On 16/05/2025 19:42, Konstantin Kharlamov wrote:
On Fri, 2025-05-16 at 09:52 +0930, Justin Zobel wrote:
On 16/05/2025 00:48, Konstantin Kharlamov wrote:
On Fri, 2025-05-16 at 00:29 +0930, Justin Zobel wrote:
Ethical issues aside, AI has other impacts as well, most notably
environmental via the huge amounts of energy required to first
train
AI and then even using it.
Maybe it's just me, but I never understood the reasoning behind "AI
consumes too much power". I mean, I am all for ecology, but this
implies improving technologies, not the opposite. Maybe I'm missing
the
point, but such reason to me seems equal to "stop using phones and
computers, because they consume energy".
Using a mobile phone cannot be compared to the power used by data
centres to train AI in the slightest.
Just straight off the top of my head, your phone and computer
automatically go to sleep by default. Servers do not.
It's also a matter of how these data centres are powered.
Corporations will often go for the cheapest source which is often
dirty non-renewable sources of energy.
Thank you for clarification, I see. I think best course of action here
would be creating some penalties for companies using too much energy,
which may lead to companies investing into research for more efficient
energy production. (this is very simplistic way to describe it, because
going that way would require thinking of a lot of nuances, like company
size, energy amount, etc, etc).
Penalizing plain people I don't think would move anything forward,
because a lone person wouldn't have the equipment to experiment with
energy sources, it has to be someone working fulltime for a university
or a company.
"I think best course of action here would be creating some penalties for
companies using too much energy" <- Capitalism doesn't work that way.
