alt Hacker NewsAnd eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas.
Reducing/stopping meat consumption and replacing it with healthy plant-based tofu, seitan, tempeh etc has a far bigger impact (and as a bonus, living beings don't have to suffer)
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True, but with autonomous agents hitting 2,000 requests is a lot easier.
That's actually kind of a scary statistic... I probably eat a burgur at most every month (beef maybe once a week at most) but probably make more than 2000 requests a day.
Your comment makes me really contextualize my AI usage and want to reduce it for ecological reasons.
why not both? some perspective:
0.5 Pwh/yr - worldwide data center energy
4-5 PWh/yr - meat total farm to table
166 PWh/yr - worldwide total energy production
maybe tomorrow you'll want to spin up a GPU on the cloud to briefly run a model, pick a data center:
DC #1: EU Efficient, but has ~100ms additional latency
DC #2: TX Runs on jet engine turbines, neighbors complain of noise and air pollution
I think that is a bit out of the blue. But it is fun to imagine a billboard-sized app for a referendum on burgers or AI.
That will put some sweat on some brows :)
I want you to imagine someone like Jenovah's Witnesses trying to moralize people on the Internet. how successful do you estimate such effort might be?
I've seen people who hate AI instantly become defensive as soon as someone brings up the water usage for a kg of beef. It's selective outrage.
I don't like whataboutism, but this isn't whataboutism because the meat industry requires way more water per capita like you pointed out. You have to create products twice, once for feed and once to raise the cows.
Your comparison only makes sense if you also consider how many requests are being made.
The "only the biggest thing matters" is a faulty logic. If you truly care about the environment then we need to improve things across the board.
And moralizing about living beings doesn't help your cause here.
It's not an or/or is it.
Could as well stop breathing to make way for the Super Intellect, that's what every sane transhumanist must do!
Tell you what, I'll keep eating beef, walking to work, and not using AI. Closer to how our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years, so it can't be too off the mark.
> And eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas.
And China is building 6-8 new mega-scale lignite coal power plants *per month.* Each one of those power plants emits more CO2 than 8.3 million people consuming medium amounts of animal products *for life.*
For the record I'm not denigrating your point. I'm taking it a step further. We're not focusing on the major contributors of CO2 emissions. It's not data centers and it's not meat consumption.