[croes]

>Is video producing co2? yes. But you know what creates a lot more co2? Driving around for entertainment

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

[k8sagic]

Have you checked how much co2 a normal car drive creates vs. watching a movie online?

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.

[commodoreboxer]

It is 100% realistic to read books and play board games. Both markets are massive, and board games in particular are having what I would consider a renaissance. Maybe it depends on your crowd, but everybody I know plays tabletop games and reads books.

[mrtranscendence]

You're missing the point. What's not realistic is to tell everyone that they should abstain from any type of entertainment that requires power (TV shows, movies, video games, etc) and should only read books and play board games instead. I don't care what kind of renaissance board games are undergoing, most people still only play the mass market classics, and then only rarely.

I don't know how much energy Netflix uses serving a movie, but playing a video game on my PC for two hours where I'm located might generate a kg of CO2. That's about as much as I'll breathe in a day. Relative to other sources of atmospheric CO2 I'm not that concerned.

[commodoreboxer]

My issue was with "we know what modern entertainment looks like" as if humans are now incapable of enjoying themselves without a screen. And you should care about a massive market increase when it's directly relevant to the point at hand. If the initial point was "we know what modern entertainment looks like, nobody plays board games or reads books", pointing out that the board game market has more than doubled in the past decade is far from irrelevant. It actually directly counters the point.

I agree with your second paragraph, and selling the "make better choices to save the world" argument is an industry playbook favorite. Environmental damage needs to be put on the shoulders of those who cause it, which is overwhelmingly industrial actors. AI is not useful enough to continue the slide into burning more fossil fuels than ever. If it spurs more green energy, good. If it's the old "well this is the way things are now", that's really not good enough.

[k8sagic]

AI and ML will help a lot of people and already does. Alpha Fold / protein folding will help us with cancer.

We will have better batterires thanks to ml material research.

We will be able to calculate and optimize everything related to flow like wind.

The last thing we need to optimize is compute and compute is what has the most money anyway. One of the first industries going green is datacenters. Google for example is going green 24/7 (so not just buying solar power but pulling green energy from the grid 24/7 through geo thermy and others).

AI/ML big datacenters are crucial for all the illneses we have which no one cares enough to solve. For example, i have one of these and we need data to make a therapy for this and i'm not alone.

[croes]

For most of your points it's may not will.

How many battery breaktroughs did we have before AI? They rarely lead to new batteries.

>AI/ML big datacenters are crucial for all the illneses we have which no one cares enough to solve.

Too bad that companies like OpenAI and MS buy most of the hardware for their data centers to write summaries of articles and emails and to create pictures.

And even if they find a cure, doesn't mean it will be available for people in need, not without a hefty fee.

Just look at the profit margin of insulin.

[croes]

BTW

>Google’s Emissions Shot Up 48% Over Five Years Due to AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40874517

[croes]

You are missing the point too.

Driving too the cinema to watch a movie produces more CO2 than watch one movie online but online makes it more convenient so you watch more. That sums up to more CO2 emission.

The point is that higher efficency is wortless in terms of CO2 emissions if it leads to higher usage that compensates for the savings.

If a programmer can program faster with AI it's good if he only needs 1 hour instead of 8 but if he still programs 8 hours a day AI's energy consumption comes just on top of his previos consumption.

Climate change doesn't care how efficient you produce more CO2, more is simply more.

[k8sagic]

I. believe that watching mulitply movies is still a lot more co2 efficient than driving a car to a big independent room, which gets heated and than also shows a movie through a big projector than having a tv running and streaming it from the internet.

[croes]

But it's realistic that we watch movies online than in cinemas. And don't forget the datacenters of the movies need to run even if no one watches. My car doesn't produce CO2 whe I don't drive.

[k8sagic]

Datacenters always run because there is always something to do.

For everything else, there are already plenty of energy saving mechanism build into the CPUs, Mainboards, Disks etc. A Datacenter doesn't run on 100% Energy just because the load is reduced.