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 20 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.