• remon@ani.social
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    6 hours ago

    That is fundamentally a problem with using polluting power sources, not AI. AI is just wasting huge amounts of power, but that wouldn’t nearly be as big of a problem with clean power sources.

    • eleijeep@piefed.social
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      1 hour ago

      Regardless of what power source you use, all of the power going into a datacentre comes out as heat. So even a 1GW solar plant powering an AI datacentre is putting 1GW of heat into the atmosphere.

    • im_fine_sandy@nord.pub
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      3 hours ago

      Sure but if we are building out renewable capability as quick as we can, but it’s being outstripped by demand, then maybe demand is part of the problem.

      • r1veRRR@feddit.org
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        37 minutes ago

        We aren’t, though, not even close. And we’ve also been holding back over the years. Trump even paid a german company to abandon an already approved offshore windpark.

        Even still, I beg people to stop falling for the same sensationalist trick that makes every conservative foam at the mouth about immigrants. PUT ABSOLUTE NUMBERS INTO RELATION TO SOMETHING!! What is the estimated 34 million in 2030 in percent? What is the impact of non-veganism in the same time? What percentages are we looking at?

        Our outrage and effort should be in relation to the negative impact of each problem. Animal AG has a gigantic impact in every sensible metric, and it’s far far far bigger than AI. Be honest, do you think even a fraction of the loudest complainers about AIs resource use are vegan?

        Can we really believe people whose morality stops wherever they’d personally need to actually do more than bitch and moan?

    • lokalhorst@feddit.org
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      6 hours ago

      I heard this before:

      That is fundamentally a problem with using polluting power sources, not Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just wasting huge amounts of power, but that wouldn’t nearly be as big of a problem with clean power sources.

      I am 100% sure big oil is heavily invested in pushing AI data centers.

      • Jason2357@lemmy.ca
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        3 hours ago

        Case in point: Alberta. As a landlocked province, they have been struggling to get oil and gas to markets, being limited by the pipelines other provinces or the US is willing to build. Now, the vast, vast majority of the planned ai datacentres in Canada are in Alberta, with insane sweetheart deals from government.

        They found a way to get paid to burn gas within their borders and are going whole hog.

      • remon@ani.social
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        5 hours ago

        Feels more like the fossil fuel industry would be quite happy with people pointing fingers at AI for the more fundamental problem they are causing.

        • Rothe@piefed.social
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          3 hours ago

          They are the same. AI companies are using excess energy powered by fossil fuels for no reason at all. We don’t need it. If they were using renewable energy then they would be taking renewable energy from projects that are much more important for our daily survival.

          All energy consumed by AI is energy we could have spend for something actual useful. That they are using fossil fuels just underlines what a mountain of “fuck you” to humanity the entire AI project is. It exists solely to provide more billions for billionaires and no other reason.

          • r1veRRR@feddit.org
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            34 minutes ago

            Same is true for meat. Meat is to nutrition what AI is to intelligence. An extremely wasteful, ultimately unnecessary version with better alternatives.

            The main difference for all the complainers is of course that they already don’t use AI. Not using meat would, in contrast, require actual effort beyond moaning and bitching.

            If your morals depend on whether it requires personal effort, you’re not moral, you’re a hypocrite.

          • remon@ani.social
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            2 hours ago

            If they were using renewable energy then they would be taking renewable energy from projects that are much more important for our daily survival.

            Exactly … the problem with AI is that it’s wasting energy.

            Then there is another problem, which is that a lot of our energy comes from sources that cause pollution.

            The wasting of energy would not be that significant of a problem if enough clean energy was available. They are not the same. Just related.