the hard green environmentalists ought to be reading you. great post that strikes a balance between pros and cons, addresses the uncertainties without turning preachy or into histrionics
This is a great summary of arguments and the dimensions of the problem. As such, it is also an antidote to the narrow focus on costs and emissions which somehow enables the net zero movement to get in the way of progress to fight climate change. My personal view is that we can't afford not to grasp AI because it offers the best chance of new ways to reduce our overall impact on the climate.
The hard part is all the changes we cannot see. So for example, my guess would be that autonomous vehicles will actually reduce the total miles driven. It will make the mix of ride share and mass transit much more flexible allowing far fewer on person to a car journeys. Plus it will eliminate the emotional investment in our cars that leads to many people driving many miles for pleasure. But who knows, just a small example of how the true effects are impossible to predict.
I also think that people assume that natural intelligence uses no energy. The brain is actually very energy intensive so maybe using ChatGPT or Claude is not that environmentally harmful 😎
The brain is very efficient actually. I was just pointing out that it burns a surprising amount of calories. I always have some trail mix on hand when I do programming 😎 And most of the machine learning algorithms use neural networks so the brain and nervous system are still sources of inspiration for AI . And I realize that AI is very energy intensive. Microsoft wants to use carbon free energy for their data centers.
the hard green environmentalists ought to be reading you. great post that strikes a balance between pros and cons, addresses the uncertainties without turning preachy or into histrionics
I find your writing and approach on this subject so incredibly useful (and clear!) Thank you.
This is a great summary of arguments and the dimensions of the problem. As such, it is also an antidote to the narrow focus on costs and emissions which somehow enables the net zero movement to get in the way of progress to fight climate change. My personal view is that we can't afford not to grasp AI because it offers the best chance of new ways to reduce our overall impact on the climate.
The hard part is all the changes we cannot see. So for example, my guess would be that autonomous vehicles will actually reduce the total miles driven. It will make the mix of ride share and mass transit much more flexible allowing far fewer on person to a car journeys. Plus it will eliminate the emotional investment in our cars that leads to many people driving many miles for pleasure. But who knows, just a small example of how the true effects are impossible to predict.
I prefer to be an optimist
Thank you. The world is combinatorially explosive (Vervaeke)
I also think that people assume that natural intelligence uses no energy. The brain is actually very energy intensive so maybe using ChatGPT or Claude is not that environmentally harmful 😎
Ridiculous claim. The human brain only uses 12 watts, whereas your average frontier language model training epoch uses thousands of megawatt hours.
The brain is very efficient actually. I was just pointing out that it burns a surprising amount of calories. I always have some trail mix on hand when I do programming 😎 And most of the machine learning algorithms use neural networks so the brain and nervous system are still sources of inspiration for AI . And I realize that AI is very energy intensive. Microsoft wants to use carbon free energy for their data centers.