From a long term environmental standpoint that’s not at all clear cut.
We objectively have too many humans in our biosphere for our current rate of resource consumption and we should significantly drop the overall number.
However, our current standard of living is mostly the result of a shared economy where we pool and share our resources and have a shit ton of people working.
Right now neural network algorithms consume a lot of processing power and resources, but they also solve whole new classes of automations problems that computers haven’t been able to solve before.
If we actually want to maintain our standard of living and reduce the population size, we may very well need AI automation utilities. They can keep scaling down in size and power consumption in the way that a real human can’t.
We can support the current population, it’s just not profitable or popular to do so.
Birthrates naturally level off as societies develop. Many are already seeing negative growth.
Our current standard of living is mostly predicated on offshoring the suffering and waste to the global South, but even that could be comfortably leveled off if we weren’t living under Capitalism.
We don’t need large AI farms, we need empathy. The techbros will not save us.
We can support the current population, it’s just not profitable or popular to do so.
If your solution ignores the nature of human psychology it’s not a solution, it’s a quixotic quest.
Our current standard of living is mostly predicated on offshoring the suffering and waste to the global South, but even that could be comfortably leveled off if we weren’t living under Capitalism.
Yes, and as their standard of living rises to meet ours, the whole human output becomes increasingly unsustainable.
We don’t need large AI farms, we need empathy. The techbros will not save us.
There is a more plausible path for neural networks to be involved in climate change solutions then their is for you to replace capitalism.
Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 07:30
nextcollapse
Lmao no
I’m sure that if AI could get to the state where it could even approach maybe doing those things, it will mesh very well with capitalism and we’d all benefit collectively. One of the core tenants of capitalism.
Your issue is clearly with capitalism, and yet you’re brain deadly bitching about AI instead.
Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 20:37
collapse
We’re just going to pretend that the only reason companies are funding AI research isn’t because they want to replace the work force because it could be cheaper?
They should. That’s how automation works. We should be building a society that doesn’t require as much work, not insisting on doing work that machines could do when we don’t want to.
Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 21:03
collapse
That shit is not going to mesh well with our current system at all. Hence talking about both.
capitalism works by extracting surplus value from workers so the owner class can have it.
surplus value can’t be extracted from technology, it can only make workers more efficient cost for cost.
we don’t own the datacenters, therefore it won’t ever be making value to us.
Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
on 14 Oct 00:25
collapse
Surplus value cannot be extracted from technology? I guess if you mean directly.
Every technological advancement has been used to to create more value that workers produce that gets stolen by the owner class, so through the transitive property, 100% percent of the value created by technology is stolen from the people actually using the technology to produce the value.
We’ve had insane technology breakthroughs that have made the value we produce skyrocket, and we’re in the negative, by a shit ton.
Also those data centers would be classified under “means of production” and in an actual socialistic or communistic economy would be under the control of the people and would then produce value for us.
my brother in christ what are you saying? you know that rich people are the biggest polluters?
you know how ai datacenters literally destroy our planet? and for what? these supposed automation tasks will not serve us. we will have mass poverty and more wealth concentrated into the hands of a habdful of tech bros. it’s the industrial revolution all over again.
the global south is suffering from our actions. and how do you define living standards? do you think a capital slave that works in deadly conditions will be happy becase now they have an iphone and access to electricity? No. a slave is still a slave.
my brother in christ what are you saying? you know that rich people are the biggest polluters?
Yes, and what do you think is happening as other countries rise out of poverty? We have way too many humans on this planet to support everyone having a middle class lifestyle.
you know how ai datacenters literally destroy our planet?
Yeah, right now. But if you tried to render 4k videos in 1990 it would also take a full data center and enormous amount of power, but computer chips can do this thing where they get smaller and orders of magnitude more efficient over time, which is how every single phone can do it on 5W of usb power today.
The rain of down votes on ur comments shows me that Lemmy has become every bit as much if not worse an echo chamber than reddit. Facts of the matter are humans are overcrowding the plant and gobbling up all the resources at an unsustainable rate. Human population DOES need to drop a bit of we are to use this planet long term, lest we spell our own doom in a few hundred years by picking this once beautiful planet to the bone.
Only on lemmy would someone think 22 total votes of which only 3/4 are downvotes would be considered a “rain of downvotes” imagine if you were in a room with 22 people and 4 agree with you but 18 didn’t. That wouldn’t be considered a flood of downvotes. That’d just be a minority position.
You can separate the vote totals in the settings i believe. Piefed does it automatically. You can also use lemvotes.org to see how each person voted for the comment or post.
I am using the voyager app and have not found a place to separate them but I appreciate the response! I have not looked much into other Lemmy browsing apps and hardly ever use it on the computer…
They’re the ecofascist yet you’re the one saying “you’ll shit in the mud and you’ll like it”.
Birthrates lower partially thanks to higher standard of living, which are not sustainable for 7+ billions people.
Not that I think LLMs are going to help in any way, but every time someone mentions overpopulation, all the counter arguments I see are loads of anti system rhetoric with nothing to show for it.
You think soviet Russia was/current China is sustainable?
Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml
on 11 Oct 15:51
collapse
The earth can easily sustain our current population at a 1st world standard of living, but only if we are orders of magnitude more efficient. That means things like no mass car usage, eco-urbanisn, no more single family homes with quarter acre empty lawns, widespread plant-based foods as the norm, and repairable technology that actually lasts decades instead of planned obsolescence and cheap plastic junk that fills up landfills.
You don’t need to be some anarcho-primitivist/Ted Kaczynski wannabe living in a wooden shack with one set of clothes.
Now is that viable in the current societal climate? No, people, especially Americans generally hate much of those eco-urbanist ideas. As long as Capitalism is the default economic system and neo-liberal politics is the default political approach to democracy, we will continue marching towards a consumerist doom.
altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 11 Oct 11:13
nextcollapse
If we actually want to maintain our standard of living and reduce the population size, we may very well need AI automation utilities. They can keep scaling down in size and power consumption in the way that a real human can’t.
Theoreticisizing LLM’s usefulness and resourcefulness doesn’t help you there. For now they are rather useless embaracingly inefficient resoucehogs existing purely because of the bubble. It’s a gamble at best, or a waste of resources and a degradation of human workforce at worst.
AI is not just LLMs, and it’s already revolutionized biotechnical engineering through things like alpha fold. Like I said, “AI”, as in neural network algorithms of which LLMs are just one example, are literally solving entirely new classes of problems that we simply could not solve before.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
on 11 Oct 14:31
nextcollapse
I don’t have to dream, DeepMind literally won the Nobel prize last year. My best friend did his PhD in protein crystallography and it took him 6 years to predict the structure of a single protein underlying legionnaires disease. He’s now at MIT and just watched DeepMind predict hundreds of thousands of them in a year.
If you vet your news sources by only listening to ones that are anti-AI then you’re going to miss the actual exciting advancements lurking beneath the oceans of tech bro hype.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
on 11 Oct 15:10
nextcollapse
You need to take a step back and realize how warped your perception of reality has gotten.
Sure LLMs and other forms of automation, artificial intelligence and brute forcing of scientific problems will continute to grow.
What you are talking about though is extrapolating from that to a massive shift that just isn’t on the horizon. You are delusional, you have read too many scifi books about AI and can’t get your brain off of that way of thinking being the future no matter how dystopian it is.
The value to AI just simply isn’t there, and that is before you even include the context of the ecological holocaust it is causing and enabling by getting countries all over the world to abandon critical carbon footprint reduction goals.
Don’t come at me like you are being logical here, at least admit that this is the cool scifi tech dystopia you wanted and have been obsessed with. This is the only way you get to this point of delusion since the rest of us see these technologies and go “huh, that looks like it has some use” whereas people like you have what is essentially a religious view towards AI and it is pathetic and offensive towards religions that actually have substance to their philosophy and beliefs from my perspective.
The rich are using the gullibility of people like you to pump and dump entire economies you fool.
Edit I am not sure why I wrote this like you might actually take a step back, you won’t, this message is really for everyone else to help emphasize how we are having the interests of the entire earth derailed by the advent of a shitty religion and its mindless disciples. The sooner the rest of us get on the same page, the sooner we can resist people like you and keep your rigid broken worldviews from destroying our futures.
