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US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

theguardian.com

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Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#251

Post by nDRDY »

BizarroLand wrote: post #207
nDRDY wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too controversial now, but one day we will recognise the current narrow-minded obsession with CO2 as the Western civilisation-wide doomsday cult that it is.

I think this is literally the most head in own ass stupid thing I've ever read on the internet.

Quite the opposite - I'm asking people to take a wider view of the changes that humankind is making to the planet. Given those changes, a viewpoint that concludes with people asking for vast numbers of trees to be cut down, burned (or charred, at least), and buried has some fundamental problems.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#252

Post by nDRDY »

mrguyorama wrote: post #208
dathinab wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues (Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to…

The point of turning the trees into Charcoal is to return all the non-carbon elements to the environment and remove any metabolic activity from releasing that carbon. The USA currently produces about 70 million tons of paper per year, which is about half carbon by weight. We produce about 2 gigatons of lumber per year, which is again about half carbon, all absorbed from the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we produce like…

Algae blooms are typically the sign of something very wrong with an aquatic ecosystem (usually human-induced). This is in addition to the issues it causes in the rest of the local ecosystem by drastically reducing the light, nutrients, and oxygen available to other aquatic life.

I can't believe these ideas are being seriously suggested. Is it a win if we reduce CO2 but make the planet uninhabitable for other reasons?

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#253

Post by expedition32 »

gwerbin wrote: post #230
drooby wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space. But the model is built on us. You can move the server anywhere you want. You can’t escape the fact that everything inside it came from human minds. That’s an ownership claim no one can relocate away from.

> if you assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space. This is the same false threat that gets repeated over and over whenever anyone tries to regulate or tax anything.

We will move them to Bahrain!

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#254

Post by drooby »

terminalshort wrote: post #227
drooby wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point, data isn't scarce like oil. Nobody's losing their forum posts. That part of my analogy is weak. But you're answering a question I'm not asking. The question isn't "was something taken from you." It's "who deserves a share when collective human output generates trillions in commercial value." your torrenting analogy makes my case. Nobody loses their original movie when it gets pirated either. We still reco…

Typically you don't get compensated for secondary or higher order value generated by your work. Every software startup today is only possible because of the massive amount of collective effort to build the computing hardware that it runs on and the work to construct the actual physical network of the internet. But that doesn't mean that you have to pay all those people for that work just because your company ends up…

Nobody is proposing that AI companies track down individual contributors and pay them based on their specific contribution. That's not how any of this works.

The Alaska Permanent Fund doesn't pay Alaskans based on how much oil was under their particular backyard. It pays a dividend from a public fund because the resource is collectively owned. The mechanism is simple: companies extract a public resource, a percentage goes into a fund, the fund pays out to the public.

And the infrastructure comparison doesn't quite work. The people who built computing hardware and internet infrastructure were paid for that work at market rates by the companies that hired them. The billions of people whose writing, code, images, and knowledge trained these models weren't paid anything for that specific use. That gap is the whole point.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#255

Post by WarmWash »

jpetso wrote: post #250
WarmWash wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that books have probably been the easiest thing to pirate for the last 30 years, and LLMs are probably the worst way to try and read a book free, I'm not sure why authors would be focusing their anger at AI. Many books you can even get free at a library....

Free books for you as an individual, not free for the library and the city backing it. What's in your library still ends up paying authors (and their publishers).

I mean, pirates putting books online for everyone also bought a copy, so I guess we're all good then?

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#256

Post by drooby »

bgnn wrote: post #236
drooby wrote: post #149

The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing. Alaska and Norway understood something critical…

> Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction." This is also true for the first comme…

This is a great point. The Netherlands is the cautionary tale of what happens when you don't do what Alaska and Norway did. A massive resource boom without proper public management hollowed out the rest of the economy.

If a handful of companies capture most of the value from AI while it simultaneously displaces workers across every other sector, that's Dutch disease applied to the entire knowledge economy. One sector booms, everything else withers.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#258

Post by gosub100 »

drooby wrote: post #216
pixl97 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no us, there is only you, by default. To move beyond that default you need to organize into things like communities, lobbying groups, and/or even governments. Ownership of singular non-physical objects is a polite lie we tell ourselves because it makes us feel more secure in a universe filled with information chaos. The moment you open your mouth or move your pen you no longer own what is in your mind, it is…

No offense, but this comment makes virtually zero contact with reality. Our entire civilization runs on your "polite lie" of owning non-physical things. Patents, copyrights, trade secrets, licensing agreements, NDAs. Trillion dollar companies are built on the legal enforceability of intellectual property. The software you're using to type this comment exists because someone owns the code. Calling information "entropy…

I agree with about 85% of what you said, but this:

> We decided collectively

"We" didn't decide that copyright would be 75 years past the death of the authors heirs. Powerful corporations that have lobbyist representation "collectively decided" that on our behalf. In 2011 they were trying to put all this copyright law under the Trans Pacific Partnership making it an international issue and expressly taking away the rights of the people to change it. For most citizens the original term of 7 years was enough before it became public domain.

