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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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The memes of the climate
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The climate of the memes of the climate!
Planet is on fire!
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Did you miss the memo that current AI is already using more power than everything we've managed to save with green energy in the last decade? We ARE fucked, the only thing we're still debating is the exact timespan. Which is asinine, the result will remain the same either way.
The only way I see to a path to salvation is a huge pandemic or world war, becausing nothing else will convince people. We've been trying (and failing) for decades.
Good news! The odds are looking pretty high for both of those!
Carbon taxes fix the problem of using energy for dumb things. Climate change isn't caused by us using energy, it's caused by the fact that carbon pollution is free.
Bingo. Power usage isn't the central problem, it's the sources of power.
I need some anon to write me a virus that will wipe out all datacenters in one go, something that will irrevocably fry all enterprise hardware beyond repair. Let's start over, with decent trust busting and without the plastic this time.
(edit: I guess it's not entirely clear but I'm expecting such a virus to hit the reset button on civilisation. Mass death, yes, but we won't fuck the world beyond being liveable.)
The world will be fine
It will take a long time in our timespan, and we won’t be fine, but the world will. Just a minor blip in the history of this marble
The world will be fine.
People are fucked.
And with ipv6!
This but for humans.
12 monkeys were right
We had a pandemic already and war in Ukraine is raging on - and both only served right wing extremists to rise and ignore climate problems even harder. We are fucked. I don't give up hope but it's tiny
If the power is renewable, who cares how much it uses? Things are far from hopeless.
Because that power could have been used by someone else who's depending on coal instead. You cannot separate power sources when on the grid.
That's why we're working to get rid of fossil fuel power generation entirely.
You got a source on that? Cause that sounds fake
Here's one:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.02243v1
Below is an article on crypto mining, not AI, but I'd wager a guess and say you certainly can draw parallels from it:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023EF003871
Also, whatever the source of green/renewable energy is, it takes a couple years to offset the manufacturing of said energy source:
https://www.cooleffect.org/solar-carbon-footprint
So even if there's no direct source on that 10 year claim, it probably isn't too farfetched!
The article you linked doesn't support your claims, is unpublished and reads like the homework of some undergrads.
Training AI models, while computationally expensive, cannot compare to crypto farms the size of warehouses everywhere around the world.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and new technology is only going to continue to use more and more energy. Conservation is not the answer.
Should i kill myself before all that unravels?
No, there’s always a shimmer of hope and the non zero chance that we mean something for someone that could make a difference, or help make the difference ourselves. Even sometimes the tiniest good-hearted gesture will do it.
I keep saying, if Putin starts a nuclear war, we might save humanity. A nuclear winter will cool the planet. And with most of us dying of radiation poisoning, we won’t have the ability to start pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere. Yay!