You seem to be projecting about warped perspective.
Sure LLMs and other forms of automation, artificial intelligence and brute forcing of scientific problems will continute to grow.
That’s not brute forcing of a scientific problem, it’s literally a new type of algorithm that lets computers solve fuzzy pattern matching problems that they never could before.
What you are talking about though is extrapolating from that to a massive shift that just isn’t on the horizon.
I’m just very aware of the number of problems in society that fall into the category of fuzzy pattern matching / optimization. Quantum computing is also an exciting avenue for solving some of these problems though is incredibly difficult and complicated.
You are delusional, you have read too many scifi books about AI and can’t get your brain off of that way of thinking being the future no matter how dystopian it is.
This is just childish name calling.
The value to AI just simply isn’t there, and that is before you even include the context of the ecological holocaust it is causing and enabling by getting countries all over the world to abandon critical carbon footprint reduction goals.
Quite frankly, you’re conflating the tech bro hype around LLMs with AI more generally. The ecological footprint of Alpha Fold is tiny compared to previous methods of protein analysis that took labs of people years to discover each individual one. On top of the ecological footprint of all of those people and all of their resources for those years, they also have to use high powered equipment like centrifuges and x-ray machines. Alpha fold did that hundreds of thousands of times with some servers in a year.
Don’t come at me like you are being logical here, at least admit that this is the cool scifi tech dystopia you wanted and have been obsessed with. This is the only way you get to this point of delusion since the rest of us see these technologies and go “huh, that looks like it has some use” whereas people like you have what is essentially a religious view towards AI and it is pathetic and offensive towards religions that actually have substance to their philosophy and beliefs.
Again, more childish name calling. You don’t know me, don’t act like you do.
I am treating you like a child because you refuse to use your brain.
You gave me one obscure very early stage example that isn’t even connected to the overall rise in value of LLMs and other forms of AI that has created an economic bubble worse than the dotcom bubble. So you are claiming the next real AI revolution is justtttt around the corner with a totally new technology you swear?
Maybe?
What I do know for sure is you are far more interested in that maybe than you are in actually engaging with the existential real world problems we are facing right now…
I am treating you like a child because you refuse to use your brain.
No you’re doing so because you started doom scrolling before you had coffee and now you’re trying to justify your uncalled for rudeness.
You gave me one obscure
It literally won the nobel prize.
very early stage example
It is not early stage, predicting the structures of those proteins has already actively changed the course of biomedical science. This isn’t early stage research that need fleshing out, this is peer reviewed published research that has caused entire labs and teams to completely change what they’re doing and how.
that isn’t even connected to the overall rise in value of LLMs and other forms of AI
It is in that it uses the same underlying type of algorithms and is literally from the same team that developed the “T” in ChatGPT.
So you are claiming the next real AI revolution is justtttt around the corner with a totally new technology you swear?
I have not claimed that, I said that AI algorithms are likely to be part of our climate solutions and our ability to serve more people with less manual labour. They help to solve entirely new classes of problems and can do so far more efficiently than years of human labour.
Rage out about tech bubbles and hype bros if you want. Last time it was crypto, streaming before that, apps and mobile before that, social before that, the internet before that, etc etc. Hype bubbles come and go, sometimes the underlying technology is actually useful though.
I have not claimed that, I said that AI algorithms are likely to be part of our climate solutions and our ability to serve more people with less manual labour. They help to solve entirely new classes of problems and can do so far more efficiently than years of human labour.
hahaha like AI will be a part of climate solutions are you serious right now?
Y’all are incapable of understanding expertise in your domain does not make you an expert in everything else, there is no way anyone in the industry you are speaking about will listen to climatologists and environmental scientists long enough to even begin to be helpful.
You keep talking about technology, when this is really a discussion about the catastrophic myopia of the tech industry of which you are making yourself a perfect example of.
To some biologists, that approach leaves the protein folding problem incomplete. From the earliest days of structural biology, researchers hoped to learn the rules of how an amino acid string folds into a protein. With AlphaFold2, most biologists agree that the structure prediction problem is solved. However, the protein folding problem is not. “Right now, you just have this black box that can somehow tell you the folded states, but not actually how you get there,” Zhong said.
“It’s not solved the way a scientist would solve it,” said Littman, the Brown University computer scientist.
This might sound like “semantic quibbling,” said George Rose, the biophysics professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins. “But of course it isn’t.” AlphaFold2 can recognize patterns in how a given amino acid sequence might fold up based on its analysis of hundreds of thousands of protein structures. But it can’t tell scientists anything about the protein folding process.
…
AlphaFold2’s success was founded on the availability of training data — hundreds of thousands of protein structures meticulously determined by the hands of patient experimentalists. While AlphaFold3 and related algorithms have shown some success in determining the structures of molecular compounds, their accuracy lags behind that of their single-protein predecessors. That’s in part because there is significantly less training data available.
The protein folding problem was “almost a perfect example for an AI solution,” Thornton said, because the algorithm could train on hundreds of thousands of protein structures collected in a uniform way. However, the Protein Data Bank may be an unusual example of organized data sharing in biology. Without high-quality data to train algorithms, they won’t make accurate predictions.
“We got lucky,” Jumper said. “We met the problem at the time it was ready to be solved.”
However, it should be noted that due to the intrinsic nature of AI, its success is not due to conceptual advancement and has not hitherto provided new intellectual interpretive models for the scientific community. If these considerations are placed in Kuhn’s framework of scientific revolution [68], AF release is a revolution without any paradigm change. Instead of “providing model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners” [68], it is a rather effective tool for solving a fundamental scientific problem.
This is because scientists working on AI (myself included) often work backwards. Instead of identifying a problem and then trying to find a solution, we start by assuming that AI will be the solution and then looking for problems to solve. But because it’s difficult to identify open scientific challenges that can be solved using AI, this “hammer in search of a nail” style of science means that researchers will often tackle problems which are suitable for using AI but which either have already been solved or don’t create new scientific knowledge.
^ this is NOT the scientific method and it undermines the scientific integrity of the entire process
Learn how to communicate with people, not the simplified boxes you put them in.
When you’re ready to have a conversation instead of just hearing yourself regurgitate mindless internet grandstanding I’m here.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
on 12 Oct 06:21
nextcollapse
AI has not revolutionized biology research at all, its not complex enough, to come up with new experimentation methods, or manage the current ones, they maybe used to write AI slop papers thats about it.
Bro grow up. The world is not black and white. Literally not a single award on the planet is meritocratic if you insist on dealing in absolutes. Every award is awarded by some committee and there is some room left for human judgement, which leaves room for human bias, which makes it not perfectly meritocratic.
If you want to go an unhinged rant that no one wants to listen to then email the nobel association directly, don’t waste federated server time.
no, because it’s literally what it is, words have meaning. that’s quite a lot of mental gymnastics and insults to defend the legitimacy of a prize that goes to war hawks and fascists for a while now.
it’s being used to push for pretty evil politics right now and should not be taken seriously for that reason. however the fuck you want to define the words i’m trying to use to describe it.
Thank you for finally spewing out the point you wanted to make from the jump. It’s irrelevant in the context of the original discussion, but you got to hear yourself talk.
that’s literally my point the entire time. it’s not meritocratic, it’s political. bother to understand next time. unless you somehow think that these folks deserve any prize.
And your point is wrong because you keep boiling it down to simple black and white.
The Nobel prize is not purely political and is not devoid of merit.
The world is not full of binary systems. It’s made of multi variable systems where multiple influences can be true at the same time.
If you want to make a point about why accurately predicting the structure of hundreds of thousands of proteins doesn’t deserve the Nobel in chemistry then I’m all ears. Please tell us all exactly why you think their prize was political and not meritocratic, and why predicting protein structures automatically is not important?
Because if you can’t answer that very specific question, then you weren’t making a point relevant to the conversation, you were making a snide generalization to hear yourself speak.
Most people are cool with some AI when you show the small, non-plagarative stuff. It sucks that “AI” is such a big umbrella term, but the truth is that the majority of AI (measured in model size, usage, and output volume) is bad and should stop.
Neural Network technology should not progress at the cost of our environment, short term or long term, and shouldn’t be used to dilute our collective culture and intelligence. Let’s not pretend that the dangers aren’t obvious and push for regulation.
