- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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“AI is a tool stop being a luddite” mfs when being exposed to this reality
to be fair, the scale of pretty much any global industry is incomprehensible to most people
If only we had invested in renewables we could power all the AI we could ever want…
No but we gotta use fossil fuels still you guys! - the top suits
i wish we could focus on making small LLMs better.
some companies are doing this. some definitely aren’t“But but but! If we’re going to solve pollution, we’ll need more of those AI data centres!”
It’s going to be so funny when they build their god AI and ask it to save us and it spits out “should’ve build solar panels 30 years ago”
The real Roko’s Basilisk is that it’s disappointed in you and thinks you wasted your life playing with computers.
well, they train their AI with pro fossil propaganda as you see in forums like this. in fact, AI searches forums like this and makes summaries to answer questions you might ask it.
AI will solve this! We just need more data centers!
/s
Cornell researchers found that at the current rate of AI growth, the burgeoning industry could represent 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030
The United States emitted 4.9 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2024.
So by 2030 the AI industry CO2 release might be 0.9% of total US emissions.
That ‘almost’ in “Almost Incomprehensible” is doing a lot of work there.
To me it seems the root of the problem is that humanity depends on fossil fuels for energy.
AI data centers are just one of many things contributing to CO2 emisions.
Lond tsory short, humanity needs to start getting it’s energy from non CO2 emmiting sources (solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear).
Consider how rapidly they have been built, and the capitalists’ plans to make many many more. Now also consider the state of the planet’s ecology and the already terrible effects of climate change.
To me, it’s incomprehensible that regular people haven’t already revolted against the death spiral the capitalist class has put us on.
Can you name a moment in time when regular people did stand in solidarity and revolt against something that wasn’t already at the point of causing them grave, direct, unavoidable, and consistent harm?
Abolitionists are an easy example.
Now if you mean a majority of people, yeah not really. But people in general, it happens.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
I love Lemmy math nerds and honestly appreciate how there’s always at least one to put things in perspective for those of us who worked really fucking hard to get a C in college algebra. Cheers.
.9% from a single source is RIDICULOUS though
Ok how much is beef farming accountable for
A huge amount too, 37.9%
But more than one thing can be bad a time, a novel idea, I know
And how many beef farms are there compared to data centers? A lot of a lot more.
If a tiny amount of physical space can do such a large amount of pollution, that’s a worry, when the plan is to increase the amount of them.
Well, sure, but when everyone loses their fucking minds about the tiniest thing, that even requires us to buy all the lies from billionaires about how much the build out will be, while having never done anything about the biggest thing they could personally change, it starts sounding mightily hypocritical.
It seems like the personal responsibility to boycott polluting and unnecessary industries is limited to whatever doesn’t require any personal effort from the person speaking.
Napkin math:
- 40% of americans are very or extremely concerned about AIs environmental impact
- To save 34 million tonnes of CO2e, you need about 5.2 million vegans from now until 2030
- So only 5% of ONLY the complainers would need to go vegan to make up for this “tremendous” impact
- That’s 2% of all americans
That’s the thing we’re even attacking random strangers online for. The thing that we pretend is going to bring about the end times. But sure, veganism is the extreme position…
By the way, what other resources are we saving?
- Water — about 8.8 trillion gallons (~33 billion m³)
- Land — around 1–1.5 million acres of forest/land
- Animals — roughly 8 billion animals including fish and shellfish
More than one thing can be bad.
Why don’t we do both? Less AI, Less Meat
Also, I’m not American, don’t insult me by assuming I’m one
Or, just eat less meat and you can still have AI
Sounds like a bad solution to me
Much more realistic: 6% of amicans that eat mostly vegan
12% of Americans that often choose a vegan meal multiple times per week, seems realistic too.
by the current weight of growth my niece will weigh 260.000 kg by 2030
Headline is very sensational. The article says the estimates greenhouse emissions are ~24-44 million metric tons, which is about .69% of the estimated emissions of the entire country, according to the EPA estimate of 6343 million metric tons.
Less than 1% of all emissions is hardly incomprehensible.
The source the article draws from also says they could reduce the emissions by 73% and water usage by 86% range with proper infrastructure, so that’s cool.
I personally believe the political and socioeconomic impact I’d far worse. We’re being shown very clearly how easily bought out local governments and regulatory agencies are. Explaining why the proper infractructure to resolve these data center issues is so difficult to enforce.
But it’s WORTH IT when ChatGPT will be able to DIAGNOSE your CANCER because you ate WOODCHIPS after using a Recipe ChatGPT gave you when you asked for Advice on SWIMMING!
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, that the people behind the biggest investment and financial scam of the century would, to make more money, fuck up people other than just investors!
Chatgpt, why is it incomprehensible?
grock, summarize this answer.
But the Average joe using plastic straws is the real reason for climate change. /s
If there was money to be made from solving climate change, it would’ve been solved yesterday.
I think there’s a lot of money to be made in confronting climate change… but it will be made more than two fiscal quarters in the future, so capitalists are not just willing, but actually proud to ignore it.
You’d be correct. Recent estimates are that climate change caused issues will reduce global income by about 15% and cost $40 trillion annually by 2050.
They’d make more money by tackling climate change. It’s in the math. But that math has to be done over multiple years not just next quarter as you said.
