Energy consumption is not a bogeyman and we'll need to consume vastly more energy if we want to make people richer, healthier and happier.
We need to pivot to cleaner sources, so the focus should be on that.
Would be great if the journos could stop demonizing the wrong thing.
What we ought to have is a carbon tax. Then if some activity such as bitcoin or ai or driving or flying uses carbon, you pay extra. Whereas if you manage to fuel your activities with nuclear/wind/solar you don’t.
There are loads of complexities to this but simply saying “consumption is necessary for riches” while ignoring that we have not managed to lower our carbon usage is not quite hitting the mark.
> while ignoring that we have not managed to lower our carbon usage
We have in the US, both total and per capita. Carbon per person is down nearly 25% since 2000.
People seem to make up statistics in their heads to match what they think is going on.
I have frequently heard this argument made - often as here axiomatically.
No argument that changing energy sources is crucial. But I would not dismiss a plan to also reduce overall energy consumption while maintaining or improving quality of life indicators.
Okay, you're dismissing the argument without proposing any counter arguments.
J. Storrs Hall lays out the case for the relationship between energy usage & quality of life.
What are your specific rebuttals?
But we aren't there yet. Until we are we need to both increase efficiency and increase renewables.
Google in particular should be praised for their work in subsidizing renewable energy generation[1] by guaranteeing energy purchases from renewable projects[3]. This guaranteed income stream is often what gets them off the ground, and the higher carbon-free energy usage from Google's data centers than the energy markets they are in is great to see[1].
However, that shouldn't preclude journalists from keeping that energy usage in people's minds.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/5-years-...
[2] https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/2021-carbon-f...
[3] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/clean-en...
The relevant term is „energy intensity“, measuring how much energy is needed per unit of GDP. It has been improving for quite a while now, see, for example https://www.aceee.org/blog/2015/12/what-energy-intensity-and...
1) That's not a fact
2) That sentence doesn't make any sense grammatically
3) Consumption reduction = lower quality of life & health for poor people (the rich have 0 interest in consumption reduction... do you see the davos crowd turning in their private jets?)
Whereas spending some money to get us all nuclear might be. If not, we will have to spend more to metigate the effects of global warming.
If we really wanted to solve this quickly and efficiently, we could kill all humans.
What happens in these cases is that people look for reasons why the emerging technology is objectively bad, and then throw out arguments and see which ones stick. Electricity usage implies climate change, and that's a popular fear to play on right now. "This thing that's going to kill your career is also why hurricanes are stronger now!" Of course, that is only partially true; maybe AI isn't the problem and driving 60 miles a day in stop-and-go-traffic to go to work is what we really need to crack down on. But, that sort of thing is 70 years old and people are comfortable with it, so there isn't much persuasion left to do; people know it's bad and do it anyway. Meanwhile, climate change was a huge problem before the phrases "Bitcoin" or "deep learning" were ever coined, so it's kind of weird to blame them.
This sort of complaining is also easy. Sure, with more electricity users coming online, we worry about the cost going up. The cost going up is good for killing energy intensive activities that you don't like; eventually it won't be profitable to mine Bitcoins or train AIs. But the cost going up also affects other industries that we DO like; poorer people heating their homes can't absorb the cost, or industries like aluminum smelting can't absorb the cost. So now we want to distribute resources with some system other than "the highest bidder wins", and you know what that means! Time to involve the government! But the government is terrible at reacting to things like this, and even though regulation is obviously the globally optimal path forward, it moves too slowly to really make a difference. By the time we charge data centers more for electricity, AI will have taken your jobs and the East Coast will be underwater.
(Meanwhile, many data centers are powered by cheap renewable hydroelectricity anyway and so aren't causing climate change. They can build their AI training data centers near a hydroelectric dam, but people aren't going to move their family so they can get cheaper electricity or spend less energy commuting to work or whatever. I'm not sure where this all leads, but it does feel like appointing a boogeyman to blame instead of actually fixing the problem. This goes back to my opening argument about seeing which argument sticks. If you don't look into things too deeply, you have a nice set of rules that leads to an obvious action. I don't like Bitcoin because the existing system works OK. Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity. Some energy use changes the climate. The changing climate kill us all. So we'd better kill Bitcoin. A simple path from "I don't like it" to "kill it before it kills us". Get out your pitchforks!)
If so, the problem may be somewhat overstated. Training is a dispatchable power load. It can be scheduled for periods of surplus power in regions where surplus power is periodically abundant. Training a ML model could literally follow the sun.
Bauxite has to be shipped to Iceland to take advantage of their abundant geothermal and hydro power for Aluminium smelting. Data moves with much less friction.
The main issue I see is that many of these models are massive. Dozens of gigabytes. You’ll quickly DDOS your validator nodes before getting anything useful.
But now I cant find the source... video encoding mining seems to have gained more traction :/.