If citizens had real representation and not FAANG capital and lobbying, they could easily vote to tax AI, and most of them would.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#259

Post by mrguyorama »

nDRDY wrote: post #252
mrguyorama wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of turning the trees into Charcoal is to return all the non-carbon elements to the environment and remove any metabolic activity from releasing that carbon. The USA currently produces about 70 million tons of paper per year, which is about half carbon by weight. We produce about 2 gigatons of lumber per year, which is again about half carbon, all absorbed from the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we produce like…

Algae blooms are typically the sign of something very wrong with an aquatic ecosystem (usually human-induced). This is in addition to the issues it causes in the rest of the local ecosystem by drastically reducing the light, nutrients, and oxygen available to other aquatic life. I can't believe these ideas are being seriously suggested. Is it a win if we reduce CO2 but make the planet uninhabitable for other reasons?

You would have to do it basically "out to sea", far enough away from humans that whatever negative effects are able to diffuse throughout the entire oceans.

Maybe then the negative effects won't be life ending.

But how else do we sequester bulk carbon dioxide? You probably aren't going to engineer something more effective than plant matter. So yes, you seed a gigantic algae bloom out in the ocean, it does a lot of bad stuff to a part of the ocean, and maybe it nets out positive.

But hey, don't worry, nobody lets me make important decisions, so not exactly "seriously suggested". Smarter people than I will have a clear list of pros and cons to this plan, and will make a much smarter decision, which might be followed by politicians maybe.

But there's no carbon capture option that doesn't do something dramatic and somehow damaging. Any plan will be industrially the inverse of burning all that oil. Pulling it out of the air will be the largest industrial project we have ever done and require more electricity than extracted from all the oil we burnt ever. To grow trees to do it would require 1000x the lumber industry we have now. Sun shades can keep us cool but not take the carbon out of the air. Aerosol injection is going to have it's own externalities. "Crush a bunch of rock and let it chemically absorb the CO2" is extremely limited.

There's no clean option out of this anymore. There's no magic button. We could stop all carbon production today and we will still have significant impact.

Re: US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

#260

Post by dathinab »

mrguyorama wrote: post #259
nDRDY wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Algae blooms are typically the sign of something very wrong with an aquatic ecosystem (usually human-induced). This is in addition to the issues it causes in the rest of the local ecosystem by drastically reducing the light, nutrients, and oxygen available to other aquatic life. I can't believe these ideas are being seriously suggested. Is it a win if we reduce CO2 but make the planet uninhabitable for other reasons?

You would have to do it basically "out to sea", far enough away from humans that whatever negative effects are able to diffuse throughout the entire oceans. Maybe then the negative effects won't be life ending. But how else do we sequester bulk carbon dioxide? You probably aren't going to engineer something more effective than plant matter. So yes, you seed a gigantic algae bloom out in the ocean, it does a lot of ba…

> do it basically "out to sea", far enough away from humans that whatever negative effects are able to diffuse throughout the entire oceans

this is not how it works, like at all

pretty much all oceans are already at risk of ecologically collapsing even without climate change, and will be majorly affected by it (both directly and indirectly)

just because they are big doesn't mean thy can just compensate whatever you throw at them.

A huge problem being damage being not very visible to the average human until catastrophic (so humans are prone to not take actions). Like we already have gigantic dead zones all over the oceans.

Many effects of climate change fall into the "live will get very shitty but still survivable category".

But an ocean dying can lead to a chain reaction leading to a mass extinction event. Like not just a lot of animal dying, but a something like noticeable more then 50% of species going extinct. That includes most to all of humanities food supply.

Theoretically humans might be able to survive this, practically we are still speaking about a non negligible 2 digit chance for human extinction (not necessary directly by that, but other catastrophes like volcanoes, plagues or meteors still happen)

this are the kind of solutions with a high potential of having worse outcomes then not doing them

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