LLM is what usually sold as AI nowadays. Convential ML is boring and too normal, not as exciting as a thing that processes your words and gives some responses, almost as if it’s sentient. Nvidia couldn’t come to it’s current capitalization if we defaulted to useful models that can speed up technical process after some fine tuning by data scientists, like shaving off another 0.1% on Kaggle or IRL in a classification task. It usually causes big but still incremental changes. What is sold as AI and in what quality it fits into your original comment as a lifesaver is nothing short of reinvention of one’s workplace or completely replacing the worker. That’s hardly hapening anytime soon.
LLM is what usually sold as AI nowadays. Convential ML is boring and too normal, not as exciting as a thing that processes your words and gives some responses, almost as if it’s sentient.
To be fair, that’s because there are a lot of automation situations where having semantic understanding of a situation can be extremely helpful in guiding action over a ML model that is not semantically aware.
The reason that AI video generation and out painting is so good for instance it that it’s analyzing a picture and dividing it into human concepts using language and then using language to guide how those things can realistically move and change, and then applying actual image generation. Stuff like Waymo’s self driving systems aren’t being run through LLMs but they are machine learning models operating on extremely similar principles to build a semantic understanding of the driving world.
I’d argue, that it sometimes adds complexity to an already fragile system. Like when we implement touchscreens instead of buttons in cars. It’s akin to how Tesla, unlike Waymo, dropped LIDAR to depend on regular videoinputs alone. Direct control over systems without unreliable interfaces, semantic translation layer, computer vision dependancy etc serves the same tasks without additional risks and computational overheads.
I’d argue, that it sometimes adds complexity to an already fragile system.
You don’t have to argue that, I think thats inarguably true. But more complexity doesn’t inherently mean worse.
Automatic braking and collision avoidance systems in cars add complexity, but they also objectively make cars safer. Same with controls on the steering wheel, they add complexity because you now often have two places for things to be controlled and increasingly have to rely on drive by wire systems, but HOTAS interfaces (Hands On Throttle And Stick) help to keep you focused on the road and make the overall system of driving safer. While semantic modelling and control systems absolutely can make things less safe, if done well they can also actually let a robot or machine act in more human ways (like detecting that they’re injuring someone and stopping for instance).
Direct control over systems without unreliable interfaces, semantic translation layer, computer vision dependancy etc serves the same tasks without additional risks and computational overheads.
But in this case, Waymo is still having to do that. They’re still running their sensor data through incredibly complex machine learning models that are somewhat black boxes and producing semantic understandings of the world around it, and then act on those models of the world. The primary difference with Waymo and Tesla isn’t about complexity or direct control of systems, but that Tesla is relying on camera data which is significantly worse than the human eye / brain, whereas Waymo and everyone else is supplementing their limited camera data with sensors like Lidar and Sonar that can see in ways and situations humans can’t and that lets them compensate.
That and that Waymo is actually a serious engineering company that takes responsibility seriously, takes far fewer risks, and is far more thorough about failure analysis, redundancy, etc.
The ones advocating for corporate greed and AI are the same ones talking about a birth rate crisis. I guess they just want more proles to slave for them and damn the ones who die young in the process.
Fuck this timeline
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
on 12 Oct 06:18
collapse
i see some state universities around saying the same, thing trying to blame the low enrollment crisis, to low birth rates, and not because COVID exposed the low-no job prospects and HCOL of post graduation. if your universities obscures/obfuscate the most important part of your DEGREE: labwork, or internships/ experience its only going to end one way.
Lol. I thought the “crash can’t come soon enough” line was hilariously close to Dwight’s line. It was a joke. I guess everybody missed it. Fair enough, too, it was a joke from a comedy program… Why would anyone think that was supposed to be funny.
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 20:17
collapse
Will it crash, though? It’s replacing people, and people are expensive.
Yes. This tech can’t replace people like some think it can. Most companies aren’t reducing head count just outsourcing.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
on 12 Oct 06:16
collapse
and only keep around a couple senior engineers, employees to manage those outsourced people, since the outsourced people may not be on par with stateside employees.
turdcollector69@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 23:36
collapse
It’s doing a shit job at replacing people, it’s still too prone to hallucinating for the vast majority of its applications.
In many of the applications where AI has replaced people the promised performance gains never materialized because of the insane amount of babysitting a LLM agent requires.
Doesn’t matter if it can write 10 hours of code in 5 minutes if you still need a software dev to troubleshoot the output for 25 hours.
They have like 90% reliability (figure pulled directly from my ass) but they need 99.99% reliability to actually be effectively reliable.
They’ve burned through all their hype and still haven’t made it reliable yet. I think they’re not going to get it done before the bubble collapses.
It’ll be similar to the dotcom boom, infinite hype implosion collapses the market to a few core players and then those core players will get there over the next 15 years.
Isn’t going to disappear but it’s absolutely going to fade into the background of day to day life.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 11 Oct 09:36
collapse
you seem to have missed my point.
If humanity’s energy requirements without AI are x, and AI’s requirements are an additional y, then AI is reponsible for the worst energy sources up to the value of y.
I live in a country that produces 70+% of its energy through nuclear reactors.
Sure we are definitely an exception but turning off datacenters where I live wouldn’t change anything about coal.
To be clear I’m not advocating for nuclear energy nor am I saying it’s a bad option.
Every country has a different energy mix, some more “carbon efficient” than others let’s say but it is not only revolving about coal and renewables.
Anyway, I think it’s fairly clear to me the datacenters won’t shutdown anytime soon even without AI it’s gonna be a major consumption of energy in any country. So I think nuclear should definitely at least considered as an option and to some extent be part of any energy mix. I think everyone knows that only renewables is not really a realistic scenario. Coal obviously is the worst option in any amount. So yeah, I was surprised that you didn’t mention it that’s it. I do think it’s very much relevant to the topic of the ever increasing energy consumption we are all gonna face in the future. This post would probably not even exist if we shutdown datacenters but I suppose you meant it as shutting down only processing power toward AI. But still we will need more datacenters in the future no matter what.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 12 Oct 06:04
collapse
Dude. You seem incapable of understanding the point I was trying to make.
Exactly, people don’t seem to realise that higher demand for energy means higher demand for all sources of energy including fussil fuels.
If doesn’t matter if this datacenter runs 100% on renewables if that means that the overall demand on the powergrid increases and now other clients that used to get (a higher percentage of) their power from renewable are getting it from coal, it’s just a green washing shift blame technique.
There’s one exception - when they are self-sufficient, or even net positive, with renewables.
One example is the Google datacenter in Hamina, Finland. They build it in an old unused paper mill, built their own renewables (3/4ths of their required at this point), and they use the cooling loop for district heating for the city.
That extra heat provides around 75% of the required heating, meaning the city could stop relying on their old natural gas heaters so now the district heating runs on renewables as well.
It’s easy to be an energy neutral datacenter, simply pour enough money to building new renewables that wouldn’t have been built without your contributions, and you don’t tax the power grid.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 11 Oct 21:28
collapse
I’ll begrudgingly concede that this is a good point.
Part of me wants to say “just force these assholes to build renewables without the datacentres” but I know that’s nonsensical.
I guess this is how carbon credit schemes are intended to work, but I’m aware that aside from a few specific cases carbon trading has just been a way to obfuscate carbon emissions.
I’m not into gold panning… though it’s not like all companies are using AI so much that it will transpire in their ESG. Now I now a couple that were so far very happily ignoring this source of carbon and, as far as I remember, it was not reported by the cloud providers either.
It’s fucking insane how much is invested (both money and natural resources) in the emperor’s new clothes. Let’s scorch the planet because every idiot out there buys into the marketing and hype. We are utterly and truly doomed because of ourselves.
nosuchanon@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 12:12
nextcollapse
AI and the investment around it are literally the only thing holding up America’s economy right now. If you take the artificial growth and the vast amounts of investment that are being pumped in AI development data centers, the US economy has barely grown half percentage point.
No surprise that they are going to power this beast at all costs until it falls apart along with the US economy.
