There's no irony or contradiction here. Some people are worried about climate change. Some aren't. Silly, yes, but I don't see the irony.

The irony is that there seems to be overlap between the two groups-- e.g. highly educated tech workers.

Is there? How are you making that determination?

I would tend to agree with them even without actual data. Just probabilistically there is likely some overlap.

Whether there's enough for calling it irony is probably a different question.

Well fair enough.

i.e. investment bankers in hoodies

These aren't different people. These are the same people. They love AI and they fear climate change, but they don't know the connection.

I disagree.

Datacenters save a lot more energy than they make. Alone how much co2 is saved when i can do my banking online instead of having to drive to a bank is significant.

The same with a ton of ohter daily things i do.

Is video producing co2? yes. But you know what creates a lot more co2? Driving around for entertainment.

And the companies running those GPUs actually have an incentive to be co2 neutral while bitcoin miners don't: They 1. already said they are doing / going co2 neutral due to 2. marketing and they will achieve it becauseh 3. they have the money to do so.

When someone like Bill Gates or Suckerberg say 'lets build a nuclear power plant for AGI' than they will actually just do that.

>Is video producing co2? yes. But you know what creates a lot more co2? Driving around for entertainment

What's more likely, watching a movie online, drive to watch a movie in a cinema?

You know what creates a lot less CO2? Staying at home reading a book vor playing a board game.

>Datacenters save a lot more energy than they make

I think you mean CO2. And I doubt that they actually save anything because datacenters are convenient so we use them more as alternatives with less convenience.

Like the movie example, we watch more and even bad movies if it's just a click on Netflix than we do if we have to drive somewhere to watch.

MS recently announced they fail der CO2 target but instead produce 40% more because of cloud services like AI

Have you checked how much co2 a normal car drive creates vs. watching a movie online?

We need to be realistic here. We know what modern entertainment looks like and its not realistic at all to just 'read books' and play board games.

It is 100% realistic to read books and play board games. Both markets are massive, and board games in particular are having what I would consider a renaissance. Maybe it depends on your crowd, but everybody I know plays tabletop games and reads books.

You're missing the point. What's not realistic is to tell everyone that they should abstain from any type of entertainment that requires power (TV shows, movies, video games, etc) and should only read books and play board games instead. I don't care what kind of renaissance board games are undergoing, most people still only play the mass market classics, and then only rarely.

I don't know how much energy Netflix uses serving a movie, but playing a video game on my PC for two hours where I'm located might generate a kg of CO2. That's about as much as I'll breathe in a day. Relative to other sources of atmospheric CO2 I'm not that concerned.

My issue was with "we know what modern entertainment looks like" as if humans are now incapable of enjoying themselves without a screen. And you should care about a massive market increase when it's directly relevant to the point at hand. If the initial point was "we know what modern entertainment looks like, nobody plays board games or reads books", pointing out that the board game market has more than doubled in the past decade is far from irrelevant. It actually directly counters the point.

I agree with your second paragraph, and selling the "make better choices to save the world" argument is an industry playbook favorite. Environmental damage needs to be put on the shoulders of those who cause it, which is overwhelmingly industrial actors. AI is not useful enough to continue the slide into burning more fossil fuels than ever. If it spurs more green energy, good. If it's the old "well this is the way things are now", that's really not good enough.

AI and ML will help a lot of people and already does. Alpha Fold / protein folding will help us with cancer.

We will have better batterires thanks to ml material research.

We will be able to calculate and optimize everything related to flow like wind.

The last thing we need to optimize is compute and compute is what has the most money anyway. One of the first industries going green is datacenters. Google for example is going green 24/7 (so not just buying solar power but pulling green energy from the grid 24/7 through geo thermy and others).

AI/ML big datacenters are crucial for all the illneses we have which no one cares enough to solve. For example, i have one of these and we need data to make a therapy for this and i'm not alone.

For most of your points it's may not will.

How many battery breaktroughs did we have before AI? They rarely lead to new batteries.

>AI/ML big datacenters are crucial for all the illneses we have which no one cares enough to solve.

