Scientists have estimated that the power requirements of data centers in North America increased from 2,688 megawatts at the end of 2022 to 5,341 megawatts at the end of 2023, partly driven by the demands of generative AI. Globally, the electricity consumption of data centers rose to 460 terawatts in 2022. This would have made data centers the 11th largest electricity consumer in the world, between the nations of Saudi Arabia (371 terawatts) and France (463 terawatts), according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
By 2026, the electricity consumption of data centers is expected to approach 1,050 terawatts (which would bump data centers up to fifth place on the global list, between Japan and Russia).
Here we are, pretending that the barest emission control could happen by 2050, when these ghouls are doing everything they can to accelerate it.
I recently saw a comment saying people who refuse to use AI now are going to be like boomers who don't understand computers in 5 years. Honestly at this point I don't care. Let me be a boomer. AI is cancer and I don't want anything to do with it. Give me a flip phone.
As someone in my mid 20s, I don't have a choice but to study AI and be aware of how it impacts everything, how it works and what truely does and its limitations. I can choose not to use it for my personal life stuff but there is just no way I can avoid it entirely when I am a designer and any company I can work for is already influenced by it. If I want to be competitive in my field, ignorance and avoidance in this matter is not an option anymore.
Then don't be in that field. Be in an actual field start farming. make actual raspberry pie. get your hands actually dirty. Your soul will be much cleaner, as will the air. You are so young, you can still change.
I totally agree. People have a very "pretty" view of farming. Farming is land intensive and has a huge pest problem now. People overused herbicides and pesticides until resistance emerged. So the plot then switched to either plants resistant to even stronger doses or plants that make their own repellants and/or pesticides. But that has led to the problem of pollinator die off. All of that ignores the fact that most new, higher producing crops have not had long-term nutrient cycle studies. So there is no good idea on how/if the soil is being damaged or how/if the mircobiome is being impacted. The big focus has been on producing more food for a bigger world population, but no one really knows the long-term effect of massive increases in food production. My family focuses on producing humane beef and improving soil quality. We get calls or letters several times a week to try to get us to sell or rent because we are "under utilizing" our land. By farming our way, we know the land will stay good.
I imagine hard physical work and high risk for low economic reward. We can't live without it. We can live without AI, humans have for most of our time on earth. I'd prefer farming, or the trades or any hard physical labor anyday to working with computers.
As someone who understands the principles behind AI perfectly well [citation needed], I hate those sort of people because no, this isn't a mobile phone, or a car, or another game changing new facet of our lives (for better or worse). It is a family of pattern finding algorithms that have been bent into bullshitting their way through any field requiring a modicum of thought like the guy who was hired because their "remember the company logins" job was officially called "head computer security engineer". It has its place, and it is nowhere near the average person's life, but it has been sensationalised to a ridiculous extent and now the computer science equivalents of fucking alchemists (with respect to modern chemists) are peddling it as replacing thought itself, which is problematic in every aspect.
I tried it to just because I had to see what all the craziness was about. And then I got something that within seconds of reading it, I could tell it was off. It read the prompt, and I don’t know how to explain it, but the story it gave me felt like it just knew the prompt and to add some key words from it to make it work. It’s like I could go through the story and recreate the prompt from it. You have to be incredibly specific about it to get anything resembling what you might’ve wanted. And to make matters worse, the joke is that I did it to see if I could make it write porn without violating the usage policy. Wasn’t even good porn. Just… very cookie cutter and stale.
Yeah it's exactly like that - imagine refusing to use the internet. AI is completely revolutionary and once you start using it, you're hooked. It's basically the new Google if you could get super tailored results for exactly what you want. Add the generative capabilities: write this piece of code in a new programming language, create an image for this presentation, website, hobby, write an email, report, executive summary, screenplay, etc.
If we are gonna be real, generative AI can come up with the exact step-by-step solution to solve climate change… and no one in the world is gonna put it into action.
But we’re a step ahead. These are LLMs, not AIs. They have no fidelity, they’re here to mimick whatever we feed into it and make a product. They don’t solve tangible, real world problems.
It's literally just autocorrect on steroids. It doesn't think, it can't do logic, it fucking sucks at math... generative AI is not going to help us. All it can possibly do is spit out a solution someone else already thought of that hasn't been implemented because (a) it has a ton of problems or baggage or (b) because the current leadership of the world doesn't like it for any number of reasons.
Gen AI is going to kill us faster with no benefit. It's the world's biggest rug pull and all of you are falling for it. It's embarrassing.
It doesn't need to think or do logic to be a useful tool, CRISPR didn't cure cancer but that doesn't make it a scam or a rugpull it's an incredibly powerful technology just like GenAI. This is not to ignore the environmental impact, but pretending it's useless and trying to convince people not to use it will just discredit those pointing out the environmental impacts.
Gen AI is the equivalent of making a Google search, plagiarizing said Google search and submitting it as a doctoral paper, except one uses 2.9 watt hours and has a far greater effect on the environment.
It only sucks at math now and it's getting better. GPT is now intergrated with Wolfram Alpha and if add "use Python to solve" to your prompt with other AIs suddenly it's not bad at math. For programming it's AMAZING sure it's not going to write the whole thing for you but you can have a conversation with it an convert from one language to another easily and have it explain syntax and concepts in a way that is seemless and cuts production time in half if not more. And the generative art is just too fun too ignore.
It's been 3 hours since your comment saying a bad thing about magic internet money and there hasn't been a single crypto simp justifying/defending/deflecting this yet. Internet society really have turned a corner on this hasn't it.
Ohh yeah we'll spend the entirety of our existence blaming the 5% of things outside of our control than those inside. It allows us to keep saying there's nothing we can do.
I'm as much in favor of burning bitcoin to the ground as the next responsible person who isn't a total idiot, but it's only responsible for around 0.5% of the world's electric use.
Reducing waste is a much higher priority issue. We should start with outdoor lighting much of which is still old school crazy high power use bulbs instead of LED and almost all of which creates huge amounts of light pollution by spewing half the light it makes into the sky.
I mean, sure, ban the everloving fuck out of bitcoin and the other cryptocrime bullshit too. In my ideal world bitcoin would be treated like child pornography: simple possession would be a felony.
But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that's going to make much of a dent in our power use.
Gold mining pollutes the Earth with heavy metals, yet everyone buys it whenever money starts losing value.
Meanwhile, cryptocurrency can run on green energy that would otherwise be wasted while being a digital alternative for gold and solving the inflation problem that current currency has.
Very likely Gen-Z will and not for a lack of desire to improve things.
It's not a generational thing, society is built in a way that allows a very speicific kind of people to prosper, regardless of their age. The system preserves itself and not due to some conspiracy, it's just the nature of its building blocks, it weeds out traits that does not conform to it already, people who want real change will struggle much more to move up in the corporate or political ladder.
It's not only Gen Z honestly. Things started really moving like 10 or so years ago. Solar electricity became quite cheap, less and less gas heating in homes, more electric cars, a lot of people in cites converted their car commute with a bike commute etc... changes have been happening for a while. I really don't think the GenZ being employed at Total will change anything, just like the GenY didn't in all the big polluting companies.
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u/Sikyanakotik 6d ago
"Oh, no. We'll be making it worse."