No surprise that they are going to power this beast at all costs
I mean, they could use their fascist power grab to drive through the infrastructure work to expand power transmission lines needed to support a modern economy, renewables, and yes more datacenters
Additional coal is just the easiest way since we already have century old power lines bringing that power where it’s needed
Yes, in this case, coal might be easiest, cheapest, fastest because we can continue to neglect infrastructure. It’ll fall apart on someone else’s administration
Typical. So basically, they’re gonna turn America into Texas. Their power grid is famously shitty and has been neglected for decades due to Republican control of the government. They are constantly kicking the can down the road for some other administration to deal with it.
Everyone time there’s even a slight dusting of snow anywhere in Texas the power grid shuts off and people freeze to death. But Texas refuses to fix the power grid and nationalize because it would mean investing and bringing their shitty substandard power grid up to modern standards.
Future generations will look back on the pre apocalypse population and call us sleep walkers. I know, as I’m one of them. Life is difficult enough already without jeopardising my freedom as the only way to change our course is violence at this point.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 14:10
nextcollapse
the only way to change our course is violence at this point.
Sadly, yes.
balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one
on 11 Oct 16:25
nextcollapse
All of these problems are caused by a remarkably small network of people. I’m not even necessarily talking about the CEOs. It’s the boards of directors. This is also the pool from which CEOs are drawn one and the pool to which CEOs return after their golden parachute. They function as a living repository of evil. A warehouse of criminals and nepo-babies. (Ex: Airbnb guy joined DOGE and is on teslas board. So first he destroys the housing market for a generation, and then destroys the government, and he is the person who directs Tesla.)
Like, could fit in one big room.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 19:26
nextcollapse
Future generations will look back on the pre apocalypse population
If it makes you feel any better, our '01, '08, '14, and '20 recessions all put hard downward pressure on carbon emissions.
If Trump manages to throw us into the first full blown Depression in a century, he may do more to curb US emissions than any president in history.
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
on 11 Oct 20:12
nextcollapse
There’s still time for a general strike. The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor. That tactic was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.
If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), please consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one.
And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above.
If you are using the internet for anything with cloud storage, you are contributing to datacenter growth. And that includes nearly everyone using social media.
Sure but energy use per datacenters was on a downward trend before ai, then it went the other way hard
balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one
on 11 Oct 16:15
nextcollapse
Yes but data center growth prior to AI was manageable. There isn’t a grid on the planet (except maybe china?) which can support the growth of AI data centers.
These people have to plan energy needs on a 10-20 year life cycle, not 2. It’s the 2 that’s the problem.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 19:04
nextcollapse
The bitcoin miners have hopefully dropped off because they were chewing up gobs of energy too.
balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one
on 11 Oct 19:08
collapse
I thought they were totally just using flare gas and renewables ;) 🙄
But my understanding for real is that ai data centers are just the same hardware as buttcoin but more of it and organized. The venture capitalists finally got what they wanted, blowing their wad on Nvidia.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
on 12 Oct 06:12
collapse
china is also building lots of coal plants to sustain the datacenters.
China already has 200% the capacity relative to their demand. They’ve been growing solar fast enough to beat very high 8%+ electricity consumption growth last year, and can probably keep the pace.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 19:03
nextcollapse
This would be 99% of businesses at this point. Stop using AI to make memes and clickbait videos.
I’m not sure that’s true. Every company uses storage, and every growing company needs more. But very few companies are training generative AIs.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 22:17
collapse
Every company uses storage, and every growing company needs more.
You’re comparing mountains to molehills. That’s before you consider improvements in storage and compression relative to demands for space, or the degree to which our storage capacity “needs” are predicated on the voracious appetite of AI models and their unwanted output. Or, for that matter, the inefficient distribution of data and proliferation of spam data that predates it.
The MAG7 operate large and growing cloud services, so their datacenter costs would grow even without any AI training.
And charging $5 for a video query does not mean the query uses $5 of energy. The query is priced to recoup training costs that were already incurred.
theacharnian@lemmy.ca
on 11 Oct 18:53
nextcollapse
Meanwhile China is going all in on renewables.
Here is a fact: an authoritarian non-democracy is doing a lot for securing the future of humanity, while the “leader of the free world” are vandalizing the climate and accelerating apocalyptic climate catastrophe.
In 2025, China is a net positive for the future of humanity, while the USA is a net negative.
If that makes you uncomfortable about what our political and economic systems in the West that brought us here, well, you know the meme: “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
If you, like me, care about the future of democracy, we have to do a LOT of digging.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 19:03
nextcollapse
We are a nation of man/woman children. Petulant little kids who don’t want to grow up and be responsible for anything.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 19:17
nextcollapse
Meanwhile China is going all in on renewables.
BUT
AT
WHAT
COST
If that makes you uncomfortable about what our political and economic systems in the West that brought us here, well, you know the meme: “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
It might be cold comfort, but none of these business models have the liquidity behind them to build out coal power at the levels they claim they’ll need.
Nevermind that solar/wind would be cheaper. Or that the raw manpower to yield coal in quantity no longer exists. So much of these proposals are - at their heart - the same vaporware that promised waves of new nuclear construction and hydro-power and geothermal.
Bottom line is that GenAI’s primary revenue comes from dumb VC and bad debt. They can’t build, much less operate, any of this shit.
neighbourbehaviour@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 21:41
nextcollapse
Our current system is going about how Marx predicted it would. The course correction that occurred after the Great Depression has been now completely reversed and we’re back staring at its approaching collapse. I don’t think we can escape that long term, and we’ll lose democracy in the process, unless we start moving away from capitalism. We gotta attack private firm ownership. Otherwise we’ll keep getting people accumulate enough capital to buy the rest of the system and steamroll the rest of us for profit.
capitalism was kind of never democratic i think, considering so much is basically dictated by the people who “own” it,
which feels more like a dictatorship/ feudalism
neighbourbehaviour@lemmy.world
on 14 Oct 02:22
collapse
Oh for sure. There’s however a higher degree of democracy than feudalism, mostly stemming one way or another from the newly developed labour power under capitalism. Power that labour has slowly ceded over the last 50-70 years or so, but it can still regain when pressed. The system still contains this vulnerability (from the point of view of the capitalist) and it seems impossible to eradicate.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 19:02
nextcollapse
Fuck AI and these energy guzzling data centers. For decades we were told to conserve power and such and now all of those savings are being sucked up, and more, by these centers.
ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one
on 11 Oct 20:27
nextcollapse
Remember, everytime us plebs are told to sacrifice for the environment it’s so the corpos and parasites can off load moral responsibility onto us.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
on 12 Oct 06:11
collapse
they funded alot of campaigns doing that.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Oct 00:44
nextcollapse
And for some reason OUR utility bills are going up to pay for it.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 13:30
collapse
Yep. People are charged the marginal cost of power generation. Everyone pays the price of the most expensive source of electricity. The market is rigged.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
on 12 Oct 06:10
collapse
its actually raising electricity prices in many areas.
We were too addicted to AI slop to save ourselves.
Actually no, no one was addicted to AI slop, it was just shoved into every product so that huge companies could make a profit and everyone hates it.
But wait! The huge companies are losing tons money on this.
Why did we destroy the planet again???
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
on 12 Oct 06:10
nextcollapse
its the techbros that are obsessed with AI slop.
sobchak@programming.dev
on 12 Oct 06:47
nextcollapse
The capitalist class loves the idea and rewards companies with investment money. They think it could be the ultimate tool to snuff out any power the working class still has; making many employees optional, total surveillance of the population, etc. I think it will be a long time until it can do many jobs, but the surveillance tech seems to be coming along pretty well (with “AI” cameras recording license plates and biometric identifiers being put up everywhere).
Wish my coworkers would get the memo. Constantly trying to shove AI videos in my face like “haha look at MLK Jr and Tupac as pro wrestling announcers haha”
As an artist I am deeply repulsed by AI. But other people around me? They love it for some reason.
LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 06:12
nextcollapse
Earth was past 7 of 9 planetary boundaries to support human life… before AI happened. That is again, boundaries to support HUMAN LIFE.
How many of the AI companies that chose coal actually produce something worthwhile? Seems like the first the these nuScience fuckers should do with their digital overmind is create clean power.
People get distracted over the fate of the pure speculative frenzy could be an AI bubble, and the harm to the hapless speculators and banksters could have a minor impact on the rest of the economy.