Too bad that companies like OpenAI and MS buy most of the hardware for their data centers to write summaries of articles and emails and to create pictures.

And even if they find a cure, doesn't mean it will be available for people in need, not without a hefty fee.

Just look at the profit margin of insulin.

Insulin is a bad example and a good one. A bad one because what happens in the USA is some super weird shit (and it only happened in the USA, thats why USA people drive to canada or mexico). Without insulin though, they wouldn't be alive.

ML on x-ray pictures is super easy technology which partially already is better than x-ray experts. Its not far away to have build in diagonstics or cheap online services. And yes they will reach poorer people than before. It will also allow a lot more people to get better diagnosis.

My sister has a type of blood cancer, she would have been dead by now if research wouldn't have found a solution 13 years ago.

And no MS and OpenAI and google are not just using their DCs to write summeries. They use it to do research. A LOT actually.

And take a look at google ios and the research papers, plenty of medical papers coming from those big companies.

Alpha Folde 2? Changed a lot too

BTW

>Google’s Emissions Shot Up 48% Over Five Years Due to AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40874517

You are missing the point too.

Driving too the cinema to watch a movie produces more CO2 than watch one movie online but online makes it more convenient so you watch more. That sums up to more CO2 emission.

The point is that higher efficency is wortless in terms of CO2 emissions if it leads to higher usage that compensates for the savings.

If a programmer can program faster with AI it's good if he only needs 1 hour instead of 8 but if he still programs 8 hours a day AI's energy consumption comes just on top of his previos consumption.

Climate change doesn't care how efficient you produce more CO2, more is simply more.

I. believe that watching mulitply movies is still a lot more co2 efficient than driving a car to a big independent room, which gets heated and than also shows a movie through a big projector than having a tv running and streaming it from the internet.

But it's realistic that we watch movies online than in cinemas. And don't forget the datacenters of the movies need to run even if no one watches. My car doesn't produce CO2 whe I don't drive.

Datacenters always run because there is always something to do.

For everything else, there are already plenty of energy saving mechanism build into the CPUs, Mainboards, Disks etc. A Datacenter doesn't run on 100% Energy just because the load is reduced.

Point 1, 2 and 3 all apply to miners as well and yet they never delivered on their promise.

The normal miners never said that. They just say this at conferences for simple greenwashing.

The normal miner doesn't go to those bitcoin conferences, they buy asics, put them in some warehouses around the world and make money.

> how much co2 is saved when i can do my banking online instead of having to drive to a bank is significant.

And if the online bank wasn't sending a bunch of requests to a bunch of third party ad networks on every click, it would save even more.

Yes. But what are you implying? Entertainment + ad garbage still is a lot more co2 efficient than printing flyers and sending those out.

I think it's more nuanced than that. I used to walk to my bank, I can't do that any more because many branches closed. The bank now directs all interactions to happen via their app. In terms of emissions (and social interaction, particularly for vulnerable and isolated members of society) I think this is bad news.

But this is a complex calculus and - frankly - feels like a distraction from the issue. I don't want to get into the weeds of calculating micro-emissions of daily activities, I want climate responsibility and reduction in energy consumption across the board.

I did made the point that AI/ml is helping us and the type of energy location and load is much easier to get green than lets say concrete.

We need AI/ML for getting there faster and helping more people around us. Alone for weather simulations but also for medicine, material research for batteries etc.

Don't even get me started with the rant about taking planes.

This is a very limited perspective. There are many parts of the world not beholden to automobiles for transportation. Where I live, I can walk to the bank, and walk or ride a bike to entertainment. The alternative to data centers does not have to be driving an automobile somewhere.

Your bank building has to be maintained and heated. Heating which is added to your use of the local bank.

My perspective is not limited. Just because people live in a city center, doesn't mean that most people do. Open Google Maps and take a look.

I see the bright side, the tech for large scale computing gets mass produced - so all the legit use cases, like scientific simulations, or LLM for productive work, also profit. And if one really bright day humanity evolves beyound the current statd of ad driven everything, we can put all of it to use for real.

Till then, I will probably avoid more and more communicating with strangers on the internet. It will get even more exhausting, when 99% of them are fake.