Rhaedas@fedia.io 1 day ago
If you put aside the ethics of how AI got to this level and the environmental costs for mainly doing things humans could have done, the next problem is who is in charge of how it's used. So now that we're here, the potentials could be good in a few aspects, but power-hungry humans are at the controls, so that's a big part of the doom and gloom of it being used for worse things, or just misused in general which is what we mostly see.
AI overall (the large grouping that includes but isn't just LLMs) is a tool, and tools used for good purposes can make big differences. LLMs even have their specific uses that make sense, but that's been totally overblown and stuffed into every conceivable place, often breaking because it's the wrong tool for the job and was sold to gullible idiots.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
“the environmental costs for mainly doing things humans could have done”
/me checks how much the environmental costs of humans doing those tasks would be…
shocked Pikachu
AI causes a tiny fraction of the environmental impact that a human causes, Humans emit more pollution commuting to offices than the entire datacenter industry will use in the next few years, and transportation is only the third largest way that a human pollutes (on average) with the other two larger cases being home heating/cooling and food consumption.
I’m not saying humans are bad, but you cannot be going around making that comparison that AI is worse for the environment than humans.
The whole who controls it thing is a massive problem, no argument there.
Rhaedas@fedia.io 23 hours ago
I get your point, but it rests on me having said the data centers will replace all humans, so it's either/or. It's going to be both, even with reduction in human work force replaced by AI, there will still be people doing people things as well as AI running. And the energy costs! So if AI doesn't consume that much energy comparably, why are some of them trying to get dedicated nuclear plants?
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
A) most of the pollution from humans doesn’t come from electricity usage, or more specifically the fossil fuels used to make electricity. It comes from direct fossil fuels used in heating, combustion engines, and industrial processes like making fertilizer. Fossil fuels used to make electricity only make up something like 30-35% of global use.
B) while you’re right that humans don’t go away, the entire datacenter industry right now only uses about 0.5% of global energy. Even if we expanded datacenter enegy use by 10x what we currently have it still makes up about the same total global enegy use as what currently goes to raising cows, and meat production as a whole is about 15% of global energy use.
C) Nuclear plants are pretty clean energy. I don’t have anything wrong with building more of them as long as the costs are transferred to the users properly and there isn’t government/business bullshit downloading externalities to individuals.