No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
The extreme damage to the environment they cause made me firmly against them. Add to that the destruction of the RAM and GPU markets, poisoning people's water, skyrocketing cost of living, their use for mass surveillance, etc.
I'd honestly impose very strict environmental regulations and usage regulations. I'd also impose regulations preventing AI from replacing humans, given all AI isn't reliable enough to do that in virtually any field.
This argument just proves you're thinking with your emotions and completely ignoring logic. You're simply repeating what you heard without any sort of critical thinking involved.
"The extreme damage to the environment they cause"
Like you don't own a car, eat meat, or heat your home.
The environmental damage from AIs doesn't even amount to a fraction of a percent of the pollution and environmental damage you cause simply by existing on this earth.
There are plenty of good reasons to dislike AI, but anyone who starts with environmental reasons is being played so hard they don't even know it.
Sounds like you are the one being played.
Transport, food and heating are not required because they are fun or nice to have. They are means to survive.
Energy and water consumption of data centers are different because the product (AI slop and best guesses) is NOT required to survive.
Sorry for existing (not sorry)
Do me a favour. Go look up the energy use per person for me in Germany, Spain, or the UK. Then go look up the energy usage per person in the USA or Canada and tell me again how necessary it is that transport, food, and heating are required energy use at the levels that currently happen in North America. You can repeat that same look from the "good" countries I listed to even lower use areas like Lithuania who still manage to heat and feed themselves on even less.
The way we live here is wasteful beyond belief, and the total value of that waste makes global AI energy usage look like a rounding error on one of the decimal points.
I'll even make it easy for you by giving you a link to a page that has these values. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
You are still arguing a moot point.
Could and should we, in the western world, be more sustainable? Absolutely yes!
But do you think, that even MORE energy consumption for something as useless and flawed as current AI systems are is in any way justified?
Even if it is just a blip on the radar compared to energy that is used to survive, it is still more load that comes on top of current usage.
How much sense would it make to undertake efforts to reduce the energy that is used to live while at the same time using more energy to power data centers that mostly benefit some guys who bet on the usefullness of AI, even against common sense?
You aren't allowed to be this upset about AI power usage while at the same time almost completely accepting the individual choices you're making to waste 100s of times more power. There's a term for this, Hypocrite.
The scales you're suggesting are just not even close to each other. We could build 10x more AI datacenters, and we (the population of the world) would still end up saving significantly more energy by eating meat one fewer day per week and eating vegetarian that day instead. I'm not even kidding.
The things we could do by adjusting our diets, choosing more appropriate housing sizes, cohabitating more, walking, biking, public transit. Individually every single one of those dwarfs the amount of energy used by AI by orders of magnitude.
It's the equivalent of yelling at your kid for leaving the LED bulb on in their bedroom all day, when you drove them to school and picked them up and it's only a mile away. One driving trip, one day, uses more energy than that bulb does if left on all year.
I am not 'allowed to be upset'? Lol, ok. Sounds like you see youself as some sort of moral police.
Call me a hypocrite if it makes you feel better but you are just skirting my point that the energy usage of AI is something that is unnecessary, just like the glowing LED lightbulb in your empty kitchen.
This makes you come across as either daft, or as someone who argues in bad faith.
Ever heard the saying "Penny Shy and Pound Foolish"
It's literally what you're doing right now.
There is a point there, though.
American cars are much less efficient than European ones.
The amount of water required for AI data centres worldwide is more than an order of magnitude lower than the water required for just corn in the US alone. Only a small fraction of which actually gets used for food.
The average energy usage per person in the US is nearly three times higher than someone in the UK.
The environmental cost of data centres is absolutely a concern, but we shouldn't forget the US alone wastes more energy and resources than are used by data centres worldwide.
I'll reply to this because I think it fits in refuting your greater point:
No, there isn't.
I, as a mere peasant, have only the power to vote for a better system. Something I often don't even have as we have a dualopoly of right wing political parties in America, and probably won't ever have a fair election again regardless at this point.
The billionaires who are putting up these AI data centers, poisoning our water at unprecedented rates, spiking electricity usage and costs at unprecedented rates, polluting our environment at unprecedented rates, are doing this entirely at their own will. They have the power to create major change. They're using that power for evil.
This is a false equivalence. Especially when you remember its the same hyper-rich fucks that made America rely on cars, and made our cars inefficient gas guzzlers.