Every company has to scramble for their share of the pie which shrinks by virtue of the collective scrambling in and of itself. I love feedback loops!
No one is arguing that
I remember back in the 90’s and early 2000’s they argued that the average person’s consumption was solely to blame for climate change. (While ignoring the pollution caused by multimillion dollar companies).
Yep. Also look at animal agriculture which we also do not need and is a huuuuuge amount crueller and orders of magnitude more polluting. Get rid of both and we’d be like a quarter of the way to fixing our emissions
AI datacenters are 3-4 orders of magnitude more polluting than agriculture comparatively. There’s just currently more agriculture than datacenters, which is something these AI companies would like to change
Get rid of both like I said, it’s not like we’re fighting for one to have the right to ruin our world over the other.
I’d love to see any kind of sources on this. From what I can tell animal agriculture emits roughly 20–30× more CO2e than all data centers combined.
Animal agriculture: The FAO’s most recent estimate puts livestock supply chains at roughly 6.2 Gt CO2e per year, about 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions Data centers (including AI): The IEA puts all data centers at about 0.5% of global CO2 emissions today (~180 Mt CO2), projected to reach 1–1.4% by 2030
Animal agriculture only causes more pollution than AI data centers today because Agriculture is a mature industry with thousands of years of supply and demand built up over time, whereas the AI datacenter boom has barely begun.
One Acre of land used for livestock farming emits on average 0.5-1 metric ton of CO2 equivalent annually.
One Acre of land used for a datacenter is anywhere from 150-300 metric tons of CO2 annually.
I love you Lemmy math nerds. (Not sarcasm.)
Thank you.
Also look at animal agriculture which we also do not need
I can eat steak. I cannot eat AI.
This is a popular notion, but I don’t think it’s correct, based on the precipitous drops in pollution that the world experienced after the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID closures.
The collapse of the travel industry and the significant decrease in daily commuting after both of these events created unprecedented improvements in air quality and carbon output, and the animal herds weren’t any smaller.
If AI is so wonderful they could afford to put up solar panels to power the data centers.
I’m gonna throw some numbers around based on a conversation with my friend the other day.
He works at an oil refinery nearby and under heavy load the whole facility can use up to 150MW of electricity. That’s while being rated as one of the least environmentally harmful refineries in the US. They have ~300 acres of solar panels supplying ~35MW over the course of a full day (~50MW during daylight hours). That means 20~25% of their power needs are fully renewable.
He also mentioned that the new Meta datacenter going up nearby is projected to use ~400MW! That’s two and a half oil refineries! That also means that to cover its electricity use they would need to set up ~2800 acres of solar panels. That’s ~11 times the footprint of the datacenter itself and two large farms worth of space on some of the best farmland in the country!
They definitely should be 100% powering the facility with renewables, but even then I don’t think model training justifies the space and resources that need to be invested to accomplish that.
The 7.65GW datacenter Amazon wants to make, would need about 155,000 acres to have a 4x provisioned solar array if they wanted to operate it all day off solar based of the US’s largest solar farm. That doesnt account for land space for storage. Also a 4x over provision probably isnt truly enough for something like this to reliably operate off solar only.
Itd be great to make some solar though for daytime hours even if trying to store the ridiculous amount of power required is its own insane problem and not worth it.
So, requiring them to cover their datacenters with solar farms would lessen power requirements by 9% plus whatever offset to cooling costs, that’s not nothing as we try to find ways to power these things beyond private natural gas plants, which they can’t keep doing.
That should definitely be the barest minimum, it’s just insane to me how much one of these data centers demands. Even beyond the privacy/copyright concerns, it doesn’t seem to me like the benefits of training models faster justifies the costs.
Its one of those things right?
If AI was so great we should be seeing OpenAI and Anthropic investing in high schools and Universities, “the next generation” so to speak. If AI is “so cool” we should be seeing investment in the next generation to use it. But we are not seeing that, OpenAI got $50 billion from Nvidia and all of that went on Nvidia GPUs, none of it went towards the people who will be using it in 20 years!
You have this thing that a lot of very rich people think is going to be biger than the printing press or the internet and they are not facilitating people to learn it… Their moto seems to be “build it and they will come”.
Think what you want about AI… “It is the best thing since sliced bread” or “it is the Anti Christ”. These companies need 10x even 100x uptake to justify this years spending, Alone. Never mind next financial year. These companies need so much more uptake to be profitable to the point where the level of investment from the MAANG companies makes sence that we should be seeing investment in schools and universitiy programs for these tools to be used so that the next generation and the generation after that, wants to use these tools. Amazon used to run hackathons where they would promote their tools over Microsoft or Google because they knew the developers who use their tech will advocate for their tech. We are not aeeing that level of support for AI tools and, to me, that speaks volumes.
What happens at night?
You’re being sarcastic, right?
Sure if you like
There are a few ways to store excess energy generated during the day. Usually batteries are the obvious answer.
One of the great things about batteries is that the metal used in them is recyclable and can be repurposed to make new batteries. So, at some point, we’ll barely need to be mining the metals used in those.
Compare that to petroleum products which, if not for green energy, would always needs to be extracting more and more to be able to satisfy an increasing demand of energy.
