Do me a favour. Go look up the energy use per person for me in Germany, Spain, or the UK. Then go look up the energy usage per person in the USA or Canada and tell me again how necessary it is that transport, food, and heating are required energy use at the levels that currently happen in North America. You can repeat that same look from the “good” countries I listed to even lower use areas like Lithuania who still manage to heat and feed themselves on even less.
The way we live here is wasteful beyond belief, and the total value of that waste makes global AI energy usage look like a rounding error on one of the decimal points.
I’ll even make it easy for you by giving you a link to a page that has these values. ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
Apepollo11@lemmy.world 6 days ago
There is a point there, though.
American cars are much less efficient than European ones.
The amount of water required for AI data centres worldwide is more than an order of magnitude lower than the water required for just corn in the US alone. Only a small fraction of which actually gets used for food.
The average energy usage per person in the US is nearly three times higher than someone in the UK.
The environmental cost of data centres is absolutely a concern, but we shouldn’t forget the US alone wastes more energy and resources than are used by data centres worldwide.
HazardousBanjo@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I’ll reply to this because I think it fits in refuting your greater point:
No, there isn’t.
I, as a mere peasant, have only the power to vote for a better system. Something I often don’t even have as we have a dualopoly of right wing political parties in America, and probably won’t ever have a fair election again regardless at this point.
The billionaires who are putting up these AI data centers, poisoning our water at unprecedented rates, spiking electricity usage and costs at unprecedented rates, polluting our environment at unprecedented rates, are doing this entirely at their own will. They have the power to create major change. They’re using that power for evil.
This is a false equivalence. Especially when you remember its the same hyper-rich fucks that made America rely on cars, and made our cars inefficient gas guzzlers.
Apepollo11@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I don’t know what you think my greater point was, maybe you’ve accidentally conflated me with another poster.
My point actually is that these are not unprecedented rates. These are entirely precedented rates. This is gross capitalism destroying the world as gross capitalism always does. What you’ve lost sight of, though, is the respective scale of things.
As I said, the US alone needlessly wastes vastly more energy and water than the entire world’s usage of AI consumes. For energy, it’s several times more, for water it’s orders of magnitude more.
You make out that solving these massive problems is impossible, so instead you’re railing against AI. Which of course is your prerogative, but just remember that there are much bigger wins out there.
Poik@pawb.social 4 days ago
When we try to solve any of them, they literally send the military at us. Which is federally illegal, but you know, rules for us, not for them.