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We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.
(www.technologyreview.com)
this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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A better analogy for AI is the discovery of asbestos or the invention of single-use plastics. Terrible fucking idea.
I think it’s probably a bit early to tell for certain on that assessment. There is definitely pros and cons to all technology. Electricity production causes environmental damage, building wooden houses require logging. Plastics are a byproduct of a withering industry. Asbestos might have saved more lives than it took, but there were probably much better ways to solve fire resistant buildings.
Why all these destructive things? Capitalism requires maximizing profits above all else. So, really the question is how will capitalism fuck us over with AI? So, so many ways. That’s why it’s important that we build community understanding of this technology in order to combat it. It’s not going away. It’s here to stay. So we either put our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not here or we can embrace it and learn how it works and how to defeat it and come up with open source tooling to combat it.
I’m in the latter camp. I love technology breakthroughs and want to learn first hand the capabilities to understand how it will be used against me and how I can use it.
Plastics are great, what are you smoking, plastics?
Well, it's a bit better than that, simply because you can train AI with solar power. Probably nobody does that currently, as it's easier, faster-to-market and probably (for whatever corrupt reason) cheaper for business to let it run on burning fossils/nuclear. Currently there's an insane amount of waste, often 1000s of models are trained and only the best performing one is deployed - and then it's just a fancy autocomplete. The better use is for prediction of material failure, new medicine and protein folding, generally improved processes.
With asbestos you get some convenience, but it'll be for eternity a pain to find a waste management facility that will accept it.