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by ElevenLathe
904 days ago
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The other problem with the excavator argument is that all that amazing productivity isn't being pulled from thin air by cleverness -- it's burning (limited, polluting) fossilized solar power from a million years ago. We haven't avoided all the work of moving the dirt around, but only transferred the burden from ourselves and our horses to our unsustainable energy sector. AI (and all software, really) is similar in that it tries to do the same to intellectual activities: instead of requiring a cheese sandwich and an afternoon, some tasks can be instead be done with a few cents worth of electricity and a few hundred milliseconds, but I still eat the cheese sandwich for lunch, so in the final analysis we've saved time but no other resource. We of course wouldn't have to make this explicit calculation if we could incorporate all this knowledge about fossil fuels directly into the prices of goods and services, but this is very difficult thing to do, and so far nobody has managed to do it in a global way. It may still make material sense to use ChatGPT to create slides for middle management meetings, but that is not at all certain in a world with a significant price on emissions (though, to be fair, almost no human activity from the past fifty years stands up to this test either). |
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So doing stuff yourself is less carbon efficient than letting ChatGPT do its job.
As for calculating co2 pollution into the prices - we're slowly doing that, e.g. EU is setting up its carbon tax that applies to companies abroad.
The issue is that if we were to instantly include true costs of carbon removal into everything, the economy might collapse at worst, and at the least poor people might not afford food, heating nor other basic necessities any more. It will take time to do it sensibly.