Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

andymasley.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 337 posts

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#61

Post by petesergeant »

Liquix wrote: post #17

~90% of the plastic debris in the ocean comes from ten rivers [0]. eight are in china/SEA. millions and billions of single-use items are sitting in warehouses and on store shelves wrapped in plastic. even before the plastic is discarded, the factories these items are produced in dump metric tons of waste into the oceans/soil with little repercussion. point is, none of our "personal lifestyle decisions" - not eating m…

This massively lets the Philippines off the hook. China has a gazillion people, and so does India, and the rest of SE Asia is bad for pollution, but the Philippines — with 1.5% of the world’s population — is an incredible 36% of ocean plastic pollution.

Also a call-out to Malaysia who are an upper-middle income country and contribute far too much per capita given their income situation, but again, they are a drop in the ocean compared to the (much, much poorer) Philippines.

Having spent half my life in South-East Asia, there’s a cultural problem that needs fixing there.

A pretty graph that make it clear just how bad the most egregious polluters are comparatively: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ocean-plastic-waste-per-c...

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#62

Post by bitwize »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #57
irishloop wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). If people collectively just ate a bit less meat and dairy, it would go a long way. Don't even have to be perfect. Just show a little bit of restraint.

Right just a little bit of restraint. On an unprecedented scale of coordination by hundreds of millions to billions of people - a scale of cooperation that has probably never occurred in human history (and there's no reason to believe it will any time soon). But sure, if people "just" did a "little", it would go a long way. Just a _little_ restraint from the entire population all at once in perpetuity. No big deal.

You do this through the government. Implement meat rations. Everybody is only allowed so much meat per week. So you have to make it count.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#64

Post by jchw »

bitwize wrote: post #62
throwaway314155 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right just a little bit of restraint. On an unprecedented scale of coordination by hundreds of millions to billions of people - a scale of cooperation that has probably never occurred in human history (and there's no reason to believe it will any time soon). But sure, if people "just" did a "little", it would go a long way. Just a _little_ restraint from the entire population all at once in perpetuity. No big deal.

You do this through the government. Implement meat rations. Everybody is only allowed so much meat per week. So you have to make it count.

I think this might be the first idea I've ever heard that I truly feel will backfire far worse than alcohol prohibition. I almost want to see it happen.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#65

Post by echelon »

bitwize wrote: post #62
throwaway314155 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right just a little bit of restraint. On an unprecedented scale of coordination by hundreds of millions to billions of people - a scale of cooperation that has probably never occurred in human history (and there's no reason to believe it will any time soon). But sure, if people "just" did a "little", it would go a long way. Just a _little_ restraint from the entire population all at once in perpetuity. No big deal.

You do this through the government. Implement meat rations. Everybody is only allowed so much meat per week. So you have to make it count.

> Implement meat rations.

I don't think we can ever be friends.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#66

Post by idle_zealot »

saagarjha wrote: post #35
Liquix wrote: post #17

~90% of the plastic debris in the ocean comes from ten rivers [0]. eight are in china/SEA. millions and billions of single-use items are sitting in warehouses and on store shelves wrapped in plastic. even before the plastic is discarded, the factories these items are produced in dump metric tons of waste into the oceans/soil with little repercussion. point is, none of our "personal lifestyle decisions" - not eating m…

That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work. Americans are about 15% of the world's emissions, of which 25% or so is transportation, of which well over half is cars. So you not driving to work is making direct impact on 2-3% of the world's overall emissions. Likewise, your decisions on all the other things, if taken in aggregate, will have a significant impact on overall…

"Driving to work" is hardly a "vote with your wallet" style consumer choice. Our housing, building, and transportation policies have been geared towards encouraging car-dependence for nearly a century. In places with better public transit and bike lanes, people spontaneously choose to use those modes of transport. Just like with companies dumping as much plastic waste/CO2 as they can get away with, this is a policy problem, plain and simple. No amount of pro-environment metal straw campaigns will solve it. At best environmentally-conscious messaging could encourage changes in voting behavior which influence policy. At worst people could be convinced that they're "doing their part" and fail to consider systemic changes.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#67

Post by llmthrow102 »

irishloop wrote: post #44
saagarjha wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work. Americans are about 15% of the world's emissions, of which 25% or so is transportation, of which well over half is cars. So you not driving to work is making direct impact on 2-3% of the world's overall emissions. Likewise, your decisions on all the other things, if taken in aggregate, will have a significant impact on overall…

Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). If people collectively just ate a bit less meat and dairy, it would go a long way. Don't even have to be perfect. Just show a little bit of restraint.

Greenhouse gas emissions are only a fraction of terrible things that humans are inflicting on the environment, and meat/dairy are both nutritious food that provides requirements for sustenance, and if not eaten need to be replaced by something else that will also cause greenhouse gas emissions (aka, a 10% reduction in meat consumption does not equal to a 1.45% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions)

I think it's kind of crazy to place the burden of environmental destruction on individual buying habits, rather than the people in power who actually have the ability to make sweeping changes that might actually move the needle.

Let's start with not incentivizing, then disincentivizing the mass production and importation of plastic garbage waste and e-waste that not only create greenhouse gas emissions but pollute the environment in other, irreversible ways.

And if your government and leaders don't make this a priority, and regardless of who you vote in, big-name corpo donors get their way instead, then maybe it's time for a new government.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#68

Post by wmf »

scottcha wrote: post #40

Yet we also see that hyperscale cloud emissions targets have been reversed due to AI investment, Datacenter growth is hitting grid capacity limits in many regions, and peaker plant and other non-renewable resources on the grid are being deployed more to handle this specific growth from AI. I think the author, by qualifying on "chatgpt" maybe can make the claims they are making but I don't believe the larger argument…

Voluntary conservation was only working by accident and guilt tripping never works. The grid needs to become clean so that we can have new industries.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#70

Post by strogonoff »

simonw wrote: post #54

The absolute best thing I've read on this subject is this article here: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-generative-ai-the-powe... It talks at great length about data center trends relating to generative AI, from the perspective of someone who has been deeply involved in researching power usage and sustainability for two decades. I made my own notes on that piece here (for if you don't have a half hour to spend…

I find the following to be a great point regarding what we ought to consider when adapting our lifestyle to reduce negative environmental impact:

> In deciding what to cut, we need to factor in both how much an activity is emitting and how useful and beneficial the activity is to our lives.

The further example with a hospital emitting more than a cruise ship is a good illustration of the issue.

Continuing this line of thought, when thinking about your use of an LLM like ChatGPT, you ought to weigh not merely its emissions and water usage, but also the larger picture as to how it benefits the human society.

For example: Was this tech built with ethically sound methods[0]? What are its the foreseeable long-term effects on human flourishing? Does it cause a detriment to livelihoods of the many people while increasing the wealth gap with the tech elites? Does it negatively impact open information sharing (willingness to run self-hosted original content websites or communities open to public, or even the feasibility of doing so[1][2]), motivation and capability to learn, creativity? And so forth.

[0] I’m not going to debate utilitarianism vs. deontology here, will just say that “the ends justify the means” does not strike me as a great principle to live by.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42486481

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549624

Post reply on HN