It's not a great idea to blame AI, which is small addition to the global emissions. I suggest focusing on what's really important, not what's currently trendy.
It's already using on the order of 1% of global energy, and there are active plans to expand that by a factor of 5 or more in the near future. That's as a percentage of current energy use, which is already way higher than it should be, so if all other sectors reduced theirs to sustainable levels it would be like 5% now and 25% planned. It's a bit more complicated when you account for renewable energy, but certainly adding consumption is not helping there. Now that buildout may not happen as planned/advertised, but I think it's very reasonable to worry about new things that make the situation worse even by a few percentage points when you need to make things better overall by much more than that to make progress. Of course this is not to say that we shouldn't be worried about/working on other sources of consumption that are currently a larger fraction -- we need to keep doing that too. But giving a pass to hundreds of TWh from AI junk in favor of trying to reduce the thousands of TWh from some other source by a couple hundred is a good way to erase the gains that you make over there.
Come on, if the first thing that comes to your mind is something responsible for 1% with projection of 5% emissions then it’s clear that you don’t really care about actual solutions but prefer to parrot current rhetoric from social media. Why not focus on the biggest contributors?
It's not a great idea to blame AI, which is small addition to the global emissions. I suggest focusing on what's really important, not what's currently trendy.
This is like saying in 1910 "cars are a tiny fraction of our emissions, you should be focusing on the steam train and the woodstove"
No, it's not. The comparison makes zero sense and is fuelled by social-media sentiment, not facts.
It's already using on the order of 1% of global energy, and there are active plans to expand that by a factor of 5 or more in the near future. That's as a percentage of current energy use, which is already way higher than it should be, so if all other sectors reduced theirs to sustainable levels it would be like 5% now and 25% planned. It's a bit more complicated when you account for renewable energy, but certainly adding consumption is not helping there. Now that buildout may not happen as planned/advertised, but I think it's very reasonable to worry about new things that make the situation worse even by a few percentage points when you need to make things better overall by much more than that to make progress. Of course this is not to say that we shouldn't be worried about/working on other sources of consumption that are currently a larger fraction -- we need to keep doing that too. But giving a pass to hundreds of TWh from AI junk in favor of trying to reduce the thousands of TWh from some other source by a couple hundred is a good way to erase the gains that you make over there.
Come on, if the first thing that comes to your mind is something responsible for 1% with projection of 5% emissions then it’s clear that you don’t really care about actual solutions but prefer to parrot current rhetoric from social media. Why not focus on the biggest contributors?