this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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The fundamental problem is that there’s money to be made by consuming more and more “sustainable” resources. The real solution is to reduce consumption on a global scale.
And how do you intend to "reduce consumption", may I inquire?
Not OC, but some ways to "reduce consumption" are reducing our usage of inefficient technology by replacing it with more energy/resource efficient means.
Examples include replacing individual automobiles with mass transit, building more dense cities to reduce consumption of construction materials/ vehicle miles, and not training massively large language models in facilities that consume more energy than an entire small country.
... gotta admit this is quite a bit more sound than I anticipated
As for LLMs, people don't really like when others say they can't explore the applications of tech, even if it's unsustainable, so there'f bacaklash ofc
In real world application, increased efficiency doesn't decrease energy usage nor decrease labor required to live. Tech has gotten more efficient since the industrial revolution, but demand for technology has increased exponentially, energy use is astronomical, and workers still work more hours.
Always I see this kind of "mixed" good/bad points comments. Wonder what it is and where does it come from...
Now to get on track: The topic is simple ANY computer infrastructure CONSUMES a LOT of POWER so if you want to be easy on the PLANET RESOURCES we need to you use it WISELY
Here are some suggestions:
stop people surveillange(aka gathering "advertising" data) and data hording from people devices like smartphones, routers, tv, smart anything like your fridge, ai assistant and other useless shit that only SPIES on you/us/me!
stopping running companies servers that do nothing and are useless or created for scopes that are not meaningful or that provide a real use;
stop creating and working for companies that do not promote/create technologies that support people and their long run sustainability...
...
I can continue with so many examples...
There are great ideas about taxing consumption, while getting rid of tax on labour.
This may be true of chopping down forests or mining coal. But we can use nuclear power. And the earth has plenty of water -- does chatgpt need clean drinking water specifically?
Datacenters moved to using evaporative cooling to save power. Which it does, but at the cost of water usage.
Using salt water, or anything significantly contaminated like grey water, would mean sediment gets left behind that has to be cleaned up at greater cost. So yes, they generally do compete with drinking water sources.
There's no way nuclear gets built out in less than 10 years.
Thank you for explaining that. I didn't understand the need to use drinking water.
Flip it around a little: we need to take control over production to eliminate this pointless and even pernicious waste. There is such massive waste in this system, so much energy and resources and lives dedicated to harmful or wasteful activities, that never really touches a consumerist perspective.
For example, the for-profit healthcare insurance system in the US. If you fired 90% of them, ran a central insurance option through the government, and then paid every single person you fired the same just to do whatever they wanted, you'd actually make the system better and more efficient. That 90% are not just redundant, they are there to put up barriers for needed healthcare because that makes the company money.
The more you analyze any industry, the more you will find these attributes. The product that doesn't need to exist and only does because of some other deficiency driven by capitalism. The massive bureaucies dedicated to monitoring workers so they don't unionize, the massive bureaucies that must be duplicated across 50 companies because they each have to do accounting and taxes and payroll and answer calls even though they make the same widget.
On top of all of this is war and related imperialism. Entire countries are thrown into chaos, with this economic system as the root cause. Why is Venezuela so heavily sanctioned? Simply because they nationalized their oil industry so that the money made would go to Venezuelans. This ran against the capitalist imperialist ownership of Venezuela's resources so they did their very best to destroy the country using economic means. Think of all the people forced into poverty because of this. Think of what they could have built instead. Now think of Iraq, its infrastructure bombed to nothing. We should center the people, but also think of all of the resources it takes to build a power grid, a clean water system, desalinization plants, roads, etc. All of that rubble because Iraq stepped outside the domination of US Empire, itself just an extension of global capital.
Through this we will decrease consumption as well, it is the natural outcome of not maintaining so much redundancy, of destroying so much of what is built, of being able to focus on real problems and developing real solutions rather than forcing humanity into pointless tasks.