That would be funny if it weren’t so infuriatingly true. Don’t forget the layoffs generated by replacing people with the AI and the shittier customer service as they replace more people with ineffective automated systems that completely fail to be able to help you with your problem thereby dumping you in a 72 minute queue with everyone else that the system failed to help in order to talk to a real live person in a foreign country that will do little more than read you a script and then escalate your case to someone that will never call you back.
gasp
I’d have written more but I had to take a breath.
I don't see the connection?
Each sector has to do its part: Food production, Housing AND, yes, computation. AND, not XOR.
Each sector has to do its part
Me, doing my tiny part to help
Billionaire, undoing the efforts of millions of people
Energy prices surging. Agriculture collapsing. Heat waves killing thousands of people. Wars erupting over access to potable water.
Everyone doing their part.
I don't think downplaying our efforts is really helpful to our goals.
I also don't believe in the individual vs collective action blame dichotomy, because we should build pilitical infrastructure that fosters climate action and prevents emissions -> If we continue to put or keep lawmakers into power that empower the extreme rich, we disempower ourselves.
The subsequent economic system doesn't really matter, but the physical output matters.
Bro hit'em with them logic gates
So that's what we use AI for, solving the climate crisis!
Whew, glad we got that settled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_model
Cloud-resolving climate models are nowadays run on high intensity super-computers which have a high power consumption and thus cause CO2 emissions.[44] They require exascale computing [..]. For example, the Frontier exascale supercomputer consumes 29 MW.[45] It can simulate a year’s worth of climate at cloud resolving scales in a day.[46]
Techniques that could lead to energy savings, include for example: "reducing floating point precision computation; developing machine learning algorithms to avoid unnecessary computations; and creating a new generation of scalable numerical algorithms that would enable higher throughput in terms of simulated years per wall clock day."[44]
It's all NAND under the hood.
You can power a datacenter with solar panels and hydro, there is no green way to raise cattle.
There is absolutely no green way to extract all the material needed to build a datacenter.
There is plenty of green ways to raise cattle, however with these ways you can't feed everyone beef at almost every meals.
Actually there are ways to do that. Recycling of materials used in various technologies (including lithium batteries and solar panels) is always improving. Chip companies like Intel are increasingly pushing for conflict free minerals. Just because something isn't being done in a sustainable way doesn't mean it can't be done sustainably, just like with farming.
What is the difficult part for datacenters, that isn't true of every other building? I was under the impression that the most inefficient part of most electronics is the batteries, which is a problem looking to go away with new chemistries.
You can also not power a datacenter that's only for generating powerpoints and instead use the renewables to replace coal plants. Until all our necessities are covered by renewables and we've retired fossil fuels, we should be dialing back the conspicuous consumption.
The worst thing about many programmers and tech people is that in general these types of people will always be more obsessed with the next technology that will save us by allowing us to consume more and become more selfish than with genuine solutions to actual human problems not neatly defined computer/math problems.
Like problems computer programs are useful for, techbros see the climate crisis as an optimization problem with easily definable numbers and quantities. Politics, ideology, emotions and systematic oppression and suffering don’t enter the algorithm in quantifiably explicit ways so they are considered trivial for the purposes of solving the problem. Most computer programmers I have met would have no problem writing a computer algorithm to save time for cops having to manually choose who to pull over and instead use a crime prediction algorithm trained on who police officers have previously pulled over in the past to “solve crime” and “make policing unbiased”. Maybe that is changing, but it isn’t because most of these people actually get what is so evil about writing a program like that in their hearts, they just understand they get shamed every time they suggest crap like this.
Thus you get legions of these people decrying environmentalists and their strategies with a fatalist cynicism in places like hacker news while they simultaneously trot out whatever lame Elon musk style “revolutionary technology” that they think will solve the crises we face that revolves around catastrophically stupid global scale geoengineering or tech that is eternally 30 years away just magically becoming distributed and ready for mass market use tomorrow.
Everything is optimization, everything must scale as quickly as possible, everything is about bigger and bigger regimes of control that enforce rigid operations and interactions. These people think the entire universe can be seen through the lens of factorio and it makes me vomit in my mouth a little every time I think about it.
