We already have enough resources for the poor amd hungry and homeless. Its behavioural issues we dont know how to fix. How to bootstrap a crackhead into a bank teller, so to speak.

i hope the bottom 10% rung on a dyson sphere society doesnt just look like hungry homeless people, but on a space station.

> Its behavioural issues we dont know how to fix

Or how to tax labor no greater than capital.

Or view quality education and healthcare for children, and keeping their parents out of survival mode, as a much better investment for everyone, than funding the adventures of overly war happy presidents.

I am enthusiastically agreeing with you. Behavioral changes at the top and bottom of society are most of the problem - not tech.

I live in japan and they have implemented what you are requesting. ive recently been to a relatives house here where they live off government handouts despite having jobs. the government pays the woman for having children. as you can imagine this is a perverse incentive. She and her four ish children have jobs. Despite collectively having more than 100k a year to work with, they live in essentially a dirty crack house with a toilet that hasnt worked for years. They fight over money and emotionally blackmail family to get 1-10k dollars at a time, and never pay it back.

Being poor like this is not a money problem. Its a behaviour problem.

You cant fix this by giving them money. They just spend it on alcohol and cigarettes.

Having interacted with them I know they arent obviously stupid and they are educated. My wife attended the same strict japanese school. Very high quality compared to an average american school, they made it up through calculus as high schoolers. She still remembers reiman sums 15 years later.

Your current perception of the world isnt quite right. It sounds like youve got this magic fix in your head, but in reality it just wouldnt work. Youre ignoring the thing you profess to actually care about... the people.

> Behavioral changes at the top and bottom of society are most of the problem

(Added emphasis)

I agree with everything you say, lots of irresponsible people and culture. But that isn't the whole story.

The wealthy and asset owners also tilt the economy toward themselves and away from labor and the less wealthy in many ways.

Poor outcomes for young individuals do have strong correlations, with strong causal support, to low income districts with poor health and education resources, poor safety, and poverty level parents. That is a circular problem created by treating the education, health, and safety of children as a "local" issue, instead of what it obviously is, a national issue.

Also, housing is a problem for many working people, while the rich magnify the problem by using the limited availability of real estate as a useful financial instrument to park money, making profitable returns based on exclusivity and productive economic growth elsewhere which increases further investment in land, even if the land is underutilized.

This is due to the perverse incentive of taxation on total land and development value instead of just the land. (Development on land should be encouraged, not taxed. Other developent and property isn't "wealth" taxed. Whereas, the underlying land is limited, so taxing those who make it unavailable for others is a community neutral bargain - and makes the underutilization of land unprofitable.)

This goes on and on ... regulation capture, use of personal loans against personal property give wealthy asset owners liquidity events that fund high lifestyles without any taxes associated with it, taxes on labor that increase beyond tax rates on capital and for corporations, etc.

The rich and asset ownership classes use government policy to actively tilt things there way, on the backs of those who's primary "asset" is their labor value, throughout society.

Facing unbearable heat, Qatar has begun to air-condition the outdoors :

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/world/climate-e...

I feel like we trying to optimize what we measure. No such measurements happen for other industries. How much does Las Vegas use electricity for the extravagant display of lights, water shows and so on.