Reality is far worse than an AI bubble. It is a US mission for a fossil fueled powered Skynet for Israel that is too big to fail. Bubble in AI investments becomes unlikely, but total destruction of rest of US economy/prosperity becomes assured when the “plebs able to eat in America bubble” bursts is a sacrifice that a fossil fueled powered Skynet for Israel is willing to make.
If Americans are still able to afford to eat, then China or Iran wins.
threaded - newest
Hooray for cancer, asthma and bronchitis! Make America Healthy Again. Lung health is like Karate – black is the best!
What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger! Or chronically ill, but in a cool way, really.
they built it in red states, because theres less resistance to regulate polluting data center, and in rural areas.
.
Crash can’t come soon enough
<img alt="“We need a new plague” - Dwight Schrute" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/988537c9-b2ae-4ca4-8fb8-798c0e9e8d94.jpeg">
Edit: Wow. Folks really can’t take a joke!
The people can stay, it is the AI that has to go.
From a long term environmental standpoint that’s not at all clear cut.
We objectively have too many humans in our biosphere for our current rate of resource consumption and we should significantly drop the overall number.
However, our current standard of living is mostly the result of a shared economy where we pool and share our resources and have a shit ton of people working.
Right now neural network algorithms consume a lot of processing power and resources, but they also solve whole new classes of automations problems that computers haven’t been able to solve before.
If we actually want to maintain our standard of living and reduce the population size, we may very well need AI automation utilities. They can keep scaling down in size and power consumption in the way that a real human can’t.
.
Stop this ecofascist shit.
We can support the current population, it’s just not profitable or popular to do so.
Birthrates naturally level off as societies develop. Many are already seeing negative growth.
Our current standard of living is mostly predicated on offshoring the suffering and waste to the global South, but even that could be comfortably leveled off if we weren’t living under Capitalism.
We don’t need large AI farms, we need empathy. The techbros will not save us.
If your solution ignores the nature of human psychology it’s not a solution, it’s a quixotic quest.
Yes, and as their standard of living rises to meet ours, the whole human output becomes increasingly unsustainable.
There is a more plausible path for neural networks to be involved in climate change solutions then their is for you to replace capitalism.
Lmao no
I’m sure that if AI could get to the state where it could even approach maybe doing those things, it will mesh very well with capitalism and we’d all benefit collectively. One of the core tenants of capitalism.
I hope someone drops you on your head again
Your issue is clearly with capitalism, and yet you’re brain deadly bitching about AI instead.
We’re just going to pretend that the only reason companies are funding AI research isn’t because they want to replace the work force because it could be cheaper?
They should. That’s how automation works. We should be building a society that doesn’t require as much work, not insisting on doing work that machines could do when we don’t want to.
That shit is not going to mesh well with our current system at all. Hence talking about both.
capitalism works by extracting surplus value from workers so the owner class can have it.
surplus value can’t be extracted from technology, it can only make workers more efficient cost for cost.
we don’t own the datacenters, therefore it won’t ever be making value to us.
Surplus value cannot be extracted from technology? I guess if you mean directly.
Every technological advancement has been used to to create more value that workers produce that gets stolen by the owner class, so through the transitive property, 100% percent of the value created by technology is stolen from the people actually using the technology to produce the value.
We’ve had insane technology breakthroughs that have made the value we produce skyrocket, and we’re in the negative, by a shit ton.
Also those data centers would be classified under “means of production” and in an actual socialistic or communistic economy would be under the control of the people and would then produce value for us.
i literally said this.
Edited that comment while you were reading.
Yeah I know that, but you also said this:
Nuance is important.
i don’t get what you trying to say
I was so descriptive that I doubled back on all of my points. Whatever you’re not picking up is 1000% on you.
my brother in christ what are you saying? you know that rich people are the biggest polluters?
you know how ai datacenters literally destroy our planet? and for what? these supposed automation tasks will not serve us. we will have mass poverty and more wealth concentrated into the hands of a habdful of tech bros. it’s the industrial revolution all over again.
the global south is suffering from our actions. and how do you define living standards? do you think a capital slave that works in deadly conditions will be happy becase now they have an iphone and access to electricity? No. a slave is still a slave.
Yes, and what do you think is happening as other countries rise out of poverty? We have way too many humans on this planet to support everyone having a middle class lifestyle.
Yeah, right now. But if you tried to render 4k videos in 1990 it would also take a full data center and enormous amount of power, but computer chips can do this thing where they get smaller and orders of magnitude more efficient over time, which is how every single phone can do it on 5W of usb power today.
The rain of down votes on ur comments shows me that Lemmy has become every bit as much if not worse an echo chamber than reddit. Facts of the matter are humans are overcrowding the plant and gobbling up all the resources at an unsustainable rate. Human population DOES need to drop a bit of we are to use this planet long term, lest we spell our own doom in a few hundred years by picking this once beautiful planet to the bone.
Only on lemmy would someone think 22 total votes of which only 3/4 are downvotes would be considered a “rain of downvotes” imagine if you were in a room with 22 people and 4 agree with you but 18 didn’t. That wouldn’t be considered a flood of downvotes. That’d just be a minority position.
Excuse my ignorance but how does one analyze how many up or down votes a comment has on Lemmy?
You can separate the vote totals in the settings i believe. Piefed does it automatically. You can also use lemvotes.org to see how each person voted for the comment or post.
I am using the voyager app and have not found a place to separate them but I appreciate the response! I have not looked much into other Lemmy browsing apps and hardly ever use it on the computer…
Settings, appearance, other, display votes. Choose separate as the option and that should do it.
Awesome I’ve changed it! Thanks a ton feel like it offers more perspective!
They’re the ecofascist yet you’re the one saying “you’ll shit in the mud and you’ll like it”.
Birthrates lower partially thanks to higher standard of living, which are not sustainable for 7+ billions people.
Not that I think LLMs are going to help in any way, but every time someone mentions overpopulation, all the counter arguments I see are loads of anti system rhetoric with nothing to show for it.
You think soviet Russia was/current China is sustainable?
The earth can easily sustain our current population at a 1st world standard of living, but only if we are orders of magnitude more efficient. That means things like no mass car usage, eco-urbanisn, no more single family homes with quarter acre empty lawns, widespread plant-based foods as the norm, and repairable technology that actually lasts decades instead of planned obsolescence and cheap plastic junk that fills up landfills.
You don’t need to be some anarcho-primitivist/Ted Kaczynski wannabe living in a wooden shack with one set of clothes.
Now is that viable in the current societal climate? No, people, especially Americans generally hate much of those eco-urbanist ideas. As long as Capitalism is the default economic system and neo-liberal politics is the default political approach to democracy, we will continue marching towards a consumerist doom.
Theoreticisizing LLM’s usefulness and resourcefulness doesn’t help you there. For now they are rather useless embaracingly inefficient resoucehogs existing purely because of the bubble. It’s a gamble at best, or a waste of resources and a degradation of human workforce at worst.
AI is not just LLMs, and it’s already revolutionized biotechnical engineering through things like alpha fold. Like I said, “AI”, as in neural network algorithms of which LLMs are just one example, are literally solving entirely new classes of problems that we simply could not solve before.
lol keep dreaming :)
arstechnica.com/…/protein-structure-and-design-so…
I don’t have to dream, DeepMind literally won the Nobel prize last year. My best friend did his PhD in protein crystallography and it took him 6 years to predict the structure of a single protein underlying legionnaires disease. He’s now at MIT and just watched DeepMind predict hundreds of thousands of them in a year.
If you vet your news sources by only listening to ones that are anti-AI then you’re going to miss the actual exciting advancements lurking beneath the oceans of tech bro hype.
You need to take a step back and realize how warped your perception of reality has gotten.
Sure LLMs and other forms of automation, artificial intelligence and brute forcing of scientific problems will continute to grow.
What you are talking about though is extrapolating from that to a massive shift that just isn’t on the horizon. You are delusional, you have read too many scifi books about AI and can’t get your brain off of that way of thinking being the future no matter how dystopian it is.
The value to AI just simply isn’t there, and that is before you even include the context of the ecological holocaust it is causing and enabling by getting countries all over the world to abandon critical carbon footprint reduction goals.
