Hopefully the panic continues and we get a lot of extra electricity, ideally via nuclear, wind, solar - and then if AI is a flop at least we get big progress on global warming.
AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)
11–20 of 124 posts
Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)
#12For humanity to continue increasing the quality of life for more people, more energy is required.
Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)
#13> By contrast, the unglamorous and largely disregarded business of making cement accounts for around 7 per cent of global emissions. Oh, that's not a good example of the point they're trying to make. The emissions from concrete are a point of major concern and are frequently discussed. A ton of effort is being put into trying to reduce the problem, and there are widespread calls to reduce the use of the material as m…
In general there seems to be a big given in the argument that I don't think is obvious:
> At the other end of the policy spectrum, advocates of “degrowth” don’t want to concede that the explosive growth of the information economy is sustainable, unlike the industrial economy of the 20th century.
This seems to imply we all must agree that the industrial economy of the 20th century was sustainable, and that strikes me as an odd point of agreement to try to make. Isn't it just sidestepping the whole point?
Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)
#14“You may not know about the issue but I bet you reckon something, so why not tell us what you reckon. Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad-hoc reckon” - David Mitchell.
Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)
#15> But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy. It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot mo…
Sounds similar to Jevons Paradox
Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)
#16> But far from demanding more electricity personal computers have become more efficient with laptops mostly replacing large standalone boxes, and software improvements reducing waste.
If only it was true, I reckon we’re using multiple-orders of magnitude more computational per $ of business objectives simply because of the crazy abstractions. For example, I know of multiple small HFT firms that are crypto market makers with their trading bots in Python. Many banks in my country have excel macros on top of SQL extensions on top of COBOL. We’ve not reduced waste in software but rather quite the opposite.
I don’t think this is super relevant to the articles point but I think it’s an under discussed topic.
Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)
#17“You may not know about the issue but I bet you reckon something, so why not tell us what you reckon. Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad-hoc reckon” - David Mitchell.
"Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad-hoc reckon, by going to bbc.co.uk… clicking on ‘what I reckon’ and then simply beating on the keyboard with your fists or head."
Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)
#18Sorry for off-topic - is Substack competing with Medium on amount of pop-ups?
Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)
#19For humanity to continue increasing the quality of life for more people, more energy is required.
At the risk of being called a luddite or a carriage driver, does the current iteration of AI actually increase quality of life that much?
Re: AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)
#20> But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy. It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot mo…
If you're using more of it, because it's replacing corporate travel and going into the office and driving across town to see your friends and family and facetiming instead, then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy.
It's not like the majority of electricity use by computers is complete waste.
You can poo-hoo and say I don't want to live in the digital world, and want to spend more time flying around the world to work with people in person or actually see my mom, or buy physical paper in stores that's shipped there and write physical words on it and have the USPS physically ship it, but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient.
If Google didn't exist, who knows how many more books I'd need to own, how much time I'd spend buying those books, how much energy I'd spend going to the stores to pick them up, or having them shipped.
It's almost certainly a lot less than how much energy I spend using Google.
While we all like to think that Facebook is a complete waste of time, what would you be spending your time doing otherwise? Probably something that requires more energy than close to nothing looking at memes on your phone.
Not to mention, presumably, at least some people are getting some value from even the most wasteful pits of the Internet.
Not everything is Bitcoin.