alt Hacker Newswhat about the environmental impact of AI, especially agentic AI? I keep reading praise for AI on the orange site, but its environmental impact is rarely discussed. It seems that everyone has already adopted this technology, which is destroying our world a little more.
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I believe the orange site's consensus was that it's approximately one additional mini fridge or dish washer worth of consumption on average. You've got users who use these tools barely 1k tokens per week. Assuming it's all batched ideally that's like running an LED floodlight for a minute or so. The other end of the spectrum can be pretty extreme in consumption but it's also rare. Most people just use the adhoc stuff.
The environmental impact of AI replacing a human programmer is orders of magnitude lower than the environmental impact of that programmer. Look up average US water consumption and CO2 emissions per capita.
And then add on top the environmental impact of all of the money that programmer gets from programming - travels around the world, buying large houses, ...
If you care about the environment, you should want AI's replacing humans at most jobs so that they can no longer afford traveling around the world and buying extravagant stuff.
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All environmental impacts are equal, but some of them are more equal than the others!
Environment impact is overstated. If you've ever looked at the numbers vs your daily carbon impact, you'd realize this.