Don’t come at me like you are being logical here, at least admit that this is the cool scifi tech dystopia you wanted and have been obsessed with. This is the only way you get to this point of delusion since the rest of us see these technologies and go “huh, that looks like it has some use” whereas people like you have what is essentially a religious view towards AI and it is pathetic and offensive towards religions that actually have substance to their philosophy and beliefs from my perspective.
The rich are using the gullibility of people like you to pump and dump entire economies you fool.
Edit I am not sure why I wrote this like you might actually take a step back, you won’t, this message is really for everyone else to help emphasize how we are having the interests of the entire earth derailed by the advent of a shitty religion and its mindless disciples. The sooner the rest of us get on the same page, the sooner we can resist people like you and keep your rigid broken worldviews from destroying our futures.
You seem to be projecting about warped perspective.
That’s not brute forcing of a scientific problem, it’s literally a new type of algorithm that lets computers solve fuzzy pattern matching problems that they never could before.
I’m just very aware of the number of problems in society that fall into the category of fuzzy pattern matching / optimization. Quantum computing is also an exciting avenue for solving some of these problems though is incredibly difficult and complicated.
This is just childish name calling.
Quite frankly, you’re conflating the tech bro hype around LLMs with AI more generally. The ecological footprint of Alpha Fold is tiny compared to previous methods of protein analysis that took labs of people years to discover each individual one. On top of the ecological footprint of all of those people and all of their resources for those years, they also have to use high powered equipment like centrifuges and x-ray machines. Alpha fold did that hundreds of thousands of times with some servers in a year.
Again, more childish name calling. You don’t know me, don’t act like you do.
I am treating you like a child because you refuse to use your brain.
You gave me one obscure very early stage example that isn’t even connected to the overall rise in value of LLMs and other forms of AI that has created an economic bubble worse than the dotcom bubble. So you are claiming the next real AI revolution is justtttt around the corner with a totally new technology you swear?
Maybe?
What I do know for sure is you are far more interested in that maybe than you are in actually engaging with the existential real world problems we are facing right now…
No you’re doing so because you started doom scrolling before you had coffee and now you’re trying to justify your uncalled for rudeness.
It literally won the nobel prize.
It is not early stage, predicting the structures of those proteins has already actively changed the course of biomedical science. This isn’t early stage research that need fleshing out, this is peer reviewed published research that has caused entire labs and teams to completely change what they’re doing and how.
It is in that it uses the same underlying type of algorithms and is literally from the same team that developed the “T” in ChatGPT.
I have not claimed that, I said that AI algorithms are likely to be part of our climate solutions and our ability to serve more people with less manual labour. They help to solve entirely new classes of problems and can do so far more efficiently than years of human labour.
Rage out about tech bubbles and hype bros if you want. Last time it was crypto, streaming before that, apps and mobile before that, social before that, the internet before that, etc etc. Hype bubbles come and go, sometimes the underlying technology is actually useful though.
hahaha like AI will be a part of climate solutions are you serious right now?
Y’all are incapable of understanding expertise in your domain does not make you an expert in everything else, there is no way anyone in the industry you are speaking about will listen to climatologists and environmental scientists long enough to even begin to be helpful.
You keep talking about technology, when this is really a discussion about the catastrophic myopia of the tech industry of which you are making yourself a perfect example of.
<img alt="" src="https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/c4818743-877a-4d74-8e75-01537f978c5a.webp">
goldmansachs.com/…/how-ai-is-transforming-data-ce…
…
quantamagazine.org/how-ai-revolutionized-protein-…
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12109453/
^ this is NOT the scientific method and it undermines the scientific integrity of the entire process
understandingai.org/…/i-got-fooled-by-ai-for-scie…<
You keep saying y’all and it’s telling.
Learn how to communicate with people, not the simplified boxes you put them in.
When you’re ready to have a conversation instead of just hearing yourself regurgitate mindless internet grandstanding I’m here.
AI has not revolutionized biology research at all, its not complex enough, to come up with new experimentation methods, or manage the current ones, they maybe used to write AI slop papers thats about it.
“hur durr AI bad”
Read the fucking link. It literally won the Nobel prize.
just passing by to point out the nobel prize is political, not meritocratic.
This is false, it’s not a binary system. The prize is both.
if it’s anything other than meritocratic, then by definition it is not.
it’s like saying there’s free speech, but only a select group of people can have it.
Lol if you rigidly define things binarily in a way that doesn’t reflect real world systems, then sure they’re binary.
likewise, if you bend words to mean what you want them to mean we don’t have much reason to even be discussing it.
if something doesn’t get primarily awarded by merit, it’s simply not meritocratic.
Lmao, it’s binary cause you say it’s binary.
Bro grow up. The world is not black and white. Literally not a single award on the planet is meritocratic if you insist on dealing in absolutes. Every award is awarded by some committee and there is some room left for human judgement, which leaves room for human bias, which makes it not perfectly meritocratic.
If you want to go an unhinged rant that no one wants to listen to then email the nobel association directly, don’t waste federated server time.
no, because it’s literally what it is, words have meaning. that’s quite a lot of mental gymnastics and insults to defend the legitimacy of a prize that goes to war hawks and fascists for a while now.
it’s being used to push for pretty evil politics right now and should not be taken seriously for that reason. however the fuck you want to define the words i’m trying to use to describe it.
i’m also not wasting any more of my time here.
Thank you for finally spewing out the point you wanted to make from the jump. It’s irrelevant in the context of the original discussion, but you got to hear yourself talk.
that’s literally my point the entire time. it’s not meritocratic, it’s political. bother to understand next time. unless you somehow think that these folks deserve any prize.
And your point is wrong because you keep boiling it down to simple black and white.
The Nobel prize is not purely political and is not devoid of merit.
The world is not full of binary systems. It’s made of multi variable systems where multiple influences can be true at the same time.
If you want to make a point about why accurately predicting the structure of hundreds of thousands of proteins doesn’t deserve the Nobel in chemistry then I’m all ears. Please tell us all exactly why you think their prize was political and not meritocratic, and why predicting protein structures automatically is not important?
Because if you can’t answer that very specific question, then you weren’t making a point relevant to the conversation, you were making a snide generalization to hear yourself speak.
Most people are cool with some AI when you show the small, non-plagarative stuff. It sucks that “AI” is such a big umbrella term, but the truth is that the majority of AI (measured in model size, usage, and output volume) is bad and should stop.
Neural Network technology should not progress at the cost of our environment, short term or long term, and shouldn’t be used to dilute our collective culture and intelligence. Let’s not pretend that the dangers aren’t obvious and push for regulation.
LLM is what usually sold as AI nowadays. Convential ML is boring and too normal, not as exciting as a thing that processes your words and gives some responses, almost as if it’s sentient. Nvidia couldn’t come to it’s current capitalization if we defaulted to useful models that can speed up technical process after some fine tuning by data scientists, like shaving off another 0.1% on Kaggle or IRL in a classification task. It usually causes big but still incremental changes. What is sold as AI and in what quality it fits into your original comment as a lifesaver is nothing short of reinvention of one’s workplace or completely replacing the worker. That’s hardly hapening anytime soon.
To be fair, that’s because there are a lot of automation situations where having semantic understanding of a situation can be extremely helpful in guiding action over a ML model that is not semantically aware.
The reason that AI video generation and out painting is so good for instance it that it’s analyzing a picture and dividing it into human concepts using language and then using language to guide how those things can realistically move and change, and then applying actual image generation. Stuff like Waymo’s self driving systems aren’t being run through LLMs but they are machine learning models operating on extremely similar principles to build a semantic understanding of the driving world.
I’d argue, that it sometimes adds complexity to an already fragile system. Like when we implement touchscreens instead of buttons in cars. It’s akin to how Tesla, unlike Waymo, dropped LIDAR to depend on regular videoinputs alone. Direct control over systems without unreliable interfaces, semantic translation layer, computer vision dependancy etc serves the same tasks without additional risks and computational overheads.
You don’t have to argue that, I think thats inarguably true. But more complexity doesn’t inherently mean worse.
Automatic braking and collision avoidance systems in cars add complexity, but they also objectively make cars safer. Same with controls on the steering wheel, they add complexity because you now often have two places for things to be controlled and increasingly have to rely on drive by wire systems, but HOTAS interfaces (Hands On Throttle And Stick) help to keep you focused on the road and make the overall system of driving safer. While semantic modelling and control systems absolutely can make things less safe, if done well they can also actually let a robot or machine act in more human ways (like detecting that they’re injuring someone and stopping for instance).