I don't know what you think my greater point was, maybe you've accidentally conflated me with another poster.
My point actually is that these are not unprecedented rates. These are entirely precedented rates. This is gross capitalism destroying the world as gross capitalism always does. What you've lost sight of, though, is the respective scale of things.
As I said, the US alone needlessly wastes vastly more energy and water than the entire world's usage of AI consumes. For energy, it's several times more, for water it's orders of magnitude more.
You make out that solving these massive problems is impossible, so instead you're railing against AI. Which of course is your prerogative, but just remember that there are much bigger wins out there.
Said just before you vomit some Redditor ass, fedora tipping neck bearded bullshit but I'll let you continue.
Omg the dipshit is unironically doing the meme. Holy shit.
Hey dumbfuck, driving a car in America and heating my home in the winter isn't a fucking option, its a necessity to live. You also have to be fucking delusional to think my collective pollution, meat eating included, is even slightly comparable to these power chugging, water and air poisoning AI data centers that are entirely optional to build and run, by the way.
Again, source? Or are you just regurgitating what you heard Sam Altmann say while you were grargling his nuts?
Total Datacenter energy use globally is about 1.5% of total Electricity use, which electricity usage itself only makes up about 20% of total global energy use. All Datacenter use isn't even AI use, it's every single datacenter holding up the internet from Netflix to Amazon to the Wix page created for your home business.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/data-centers-share-electricity-demand?country=%7EOWID_WRL
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
So again I assert (with sources that back me up) that AI energy use/pollution is a small fraction of a single percent of overall use.
You've been lied to, now you need to ask WHY you're being lied to about AI energy use and pollution being a problem.
You're also absolutely wrong about heating and transportation being necessities in their current form. There are real choices you can make to drastically reduce your footprint on the environment including things like living in a smaller home, or with more people under the same roof. Those choices can quite literally reduce your individual heating requirements by 70-90%, and often those housing options are located in higher density urban locations where public transit, walking, and cycling are significantly easier to do. Practically everyone in the world could live in Cities and realize these efficiencies, there's no real reason stopping that from happening other than personal choice. People in North America have just normalized this ultra-spread out suburban bullshit that's literally costing us the planet.
Why are you guessing when there is a lot of information available?
https://www.hanwhadatacenters.com/blog/what-are-the-power-requirements-for-ai-data-centers/
AI data center power demand will surge 160% by 2030, requiring 68 gigawatts of capacity compared to 10 gigawatts in 2025.
1 gigawatt is equivalent to about the energy usage for 800,000 homes. That is 8 millions homes right now projected to be 54 million homes of electricity in the next 4 years an increase of 580%
You have the gal to try and blame a single end user for their consumption when faced with this? You are clearly being disingenuous.
How much pollution does 68 gigawatt make!? Anywhere from 300-600 million metric tons of C02. This doesn't include all the other pollution this energy generation will make. Just the C02.
"China makes one-third of all global carbon dioxide emissions, emitting roughly 13 billion metric tons annually. By contrast the United States, emits about 4.6 billion metric tons a year."
Once again, just the C02 and wow. I am sure it is all the suburban populations fault in the US. Man you act like a corporate shill trying to blame pollution on the individual to shift the blame. Acting so dumb it hurts.
https://medium.com/@brendacovarrubias/carbon-footprints-the-individual-vs-the-corporate-giant-165b0c75dd11
"according to a groundbreaking 2017 report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Climate Accountability Institute, just 100 companies were responsible for over 70% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988."
People need to do their part to reduce waste and people in North America definitely produce more than average. Pretending they are the problem is pure bullocks though.
You simply don't seem to understand scale.
Lets use your article's number. 68 Gigawatts of capacity required Globally, which is a little under 600 Terawatt hours per year. Global electricity production is around 29,000TWh Global total energy consumed per year (including non-electricity sources) is about 150,0000 to 160,000TWh
That puts AI use at about 2% of electricity use, and about 0.38% of total energy consumption. It's quite literally a fraction of 1% even by your own numbers.
Your China argument math is bad as well. You can remove a billion people from China's population, and they would still have more people than the US. They have 4.2x more people, and have only 2.8x as many carbon emissions.
I just explained the scale. Saying 2% is a nonsensical and reductionist argument that ignores the projected increase and the reality we don't actually need AI at all.
