cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20289663
A report from Morgan Stanley suggests the datacenter industry is on track to emit 2.5 billion tons by 2030, which is three times higher than the predictions if generative AI had not come into play.
The extra demand from GenAI will reportedly lead to a rise in emissions from 200 million tons this year to 600 million tons by 2030, thanks largely to the construction of more data centers to keep up with the demand for cloud services.
Everyone thought AI was going to kill us via some Terminator-like Skynet.
Nope.
It’s just going to let us kill ourselves via greed and accelerate destroying the environment.
And even if it doesn’t, it’ll still make hundreds of trillions of dollars doing it, so it was worth it in the end.
Every IT company now: we should increase our server costs by 100x to offer unwanted gimmicks that users don’t want and aren’t willing to pay
Oh yea, this is happening too.
Between AI and shitcoin mining, these two “technology branches” already consume more power than all the green power added to the grid combined.
It’s why humans will always remain de facto slaves to a few masters. Anything that could potentially be advantageous to all life on Earth? Only if the ones at the top get to profit first. No profit? Enjoy scorching to death on hell-planet for the next forty years!
Between AI and shitcoin mining, these two “technology branches” already consume more power than all the green power added to the grid combined.
And your sources? I only did a cursory search, and according to the IEA data centers are responsible for somewhere in the range of 2-6% of electricity demand. Renewables are currently around 30% globally.
I feel like some people are just emotional reactionaries. They see a certain story, and in their own mind they make the story worse than it is, and treat their feelings as fact.
I have no sources on this, or proof that this guy in particular is doing that.
…wait, am I doing it right now???
Hmmmmm…
AI consumes power, yes, it’s projected to triple its environmental impact, yes, but its environmental impact is much less than most other things. If anything, the AI hate train draws angry peoples’ focus off the big polluters that matter.
“Arrghle AI is in everything and modern cars track you, I’ll just drive a 30+ year old pickup truck because they don’t has no AI tracking nonsense”
Oil and gas companies: money
Between AI and shitcoin mining, these two “technology branches” already consume more power than all the green power added to the grid combined.
I think you would be shocked if you learned what some other things in our world cost in CO2.
The energy costs of cryptocurrency mining are easy to calculate because the system is extremely transparent. AI is a little muddier, but we know how much big tech is expanding data centers, and we know how many enterprise GPUs Nvidia sells, so we get a decent estimate.
But these things don’t actually do as much damage as compared to other things. Imagine how much energy is used for Gaming PCs and consoles. It’s probably up there with Crypto and AI if you consider all running consoles and PCs, plus all the multiplayer infrastructure. But we don’t have numbers because this is hard to calculate.
And then there’s stuff like personal automobiles, that completely blow these other things out-of-the-water.
Or compare to the CO2 put out by global concrete construction. It’s more than some might believe.
Yes but concrete is required. It is literally the foundation of modern civilization. It is the second most used substance on the planet after water. Without it we would have to do away with things like roads, power plants (green and carbon emitting), housing, water treatment and waste treatment plants, erosion control and seawalls, and most production facilities for all of our day to day goods and essentials.
The industry is making steps to reduce its up front carbon cost and inrease captured carbon in the concrete, but it is slow moving as big changes can cause major problems with infrastructure. Noone wants their hospital falling down because they used a new mix design that hasn’t been thoroughly tested and tried.
We dont work without concrete, but i’m pretty sure we do work without bitcoin.
If your just looking at fun carbon emitting facts though, then aluminum smelting is another huge number like 4% globally. Concrete is like 7% globally, and HVAC is like 12%.
I dont think much will remain after this extinction event. Do you know how long it takes niches to refill in an ecosystem? We’re going to get to a point where industry collapses and we are reset if we survive at all.
We wouldn’t even be able to restart. All the easily available resources have been delved. Three thousand years ago people could scoop pure gold from rivers by the kilos. Today, all decent deposits lie kilometers below the surface.
But it’ll be for the best. We had our shot and blew it.
Resources like gold would be more accessible, y’know because it already been mined and made into things. If society collapses what few survivors there are could recycle shit like metals. The actual issue is fossil fuels. Getting to a point where you can use renewable power would be difficult with using fossil fuels for power first.
Maybe resources will be scarce enough that we are forced to try something other than capitalism, as we have to share to make it anywhere. Or maybe it will just make all resources needed for advanced technologies unavaible. Then we can fight over whose hut is closest to the last river.
Between AI and shitcoin mining
The difference is that the better shitcoins have been upgraded to be 99% more energy efficient.
But there’s no foreseeable limit or escape from the waste of “AI”.
I remember when scientists were more focused on making AI models smaller and more efficient, and research on generative models was focused on making GANs as robust as possible with very little compute and data.
Now that big companies and rich investors saw the potential for profit in AI the paradigm has shifted to “throw more compute at the wall until something sticks”, so it’s not surprising it’s affecting carbon emissions.
Besides that it’s also annoying that most of the time they keep their AIs behind closed doors, and even in the few cases where the weights are released publicly these models are so big that they aren’t usable for the vast majority of people, as sometimes even Kaggle can’t handle them.
