How to feed all the power-hungry AI data centers

Maybe someone with the knowledge of hindsight in a few generations will say that, yes, we should stop and draw a line in the sand.

We are still used to the idea that we can treat externalities to the systems we build as infinite and boundless, while it is getting increasingly clear that they are not. I am not saying we should stop working on LLMs. I just say we probably should factor in (that means: assign economic value to) downstream consequences of said high energy consumption if we don't wanna destroy our own habitats. And that then would probably lead to a world where LLMs are used for actually important problems instead of furthering the goals of the few who truly profit from surveillance-capitalism.

But hey, let's continue wasting a years worth of energy on training LLMs on cat pictures, they are cute after all.

DC are run by companies with a shitload of money.

Not a hard problem.

And we can use the heat to heat houses too!

Here are stats from 6 months ago, I doubt it’s changed significantly since then:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/28/most-amer...

Luckily the future does not depend on what you can or can't imagine. And no, even if that imagination were accurate, AI would not be the solution for any of those problems. We know the root causes, we know the effects, having a bunch of companies boil the oceans to have AI generate mediocre copy and uninspired illustrations does not help with anything other than making those companies richer and displacing even more workers and shutting down even more career paths.

Young people don't want to have kids or work because all the aspirational goals previous generations had have become unattainable for them, we're counting down the years until the climate catastrophe becomes impossible to ignore even in wealthier countries and there is literally nothing the masses can do because politicians across the world have shown a complete disregard for human life in the face of a global pandemic that had a death toll in the millions before we simply stopped counting.

> So we need systems, that learns human knowledge, refines it, makes it better and takes over all of the work.

And how would that benefit anyone but those who own those systems and charge for its use? How would that benefit the "younger generation"? To the contrary this would seem like it would do what automation always does: drive down wages and reduce workforces while harming workers' ability to bargain for better working conditions.

As tech workers we should take the time to understand that the "Luddites" were not actually opposed to technological advancement but to the consequences of it in a system that always rewards the business but not the worker for an increase in productivity. You don't need to withdraw into a cabin in the woods to realize that the way we have set up the systems that govern us technological progress will always only accelerate the wealth drain to the rich, never reverse it.

And that doesn't even get into how most AI startups are completely unsustainable (as growth-oriented startups tend to be) or how the proliferation of underpriced AI has contributed to the destruction of knowledge via search engine spam, "content generation" and social media bots.

If you want to create fully automated gay luxury space communism, be my guest, but you'll also need to work on the "communism" part if you want to make the "fully automated" part not result in the opposite direction.