The leap in emissions is largely due to energy-guzzling data centers and supply chain emissions necessary to power artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The report estimated that in 2023, Google’s data centers alone account for up to 10% of global data center electricity consumption. Their data center electricity and water consumption both increased 17% between 2022 and 2023.
Google released 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide just last year, 13% higher than the year before.
Climate scientists have shown concerns as Big Tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft continue to invest billons of dollars into AI.
The answer is nuclear power.
Or how about cutting back on the idiotic and venal misuse of poorly-developed AI?
I think it’s unfair to call it poorly-developed, the rush to market it and apply it in every corner is driven entirely by capitalist speculation, the engineers and scientists working on developing these systems are not to blame
Are you happier with “inadequately-developed”?
In both cases I was referring to the fact we’re letting the equivalent of a toddler run amok while being exploited by greedy capitalists and trained by fascists. It’s a very smart toddler but that just makes things worse.
The technology is promising, it’s just not remotely ready for what they’re trying to use it for, and may never be in its current iteration (transformer-based LLMs). Like, yes, an AI will probably eventually be able to read many articles from search and integrate that information together in a useful way, but right now it’s almost as likely to just start making shit up halfway through and tell you to eat glue lmao.
The problem is that AI is the new corporate buzzword like web was back during the dot com bubble. The web did end up being massively successful, but it just wasn’t ready for like 90% of what investors wanted from it back then.
there are still going to be a lot of people who need power though. Cutting the US of AI isn’t going to magically remove coal plants from the grid, it’s going to do nothing actually. We need to be building new plants, period.
We need to be transitioning to zero carbon as fast as possible, period, and even that isn’t good enough. Moderating our energy consumption is vital. There is a cliff at the end of the road and business as usual means driving on down the road.
I am not saying that we need to turn off our lights and heating. I am saying that we first-worlders use a lot of power on frivolous things that we absolutely can live without.
Environmentalism aside, I think it’s shitty that a company can waste so much energy on frivolous things anyway. Even if we were using more nuclear I still wouldn’t want it going to generating more porn of three-breasted women
Or at least not decommissioning old ones. A dollar invested into new solar or wind goes further than new nuclear right now, but we’ll see if it tips more towards nuclear once the grid is a higher percentage intermittent and needs a lot more energy storage with it.
Modular nuclear reactors seem really cool though for replacing large long term generators like at construction or excavation sites.
a lot of older nuclear plants were built in the 70s and 80s and those plants are going to be EOL even with extensions, unless we’re going to extend the lifecycle of those a second time. They should probably be decommissioned, unfortunately.
I obviously don’t know all the cases, but if extending the life a second time is cost comparable to renewables, yes we absolutely should do it.
But by all means, everyone don’t use plastic straws! You’re killing the environment!
Yeah dawg we can’t possibly do two things that are good for the environment, we have to pick one. Everyone knows that.
Plastic straws are harmful to sea turtles. That is why their use has been reduced.
Do you like turtles?
I know this is true, but I find it bizarre that there’s this fixation on straws and not the hundred other things we are likely doing that also kills turtles.
It’s like someone saw that viral video of the turtle with a straw up it’s nose and decided that’s the only thing to focus on.
I bought this like, prepared meal thing. It was like curry or something. Packaged, shelf stable. It harked on eco-friendly packaging. I figured, I’ve gotten curry before that was in a foil bag which I assume is easily recyclable. Probably something like that, right?
Every component was individually plastic wrapped. Even the bowl. Except for the bamboo “spoon”. That was wrapped in paper. I put “spoon” in quotes because it was vaguely spoon shaped and functioned more like an oat from a rowboat.
Like, was this just a piss poor attempt at green washing?
Detractors have that fixation on straws, for the EU legislature it was just another regulation among many.
Also the plastic straw fixation is now kinda fading in favour of attached bottle caps. People will literally lose 50 IQ points and stub their nose to spite Berlaymont instead of rotating the bottle 90 degrees.
So, lets get this straight. Humans are going to die. Animals are going to die. Plants are going to die.
…so that corporations can make a few easier dollars before this whole planet burns in flames?
Yes, corporationS. Plural. What? You think google is the only one using AI?
so that corporations can make a few easier dollars before this whole planet burns in flames?
Sure. But they do that by providing services. Services like Gmail and (probably for a large part) cloud hosting for other companies, companies whose services you’re probably using as well.
And honestly, it usually is more economical (Both financially as well as in eco footprint) for those companies to use cloud services that scale based on demand, rather than having a fixed set of servers running for the potential max capacity.
Don’t get me wrong, increased carbon emissions is bad, but the picture is a bit more nuanced than “Google flip switch, kill animals, get money”.
The AI hype (talk to your toaster!) will blow over, useful AI will remain and improve, this is just a hurdle along the way.
The AI hype (talk to your toaster!) will blow over, useful AI will remain and improve, this is just a hurdle along the way.
I hope so. AI spam causing too much internet noise to the point where we can’t tell which one’s true or not would be one big hurdle.
I agree with everything except that A.I. doesn’t make money and may never solve a problem important enough to justify the cost.
I mean, yeah.
One of the hallmarks of our species is its insatiable, irrational greed.
That’s a hall mark of our civilisation/society, not our species. Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and the vast majority of cultures in that time have been relatively stable, with checks on excessive greed.
(see Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn Of Everything for some good examples.)
No wonder AMZN/MSFT/GOOG have been paying people to fluff nuclear power here and on reddit.
Fucking hell