It is not my math dude. If you want to argue the experts take it up with them, not me.
China produce 3 times as much pollution. Are you saying their 300 million rural farmers produce this pollution!? You are acting impossibly dumb right now.
The problem is industry, it always has been. Your ignorance to this issue and trying to shift the blame is pathetic.
That's the projected increase from YOUR OWN FUCKING SOURCE by 2030, and it's not 2%, it's 0.38% of global energy use.
You're clearly moving the goalposts because you recognize you've lost. I know it, you know it, and you're still choosing to be mad about it instead of mad that global meat production uses somewhere between 12% and 20% of global energy usage. We could all literally start eating vegetarian, and save somewhere between 31x and 52x more energy than AI datacenters are projected to use. You could eat vegetarian just one day a week, and you'd still save somewhere around 5x as much energy.
You don't practice what you preach, you're a hypocrite.
There is no goalpost to move. You want to blame pollution on US suburbanites as a way to discredit the environmenal impact of AI datacenters. I pointed out you are full of shit. You have no rebuttal.
I said that US citizens create more pollution and everyone should do their part. This is a fucking given.
Meanwhile 70%+ of pollution comes from industry. Your inability to see the bigger picture is stunning to say the least.
I'm not full of shit. Suburbanites have been blasting carbon into the atmosphere for a century at a rate the AI datacenters could only dream of. You've given no evidence to prove otherwise while I backed up my numbers.
Industry exists so that humans can consume. There is no industry on the planet who's production (and energy use/pollution) can't be directly or indirectly attributed to a human customer.
You buy the electricity that's generated from the natural gas power plant. The pollution to produce and burn that is yours. Your car is made of metals that produced pollution and used energy (which also produced pollution) to extract and refine. That pollution is yours. The energy that went into rendering Toy Story 5, and building the movie theater, and growing the popcorn. That's all yours.
Stop blaming industry, industry doesn't exist unless people buy their products. You make the choices with your wallet.
Yes you are. You are an apologist for corporations. Pathetic. You have not disproven one thing I have said.
Industry wastes and produces products we don't need. Take cooking pots and the forever chemicals fiasco. Corporations developed cheaper disposable cookware and in doing so poisoned every single human on the planet. Was this suburbanites fault? Fuck no. Corporations drove the adoption not the other way around to make MORE Money.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2022/01/31/climate-change-fossil-fuel-industry-individual-responsibility
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220504-why-the-wrong-people-are-blamed-for-climate-change
Take recycling plastic for our second example. Companies fucking knew recycling plastic was not feasible but they created an entire campaign around it to blame the consumer.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled
You are acting so fucking ignorant it isn't funny.
You literally just admitted that people got tricked by a company through propaganda to buy their products, while people knew and said there was a problem, ignored those people, and bought the products anyways. Then blamed the company.
It must be so easy to live your life in such ignorance. You never have to think hard about anything, just believe the marketing campaigns and ignore everything else.
This is exactly the same situation. You're being lied to about AI, there is literally massive amounts of money flowing into anti-AI marketing right now, and instead of asking why anyone would spend money on that, you just accept it as truth because it doesn't come from a company.
I am sorry, I didn't understand your comprehension of the situation is this bad. The public didn't know, the corporations did in regards to forever chemicals. The corporations covered it up and they are now fighting it through numerous lawsuits in the courts. Please do try to catch up.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/05/425451/makers-pfas-forever-chemicals-covered-dangers
Next up global warming. Did you know the petroleum scientists back in the 50s knew global warming was a real? The corporations then paid for the research to prove it. They covered this up and paid heavily into anti-climate change propaganda. This is why there is a climate change debate when it was already proven true by the companies doing the fucking polluting.
https://commonhome.georgetown.edu/topics/climateenergy/defense-denial-and-disinformation-uncovering-the-oil-industrys-early-knowledge-of-climate-change/
But please tell me I am soooo ignorant. What a joke.
You want to blame the individual which is literally propaganda paid for by corporations to absolve them of their crimes. Acting like a bootlicking little bitch isn't as cool as you think it is.
You think pointing out that AI sucks is part of some giant fucking conspiracy!? What in the literal fuck are you on. Objectively there are a lot of things to not like about what corporations are doing with AI.
Participate, society, very smart, etc. Top notch.