The leap in emissions is largely due to energy-guzzling data centers and supply chain emissions necessary to power artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The report estimated that in 2023, Google’s data centers alone account for up to 10% of global data center electricity consumption. Their data center electricity and water consumption both increased 17% between 2022 and 2023.
Google released 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide just last year, 13% higher than the year before.
Climate scientists have shown concerns as Big Tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft continue to invest billons of dollars into AI.
The answer is nuclear power.
Or how about cutting back on the idiotic and venal misuse of poorly-developed AI?
there are still going to be a lot of people who need power though. Cutting the US of AI isn’t going to magically remove coal plants from the grid, it’s going to do nothing actually. We need to be building new plants, period.
We need to be transitioning to zero carbon as fast as possible, period, and even that isn’t good enough. Moderating our energy consumption is vital. There is a cliff at the end of the road and business as usual means driving on down the road.
I am not saying that we need to turn off our lights and heating. I am saying that we first-worlders use a lot of power on frivolous things that we absolutely can live without.
I think it’s unfair to call it poorly-developed, the rush to market it and apply it in every corner is driven entirely by capitalist speculation, the engineers and scientists working on developing these systems are not to blame
Are you happier with “inadequately-developed”?
In both cases I was referring to the fact we’re letting the equivalent of a toddler run amok while being exploited by greedy capitalists and trained by fascists. It’s a very smart toddler but that just makes things worse.
oh yes I’m not excited about humans being replaced by bias amplifying machines with corporate morals
Environmentalism aside, I think it’s shitty that a company can waste so much energy on frivolous things anyway. Even if we were using more nuclear I still wouldn’t want it going to generating more porn of three-breasted women
Why did you pick the one positive use of AI?