This is of course by far the most dangerous part about many programmers and tech people, by and large they seem to believe that because they understand computers that they understand everything they need to know about the world. It is really no different than any other kind of hubris, it’s just the rest of us give tech people more leeway to engage in it because the tech world preys so intensely on our practical real world hopes and dreams while laying claim to large swathes of our imaginative capacity to envision different realities.
There are also many amazing tech and programmer type people, I am speaking in generalizations that will never include every instance of the type. I love you, cool and radical lefty techies!!!! This isn’t aimed at you.
You can absolutely raise cattle in an energy neutral (or potentially even energy positive) way. Cattle, in nature, consume grass. Most of the energy the cows get from the grass comes from solar energy. If they're being raised on land that is not being used for anything else and no equipment or anything else is used, the area gathers more energy than it costs.
However, this is generally not how cattle is raised. In order to meet the large demands of our society other methods are used that cost more energy. That doesn't mean it can't be done, but it won't be done on a large scale.
I'd rather switch the datacenters to green energy before trying to convince people to give up cheeseburgers.
We cannot afford to do one before the other. We're need to do both
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
(emphasis mine)
People giving up cheeseburgers and SUVs has been on the table for at least forty years. If you’re younger than forty, that’s your entire lifetime. It has never not been a problem. It has always been exacerbated by republiQans. It will not change, it will not go away, it will never be wrong. Give up cheeseburgers and SUVs or kill the planet with arrogance and greed.
Guess which one we’ve picked for forty years. G’head. Guess.
I agree, but I guess the scope is more about oppurtunity costs - "At maximum expanse of renewable energy, should we use that energy for fancy justifications of layoffs of middle to owning class tech jobs or for e.g. electrified heat pumps and vehicles for working and middle class people"
Isn't the majority of the problem with cattle the diet which causes more methane?
There's also a food chain issue. Vegan diets are less CO2 intensive per calorie. There are ways to have some meat with negligible CO2 impact, but it's not going to be coming from factory farms.
Very Sharp
Very charp
I swear the concept of doing two things at once is lost on nearly everyone on the internet who clutch their pearls.
The doomscrolling rot has infected their minds lol. They overemphasize the effects of climate change while ignoring everything good and green people are doing which is literally countering said climate change through mitigation and adaptation.
Yet... somehow they want to freeze the entirety of the world, magically build enough wind, solar, and hydro to power everything, then just... turn it back on again.
Yeah, literally everyone would do that if they could. It's not how reality works lol. Prepare for greenwashing comments for quoting studies that aren't from the 1970s!
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03012021/five-aspects-climate-change-2020/
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/can-we-slow-or-even-reverse-global-warming
https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/adaptation-mitigation/resources/
https://www.un.org/en/un75/climate-crisis-race-we-can-win
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-still-plenty-we-can-do-to-slow-climate-change/
Yet... somehow they want to freeze the entirety of the world, magically build enough wind, solar, and hydro to power everything, then just... turn it back on again.
No, we want billionaires to stop using so much fucking energy and making things disproportionately worse for everyone
They overemphasize the effects of climate change while ignoring everything good and green people are doing which is literally countering said climate change through mitigation and adaptation.
Overemphasizing the death of all life on the planet? Really? Wow that seems hard to do. Thank goodness the ‘good and green’ people are literally countering said destruction, so that everything’s good and nice again.
Although mitigation isn’t recovery it’s just making it less bad. And adaptation might be good but it’s also inevitable given the dying environment so I’m not sure we should credit that as a win.
I guess burning tons of fuel to crank out some bitcoins for Elmo is okley-fuckin-dokely! I was a grade A moron to doubt it!
I went through 3 of your sources and they claim that we can, in fact, turn to renewable energies. And that we should! None said anything about it being impossible. I guess maybe one of the others will say something like that, but honestly I'm not working to make your point for you.
Everybody except your strawmen agree there's a transition period. The problem is that due to many interests, the powers that be are dragging their feet.
👍
