Net-zero in 2030 is a lie. Google, Microsoft, whoever, - doesn't matter. It's only five years left. I don't even think that bigcop can go from increasing carbon emissions to decreasing before 2030.
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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Who better than these obnoxious companies to build solar and wind farms to power their own server farms?
It would seem that we shall be requiring you peasants to give up another 10% of your daily carbon footprint to meet the demands of our new machine overlord.
The stuff about tech companies going carbon neutral or whatever was such bullshit. It was clear this was mostly PR and if there was a need to massively increase carbon emissions (as happened with current "AI" trends), they wouldn't think twice.
So, lets get this straight. Humans are going to die. Animals are going to die. Plants are going to die.
...........so that corporations can make a few easier dollars before this whole planet burns in flames?
Yes, corporationS. Plural. What? You think google is the only one using AI?
I mean, yeah.
One of the hallmarks of our species is its insatiable, irrational greed.
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It's so we can make silly AI songs to send to each other :)
so that corporations can make a few easier dollars before this whole planet burns in flames?
Sure. But they do that by providing services. Services like Gmail and (probably for a large part) cloud hosting for other companies, companies whose services you're probably using as well.
And honestly, it usually is more economical (Both financially as well as in eco footprint) for those companies to use cloud services that scale based on demand, rather than having a fixed set of servers running for the potential max capacity.
Don't get me wrong, increased carbon emissions is bad, but the picture is a bit more nuanced than "Google flip switch, kill animals, get money".
The AI hype (talk to your toaster!) will blow over, useful AI will remain and improve, this is just a hurdle along the way.
The AI hype (talk to your toaster!) will blow over, useful AI will remain and improve, this is just a hurdle along the way.
I hope so. AI spam causing too much internet noise to the point where we can't tell which one's true or not would be one big hurdle.
Who knows, maybe it'll teach people to be more skeptical of the things they read online, and actually look for the underlying sources.
Literally not a single person on the planet thinks Google is the only one using AI. Agree with the rest though...
I agree with everything except that A.I. doesn’t make money and may never solve a problem important enough to justify the cost.
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These companies 100% said they'd be carbon neutral by 2030 in order to take the wind out of the sails of people pushing for carbon taxes, rather than because they actually intended on doing it.
Could be the other way as well. Prepare to become carbon neutral in order to have less tax burden. But once that fell though, they didn't care again. The only way they will be carbon neutral is if governments make it more expensive for them to not be.
Yup. The one thing that is certain is that you cannot just leave companies to self-regulate.
Time to use less paper straws, folks #weareinthistogether🌎
I turn off my lights when I'm not in a room and don't own a server farm. #doingmypart🌳
I realized the reading lights on my private jet were all incandescent. Recently flew it to Italy and had them swapped out there for LED.
Speed running two apocalypse fronts.
who would have guessed the giant corporation would have lied about something, because we haven’t been lied to before.
Fucking hell
The answer is nuclear power.
Or at least not decommissioning old ones. A dollar invested into new solar or wind goes further than new nuclear right now, but we'll see if it tips more towards nuclear once the grid is a higher percentage intermittent and needs a lot more energy storage with it.
Modular nuclear reactors seem really cool though for replacing large long term generators like at construction or excavation sites.
a lot of older nuclear plants were built in the 70s and 80s and those plants are going to be EOL even with extensions, unless we're going to extend the lifecycle of those a second time. They should probably be decommissioned, unfortunately.
I obviously don't know all the cases, but if extending the life a second time is cost comparable to renewables, yes we absolutely should do it.
Or how about cutting back on the idiotic and venal misuse of poorly-developed AI?
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
The technology is promising, it's just not remotely ready for what they're trying to use it for, and may never be in its current iteration (transformer-based LLMs). Like, yes, an AI will probably eventually be able to read many articles from search and integrate that information together in a useful way, but right now it's almost as likely to just start making shit up halfway through and tell you to eat glue lmao.
The problem is that AI is the new corporate buzzword like web was back during the dot com bubble. The web did end up being massively successful, but it just wasn't ready for like 90% of what investors wanted from it back then.
Exactly what I meant by poorly-developed.
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.
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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?
But by all means, everyone don't use plastic straws! You're killing the environment!
Yeah dawg we can't possibly do two things that are good for the environment, we have to pick one. Everyone knows that.
Plastic straws are harmful to sea turtles. That is why their use has been reduced.
Do you like turtles?
I know this is true, but I find it bizarre that there's this fixation on straws and not the hundred other things we are likely doing that also kills turtles.
It's like someone saw that viral video of the turtle with a straw up it's nose and decided that's the only thing to focus on.
I bought this like, prepared meal thing. It was like curry or something. Packaged, shelf stable. It harked on eco-friendly packaging. I figured, I've gotten curry before that was in a foil bag which I assume is easily recyclable. Probably something like that, right?
Every component was individually plastic wrapped. Even the bowl. Except for the bamboo "spoon". That was wrapped in paper. I put "spoon" in quotes because it was vaguely spoon shaped and functioned more like an oat from a rowboat.
Like, was this just a piss poor attempt at green washing?
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I wonder if this is taking into account the energy mix of the particular data centers, or just using the average energy mix?
Sadly it's tricky to separate the two.
Say if hypothethically we have a data center that is not connected to the grid, and is entirely running on solar power and battery storage.
If the grid still generates (part of) its electricity need using fossil fuels, those same solar panels and batteries could instead have been used to (further) decarbonize the grid.
While using solar power is good, increasing the overall unnecessary electricity consumption is still not great.
But you can measure how much of the power of a grid is generated with fossil fuels at a particular place and time. For example, if they have more data centers where energy is cheap like from hydro or geothermal, then the carbon footprint will be less than if they were just using average power statistics.
That is assuming that those data centers are necessary. If the data center is doing something that is not really needed then it is in effect wasting power that could have been used for other purposes. (e.g. using surplus power to make steel or aluminium for instance)
While I do think that AI-tools can be increadibly useful, the current hype surrounding it very much looks like a bubble akin to the DotCom bubble to me. Companies left and right are jumping on the AI bandwagon for the sake of using the buzzword "AI" in their marketing speech.
I don't consider that kind of use of datacenters to be necessary.
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there are almost certainly heuristics you can use, but these are going to be heuristics the size of the national US grid, with physics similar to how water flows through pipes. Except these pipes are dynamic and significantly less restrictive.
Plus source generation is very sparse, CCG gas plants for example generally only run when peaking, and solar only works during the day, generally, and nuclear power runs 24/7 around the clock, so it's not quite trivial to calculate. More than likely what the heuristic they're using here is that they consume 43% more power as a corpo, and thusly, produce 43% more CO2.
Surprising nobody.
No wonder AMZN/MSFT/GOOG have been paying people to fluff nuclear power here and on reddit.
BUT YOU PLEBS BETTER NOT TURN ON THE AC
Classic corporate behavior. Get market share, enshittify (Enshittification) for quarterly profits. At the expense of their users. What a waste.
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