alt Hacker NewsAI is partly to blame here.
All that power has to come from somewhere. The idea that all this AI is powered by “green” energy and unicorn farts is just a bunch of PR puffery from tech companies trying to divert attention from the environmental damage they’re causing.
The uncomfortable truth is that AI is the biggest setback on our path to energy sustainability we’ve seen in a generation.
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It is, but degrowth is an election losing proposition. Any talk like this needs to be transparently non-hostile to demand for political purposes. The solution should be something like requiring them to build nuclear or renewable energy, or tax them and put the money into a subsidy fund for clean energy.
Thank you for acknowledging the elephant in the room. I've literally seen people on HN argue that AI's increased power demand isn't bad for climate goals, because the money will encourage renewables.
It's astounding how people don't see it, even when it's the invisible hand of the market that's choking them to death.
We can power it all and then some with renewable and nuclear energy. We elected a regime openly hostile to that and openly pro fossil fuel. Like they literally ran on burning more coal, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we are burning more coal.
AI doesn’t matter. If it’s not AI it’ll be EVs. Or if you’re pro immigration (as I am) then what do you think letting more people into the country does for power demand? It’s something like 5kW averaged out over 24/7 per head. That’s probably conservative when you do a full accounting of all demand per head. Every new immigrant is probably equivalent to a rack of GPUs.
Degrowth is political fantasy. It will establish a populist backlash every time. Or are you going to line up to be the first to become poorer?
I look at that stuff as a very privileged fantasy. Only the rich can romanticize poverty. The people who fantasize about green back to the land scenarios are usually wealthy middle or upper class people in developed nations who have zero first hand experience of what that actually means outside the Avatar films.
I don't like the social harms related to AI but I think the energy is a silly emphasis. No one has ever thought twice about any heavy industry or absurdist garbage for consumers, home heating, etc.
If we were on track for everything else a serious uptake of AI might have put us barely off track.. But this is like blaming the wafer thin mint for the fat guy exploding.
I think it's still worthwhile, though. AI, given its current trajectory, will be able to help immensely with science and engineering challenges. Degrowth isn't a recipe for sustainable reduction of CO2 emissions.
Yep, someone was bragging recently they used 13B tokens last year. At 8mg CO2/token that's ~100t of CO2. Consumption of 5 households (or 200 NYC-London flights) just for vibe coding!