Everyone is playing lip service to global warming, energy efficiency, reducing emissions.
At the same time data centers are being filled with power hungry graphic cards and hardware to predict if showing a customer an ad will get a clock, generating spam that “engages” users aka clicks.
It’s like living in a episode of black mirror.
Till then, I will probably avoid more and more communicating with strangers on the internet. It will get even more exhausting, when 99% of them are fake.
Datacenters save a lot more energy than they make. Alone how much co2 is saved when i can do my banking online instead of having to drive to a bank is significant.
The same with a ton of ohter daily things i do.
Is video producing co2? yes. But you know what creates a lot more co2? Driving around for entertainment.
And the companies running those GPUs actually have an incentive to be co2 neutral while bitcoin miners don't: They 1. already said they are doing / going co2 neutral due to 2. marketing and they will achieve it becauseh 3. they have the money to do so.
When someone like Bill Gates or Suckerberg say 'lets build a nuclear power plant for AGI' than they will actually just do that.
What's more likely, watching a movie online, drive to watch a movie in a cinema?
You know what creates a lot less CO2? Staying at home reading a book vor playing a board game.
>Datacenters save a lot more energy than they make
I think you mean CO2. And I doubt that they actually save anything because datacenters are convenient so we use them more as alternatives with less convenience.
Like the movie example, we watch more and even bad movies if it's just a click on Netflix than we do if we have to drive somewhere to watch.
MS recently announced they fail der CO2 target but instead produce 40% more because of cloud services like AI
We need to be realistic here. We know what modern entertainment looks like and its not realistic at all to just 'read books' and play board games.
The normal miner doesn't go to those bitcoin conferences, they buy asics, put them in some warehouses around the world and make money.
And if the online bank wasn't sending a bunch of requests to a bunch of third party ad networks on every click, it would save even more.
My perspective is not limited. Just because people live in a city center, doesn't mean that most people do. Open Google Maps and take a look.
But this is a complex calculus and - frankly - feels like a distraction from the issue. I don't want to get into the weeds of calculating micro-emissions of daily activities, I want climate responsibility and reduction in energy consumption across the board.
We need AI/ML for getting there faster and helping more people around us. Alone for weather simulations but also for medicine, material research for batteries etc.
