Le dimanche, 9 août 2026, 04.19:30 h heure d’été d’Europe centrale Theodore Tso a écrit : > P.S. As far as the concern about the electricity and water usage, I will > point folks at the estimates of how much electricity and water might > be used to watch a movie on Netflix or Hulu or Disney+. Or to make a > pair of jeans, for that matter. Or the amount of CO2 generated when > someone flies to a DebConf. Should we worry about ecological > sustainability? Sure! But I sometimes think that this is more of an > excuse to justify a position that someone has already has made for > other reasons.
I really tried resisting taking the bait. Here I am, failing.
SUVs are great, they only consume 7 liters of fuel per 100 km, and it costs
only 1.86 CHF/liter to buy fuel; that's so cheap! If I focus only on the
immediate costs of driving around, it really doesn't have much of an impact,
right? Modern SUVs are much more efficient that lame small cars from 20 years
ago, and I can fit so many people and stuff in them, fantastic!
Let's just ignore the following comparisons with average cars from the 2000S:
* SUVs are massively heavier, bulkier, larger, longer, higher
* The average amount of humans transported per SUV is _lower_.
* SUVs consume bigger amounts of resources to build. If (partially or fully)
electric, they consume well-named "rare earth" materials.
* SUVs are more dangerous to pedestrians and other road users
Let's also ignore these other points:
* "car culture" has lead to soil waterproofing, building cities and landscapes
for cars not people, air pollution, microplastics in everything we drink or
eat. Children walk less, bike less, are less safe in public spaces because of
cars being literally everywhere.
* the IPCC has been saying for as long as it produced reports that we need
massive changes in how our societies behave to maintain the earth at livable
levels. Yet significant changes are yet to come. Potential changes include:
* massively reducing transports (individual and collective)
* reduce the weight of vehicles across the board
* shift from individual to collective transportation means
* shift short-range mobility to cycling (ev. electrical)
* electrify the mobility that cannot be further reduced
* etc.
Anyway. I'm sure you get where I'm getting at: the concern with LLMs is not
the "per request" electricity and water usage (notwithstanding the absurd
comparison between "interacting with an LLM agent" and "buying a single pair
of jeans I will be able to wear for 10+ years"). The concern is the effect of
an LLM industry "at large" on our societies and on the only earth we have.
We "as a species" are making choices that impact life on earth in the future.
We (in the so-called "west") have a ruling and unaccountable transnational
billionaire class that is making choices that affect all of us, without our
governments keeping any ability (or interest) to control any of their actions
(it's good for the economy, so it must be good for everyone, right? Ha ha).
AI companies are not a mandatory feature of our societies. We don't have to
allow AI companies to destroy books to train LLMs [0]. We don't have to allow
building datacenters to put strain on local electricity or water networks, or
increase the local temperature. In a summer with massive drought and fires
burning through Europe and North America, with (public) funding desperately
missing in firefighting, climate action, etc, deciding to invest 30 B€ in AI
Gigafactories [1] _is_ a choice that we "as a species" are making, and one
that I don't think is right at all.
So. Sure, one's 7l/100km SUV is great, not too expensive to drive around.
Sure, the latest LLMs consume less water and electricity per request than the
2023 ones. But the 2026 SUV has a much bigger consumption of resources to
build than any car from the 1990s. And the latest LLM consumed massive amounts
of resources to train. In both cases, we're making a choice (mostly allowing
ruling classes to choose for us, but "as a species", we're making that
choice). SUVs are not inevitable, AI companies are not inevitable. Not every
"technological progress" is good or inevitable.
We can choose to pick the more efficient technologies, to use the finite
resources that we have in the most efficient way, to spread the availability
of said rare resources across the people, and evolve towards a set of
societies that have understood the multiple challenges of the climate crisis
and have decided to act accordingly. We can restrict the size and weight of
cars allowed on our streets, we can enforce that they be electric. We can tax
the rich. We can limit how much funding, electricity or drinkable water we
want to allocate to the AI sector (or to any sector). We can forbid private
jets and restrict how many flights are allowed per person per decade. Or how
many jeans.
Or we can just continue thinking that the class that rules over our earth's
wealth has everyones' best interests at heart. Continue making the cars
larger, heavier and more individual. Continue drilling for more fossil fuels
to heat the atmosphere even faster. Continue building more AI datacenters than
the others, faster, so that we can code faster than "them". Replace unionized
workers by obedient LLM agents, to extract more monetary value for
shareholders. Let AI-using companies handle our care systems without care.
Divert funding for art and culture to generative produces without soul.
Transform more of the economy into it's "gig-" equivalent, with only tractable
and submissive on-call "independent workers", without social rights or
benefits. Continue increasing the longterm wealth gap everywhere.
I don't have a concern with the LLM _technology_ as such: it's just maths and
enough training material, which outputs a very large set of numbers that we
can use to infer new material from existing material. But I am firmly of the
camp that says we cannot talk about the LLM technology without talking about
who is pushing for its usage, who is doing the training and how, what effect
those have on our limited resources, and what are the economical and political
motives of these.
And so I object to reducing the "ecological" discussion to just a "it's not
that bad, $duration of LLM agent usage is the same as buying a pair of jeans",
because I think that type of argument is either ill-advised, or in bad faith.
--
OdyX
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Panama
[1]
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/eu-launches-ai-gigafactories-call-boost-europes-computing-capacity-and-unlock-more-eu30-billion
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