But in this case, Waymo is still having to do that. They’re still running their sensor data through incredibly complex machine learning models that are somewhat black boxes and producing semantic understandings of the world around it, and then act on those models of the world. The primary difference with Waymo and Tesla isn’t about complexity or direct control of systems, but that Tesla is relying on camera data which is significantly worse than the human eye / brain, whereas Waymo and everyone else is supplementing their limited camera data with sensors like Lidar and Sonar that can see in ways and situations humans can’t and that lets them compensate.
That and that Waymo is actually a serious engineering company that takes responsibility seriously, takes far fewer risks, and is far more thorough about failure analysis, redundancy, etc.
lol like we actually share. we have centibillionaries while most people in the world work hard for almost nothing.
Nah people are terrible
<img alt="Why are you still here?" src="https://lemmy.zip/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-content.duckduckgo.com%2Fiu%2F%3Fu%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fmedia.tenor.com%252FEG_a9HBNibMAAAAM%252Fwhy-are-you-still-here-jared-dines.gif%26f%3D1%26ipt%3D6bd238a9e70fa19a18602eedda500a78b8d0862f548334f48f557ac603bba553">
Ahhhh everyone should listen to me!!!
Your image didn’t display for me in voyager app
The ones advocating for corporate greed and AI are the same ones talking about a birth rate crisis. I guess they just want more proles to slave for them and damn the ones who die young in the process.
Fuck this timeline
i see some state universities around saying the same, thing trying to blame the low enrollment crisis, to low birth rates, and not because COVID exposed the low-no job prospects and HCOL of post graduation. if your universities obscures/obfuscate the most important part of your DEGREE: labwork, or internships/ experience its only going to end one way.
Are you one of the too many people?
Lol. I thought the “crash can’t come soon enough” line was hilariously close to Dwight’s line. It was a joke. I guess everybody missed it. Fair enough, too, it was a joke from a comedy program… Why would anyone think that was supposed to be funny.
Will it crash, though? It’s replacing people, and people are expensive.
Yes. This tech can’t replace people like some think it can. Most companies aren’t reducing head count just outsourcing.
and only keep around a couple senior engineers, employees to manage those outsourced people, since the outsourced people may not be on par with stateside employees.
It’s doing a shit job at replacing people, it’s still too prone to hallucinating for the vast majority of its applications.
In many of the applications where AI has replaced people the promised performance gains never materialized because of the insane amount of babysitting a LLM agent requires.
Doesn’t matter if it can write 10 hours of code in 5 minutes if you still need a software dev to troubleshoot the output for 25 hours.
They have like 90% reliability (figure pulled directly from my ass) but they need 99.99% reliability to actually be effectively reliable.
They’ve burned through all their hype and still haven’t made it reliable yet. I think they’re not going to get it done before the bubble collapses.
It’ll be similar to the dotcom boom, infinite hype implosion collapses the market to a few core players and then those core players will get there over the next 15 years.
Isn’t going to disappear but it’s absolutely going to fade into the background of day to day life.
.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell
And capitalism!
It doesn’t make any difference whether they use coal, nuclear, or renewables.
If they were using renewables the rest of us would need the coal generated power to keep the lights on.
And the nuclear ?
You skipped it somehow.
you seem to have missed my point.
If humanity’s energy requirements without AI are x, and AI’s requirements are an additional y, then AI is reponsible for the worst energy sources up to the value of y.
I’m just pointing out the fact that you mention nuclear energy and then discarded it in your follow up.
What ?
I didn’t “discard” it, it’s just not a pertinent inclusion. I also didn’t mention geothermal power, or wheelbarrows.
It doesn’t matter what type of power is plugged into data centres. Turning them off would reduce coal power consumption.
I live in a country that produces 70+% of its energy through nuclear reactors.
Sure we are definitely an exception but turning off datacenters where I live wouldn’t change anything about coal.
To be clear I’m not advocating for nuclear energy nor am I saying it’s a bad option.
Every country has a different energy mix, some more “carbon efficient” than others let’s say but it is not only revolving about coal and renewables.
Anyway, I think it’s fairly clear to me the datacenters won’t shutdown anytime soon even without AI it’s gonna be a major consumption of energy in any country. So I think nuclear should definitely at least considered as an option and to some extent be part of any energy mix. I think everyone knows that only renewables is not really a realistic scenario. Coal obviously is the worst option in any amount. So yeah, I was surprised that you didn’t mention it that’s it. I do think it’s very much relevant to the topic of the ever increasing energy consumption we are all gonna face in the future. This post would probably not even exist if we shutdown datacenters but I suppose you meant it as shutting down only processing power toward AI. But still we will need more datacenters in the future no matter what.
Dude. You seem incapable of understanding the point I was trying to make.
Exactly, people don’t seem to realise that higher demand for energy means higher demand for all sources of energy including fussil fuels.
If doesn’t matter if this datacenter runs 100% on renewables if that means that the overall demand on the powergrid increases and now other clients that used to get (a higher percentage of) their power from renewable are getting it from coal, it’s just a green washing shift blame technique.
There’s one exception - when they are self-sufficient, or even net positive, with renewables.
One example is the Google datacenter in Hamina, Finland. They build it in an old unused paper mill, built their own renewables (3/4ths of their required at this point), and they use the cooling loop for district heating for the city. That extra heat provides around 75% of the required heating, meaning the city could stop relying on their old natural gas heaters so now the district heating runs on renewables as well.
It’s easy to be an energy neutral datacenter, simply pour enough money to building new renewables that wouldn’t have been built without your contributions, and you don’t tax the power grid.
I’ll begrudgingly concede that this is a good point.
Part of me wants to say “just force these assholes to build renewables without the datacentres” but I know that’s nonsensical.
I guess this is how carbon credit schemes are intended to work, but I’m aware that aside from a few specific cases carbon trading has just been a way to obfuscate carbon emissions.
Looking forward the 2026 ESG reports of large companies that are so happy to embrace AI :)
I think you would have an easier time searching for those who didn’t.
I’m not into gold panning… though it’s not like all companies are using AI so much that it will transpire in their ESG. Now I now a couple that were so far very happily ignoring this source of carbon and, as far as I remember, it was not reported by the cloud providers either.
It’s fucking insane how much is invested (both money and natural resources) in the emperor’s new clothes. Let’s scorch the planet because every idiot out there buys into the marketing and hype. We are utterly and truly doomed because of ourselves.
AI and the investment around it are literally the only thing holding up America’s economy right now. If you take the artificial growth and the vast amounts of investment that are being pumped in AI development data centers, the US economy has barely grown half percentage point.
No surprise that they are going to power this beast at all costs until it falls apart along with the US economy.
I mean, they could use their fascist power grab to drive through the infrastructure work to expand power transmission lines needed to support a modern economy, renewables, and yes more datacenters
Additional coal is just the easiest way since we already have century old power lines bringing that power where it’s needed
Yes, in this case, coal might be easiest, cheapest, fastest because we can continue to neglect infrastructure. It’ll fall apart on someone else’s administration
Typical. So basically, they’re gonna turn America into Texas. Their power grid is famously shitty and has been neglected for decades due to Republican control of the government. They are constantly kicking the can down the road for some other administration to deal with it.
Everyone time there’s even a slight dusting of snow anywhere in Texas the power grid shuts off and people freeze to death. But Texas refuses to fix the power grid and nationalize because it would mean investing and bringing their shitty substandard power grid up to modern standards.
Future generations will look back on the pre apocalypse population and call us sleep walkers. I know, as I’m one of them. Life is difficult enough already without jeopardising my freedom as the only way to change our course is violence at this point.
Sadly, yes.
All of these problems are caused by a remarkably small network of people. I’m not even necessarily talking about the CEOs. It’s the boards of directors. This is also the pool from which CEOs are drawn one and the pool to which CEOs return after their golden parachute. They function as a living repository of evil. A warehouse of criminals and nepo-babies. (Ex: Airbnb guy joined DOGE and is on teslas board. So first he destroys the housing market for a generation, and then destroys the government, and he is the person who directs Tesla.)
