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What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

scientificamerican.com

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Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#31

Post by beardyw »

Kiboneu wrote: post #15
beardyw wrote: post #7

I've seen discussion about analog circuits which might do a lot of the work for much less power. I hope people are seriously investigating it. I think maybe analog computers were abandoned too quickly.

The issue with analog computers is error accumulation, non determinism due to environmental factors and calibration requirements. However you can have an architecture that deals with the error well enough to make useful estimates. Artificial and biological neural networks for instance. Some neuromorphic chips use analog components for storage and processing. Some people are trying to go the other way around and grow…

Yes, but isn't non determinism a feature of AI.

Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#32

Post by throwaway22032 »

_heimdall wrote: post #22
throwaway22032 wrote: post #6

This is just another reason to tax externalities and be done with it. Guilt tripping on totally arbitrary things just isn't going to work. We already have a mechanism for managing scarce resources, it's called price, so let's just use it.

How does a tax fix it? Sure the government takes in the money and could even do right about how they allocate spending it, but the damage (so to speak) is caused before the tax is ever collected. Consumers just need to know how it actually works, at least at the most basic level of what the costs are. From there either consumers don't care or stop using it. Do we really need the government forcing more morals on us t…

My point is that if oil extraction, refining, burning etc is taxed then no-one has to worry about any of this.

That worrying about whether doing bog standard everyday activities like turning on a computer and running a program is "bad" is just silly and even if it did work would cause mass anxiety.

It's not a sin tax, it's a tax on causing externalities. There is no need for an AI tax because AI is not in and of itself a thing which causes environmental damage.

Well, unless it goes Skynet, but I'm considering that out of scope.

Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#33

Post by squigz »

MyFirstSass wrote: post #5
solardev wrote: post #2

This is such a strange line of thought. What would it cost a human to go through the same training data and come up with a similar summary? Across all the fields and languages that Google has access to? Even compared to regular indexing, it's not exactly apples to apples. You still have to go through a dozen or more links and manually read them and filter out spam before getting a good idea. It's be fairer to compare…

I agree, also think about just how much paper one should print/buy in bookform to get the same data. That said Jevons Paradox seems to be a hardcoded feature of the physical underpinnings of modern society, so we're probably headed for some sort of "busybody" machine world with AI's everywhere that are highly efficient but also highly wasteful. Very few modern process so far has lead to more efficient / scarcer use o…

> Very few modern process so far has lead to more efficient / scarcer use of earths resources,

Scarcer? Probably right. More efficient? That seems very, very wrong. We're constantly looking for more efficient ways of doing and building things - if you'd like to frame this in a cynical way, look at it like this: businesses/industries are always looking to reduce costs. Sometimes this is done by firing thousands of people, sometimes this is by using more efficient materials/processes.

Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#34

Post by _heimdall »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #32
_heimdall wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a tax fix it? Sure the government takes in the money and could even do right about how they allocate spending it, but the damage (so to speak) is caused before the tax is ever collected. Consumers just need to know how it actually works, at least at the most basic level of what the costs are. From there either consumers don't care or stop using it. Do we really need the government forcing more morals on us t…

My point is that if oil extraction, refining, burning etc is taxed then no-one has to worry about any of this. That worrying about whether doing bog standard everyday activities like turning on a computer and running a program is "bad" is just silly and even if it did work would cause mass anxiety. It's not a sin tax, it's a tax on causing externalities. There is no need for an AI tax because AI is not in and of itse…

I still don't quite follow you here, how does a tax make it something that no one had to worry about? We tax fuel, for example, but people are still worried about emissions and environmental impacts.

I call it a sin tax in this case because it would be a government taxing something they don't want people doing, or want us doing less of. Where income tax isn't meant to make people want to reduce their income, taxes on alcohol, cigarettes, or in this case oil extraction or burning are specifically implemented to move the market.

Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#36

Post by appplication »

SilverBirch wrote: post #11

This seems to be missing the most obvious optimization that Google are clearly doing. When you see an AI answer to your question on Goole I guarantee that Google hasn't gone off and put your query into an AI. What it has almost certainly done is stick your query into the same processing engine that all the other queries go to, and found a flag that says "Oh I have a pre-computed AI answer to this" and returns that. I…

It’s a good thought, but I asked a pretty specific question (where can you get in to swim in the Napa river) the other day, and it had a generally correct answer, but then refined it to “within 5 miles of yountville” and it came back with an even more specific answer. I don’t think this was precomputed, though I could be wrong.
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