Like, could fit in one big room.
If it makes you feel any better, our '01, '08, '14, and '20 recessions all put hard downward pressure on carbon emissions.
If Trump manages to throw us into the first full blown Depression in a century, he may do more to curb US emissions than any president in history.
There’s still time for a general strike. The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor. That tactic was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.
If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), please consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one.
And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above.
Also @FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
Reminds me of this song. Carbon based lifeforms. World of sleepers
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu2eAI7viFw
Datacenter != AI
If you are using the internet for anything with cloud storage, you are contributing to datacenter growth. And that includes nearly everyone using social media.
Sure but energy use per datacenters was on a downward trend before ai, then it went the other way hard
Yes but data center growth prior to AI was manageable. There isn’t a grid on the planet (except maybe china?) which can support the growth of AI data centers.
These people have to plan energy needs on a 10-20 year life cycle, not 2. It’s the 2 that’s the problem.
The bitcoin miners have hopefully dropped off because they were chewing up gobs of energy too.
I thought they were totally just using flare gas and renewables ;) 🙄
But my understanding for real is that ai data centers are just the same hardware as buttcoin but more of it and organized. The venture capitalists finally got what they wanted, blowing their wad on Nvidia.
china is also building lots of coal plants to sustain the datacenters.
China already has 200% the capacity relative to their demand. They’ve been growing solar fast enough to beat very high 8%+ electricity consumption growth last year, and can probably keep the pace.
This would be 99% of businesses at this point. Stop using AI to make memes and clickbait videos.
I’m perfectly fine with Lemmy being limited to 100% renewable power. Don’t burn coal or LNG for me.
Except the demand for new data centers is driven entirely by the capacity constraints of the current AI models.
“Why are you mad at my five ton diseal SUV when you just adopted a pet chihuahua? They both emit carbon!”
I’m not sure that’s true. Every company uses storage, and every growing company needs more. But very few companies are training generative AIs.
You’re comparing mountains to molehills. That’s before you consider improvements in storage and compression relative to demands for space, or the degree to which our storage capacity “needs” are predicated on the voracious appetite of AI models and their unwanted output. Or, for that matter, the inefficient distribution of data and proliferation of spam data that predates it.
Most US Growth Now Rides on AI—And Economists Suspect a Bubble
The expansion in demand is entirely being driven by the expansion in AI capacity.
That article doesn’t say what you imply it does. Companies may be using ChatGPT to grow, but that doesn’t mean they are training AIs.
And the distinction is critical to energy usage. Training a new AI uses a lot of energy. Querying an existing AI uses far less.
It’s the MAG7 that’s driving growth. And they’re all fixated on training AI in some capacity
It costs $5 for each 10s video generation, based on Azure’s published rates for the first Sora model.
That’s presumably a lot of energy.
The MAG7 operate large and growing cloud services, so their datacenter costs would grow even without any AI training.
And charging $5 for a video query does not mean the query uses $5 of energy. The query is priced to recoup training costs that were already incurred.
Meanwhile China is going all in on renewables.
Here is a fact: an authoritarian non-democracy is doing a lot for securing the future of humanity, while the “leader of the free world” are vandalizing the climate and accelerating apocalyptic climate catastrophe.
In 2025, China is a net positive for the future of humanity, while the USA is a net negative.
If that makes you uncomfortable about what our political and economic systems in the West that brought us here, well, you know the meme: “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
If you, like me, care about the future of democracy, we have to do a LOT of digging.
We are a nation of man/woman children. Petulant little kids who don’t want to grow up and be responsible for anything.
BUT
AT
WHAT
COST
It might be cold comfort, but none of these business models have the liquidity behind them to build out coal power at the levels they claim they’ll need.
Nevermind that solar/wind would be cheaper. Or that the raw manpower to yield coal in quantity no longer exists. So much of these proposals are - at their heart - the same vaporware that promised waves of new nuclear construction and hydro-power and geothermal.
Bottom line is that GenAI’s primary revenue comes from dumb VC and bad debt. They can’t build, much less operate, any of this shit.
Our current system is going about how Marx predicted it would. The course correction that occurred after the Great Depression has been now completely reversed and we’re back staring at its approaching collapse. I don’t think we can escape that long term, and we’ll lose democracy in the process, unless we start moving away from capitalism. We gotta attack private firm ownership. Otherwise we’ll keep getting people accumulate enough capital to buy the rest of the system and steamroll the rest of us for profit.
capitalism was kind of never democratic i think, considering so much is basically dictated by the people who “own” it, which feels more like a dictatorship/ feudalism
Oh for sure. There’s however a higher degree of democracy than feudalism, mostly stemming one way or another from the newly developed labour power under capitalism. Power that labour has slowly ceded over the last 50-70 years or so, but it can still regain when pressed. The system still contains this vulnerability (from the point of view of the capitalist) and it seems impossible to eradicate.
And a lot of burying.
Fuck AI and these energy guzzling data centers. For decades we were told to conserve power and such and now all of those savings are being sucked up, and more, by these centers.
Remember, everytime us plebs are told to sacrifice for the environment it’s so the corpos and parasites can off load moral responsibility onto us.
they funded alot of campaigns doing that.
And for some reason OUR utility bills are going up to pay for it.
Yep. People are charged the marginal cost of power generation. Everyone pays the price of the most expensive source of electricity. The market is rigged.
its actually raising electricity prices in many areas.
Another reason to avoid the US.
Disgusting
Hey, regime 🖕
(Just expressing what is left to express here)
Our most advanced tech is dependent on some of our most old tech.
And I thought AI killing us would use cool robots and Shit. Well.
TBF it requires minimum effort from the ai. Efficient.
This one sums up humanity quite well these days: “Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you!” - Londo Mollari
So close, AI will kill us with coal robots and Shit-Wells
Republicans are kinda like robots
It’s the paperclip maximizer in action.
We were too addicted to AI slop to save ourselves.
Actually no, no one was addicted to AI slop, it was just shoved into every product so that huge companies could make a profit and everyone hates it.
But wait! The huge companies are losing tons money on this.
Why did we destroy the planet again???
its the techbros that are obsessed with AI slop.
The capitalist class loves the idea and rewards companies with investment money. They think it could be the ultimate tool to snuff out any power the working class still has; making many employees optional, total surveillance of the population, etc. I think it will be a long time until it can do many jobs, but the surveillance tech seems to be coming along pretty well (with “AI” cameras recording license plates and biometric identifiers being put up everywhere).
Wish my coworkers would get the memo. Constantly trying to shove AI videos in my face like “haha look at MLK Jr and Tupac as pro wrestling announcers haha”
As an artist I am deeply repulsed by AI. But other people around me? They love it for some reason.
Earth was past 7 of 9 planetary boundaries to support human life… before AI happened. That is again, boundaries to support HUMAN LIFE.
Article from when it was 6/9:
scientificamerican.com/…/humans-have-crossed-6-of…
The coal and O&G industries have been pushing themselves as suppliers to power AI, so don’t blame AI without blaming the coal and O&G industries.
Why not blame both?
AI people choosing renewables have nothing to do with this.
But they aren’t choosing renewables, they’re choosing coal. People are responsible for the choices they make.
Some companies choose renewables, other don’t. They aren’t only one person.
How many of the AI companies that chose coal actually produce something worthwhile? Seems like the first the these nuScience fuckers should do with their digital overmind is create clean power.
Using renewables to power AI for optimizing uses of renewables somehow is a good idea and I’m sure someone is working on it, but not everyone.
We don’t need AI to know how to use renewables. We’re just unwilling to implement then on a sociality scale.
I am totally willing to implement renewables. Whether you use it to power cars, homes, datacenter or AI and why, that’s anther discussion.
People get distracted over the fate of the pure speculative frenzy could be an AI bubble, and the harm to the hapless speculators and banksters could have a minor impact on the rest of the economy.
Reality is far worse than an AI bubble. It is a US mission for a fossil fueled powered Skynet for Israel that is too big to fail. Bubble in AI investments becomes unlikely, but total destruction of rest of US economy/prosperity becomes assured when the “plebs able to eat in America bubble” bursts is a sacrifice that a fossil fueled powered Skynet for Israel is willing to make.
If Americans are still able to afford to eat, then China or Iran wins.