[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.

[k8sagic]

Insulin is a bad example and a good one. A bad one because what happens in the USA is some super weird shit (and it only happened in the USA, thats why USA people drive to canada or mexico). Without insulin though, they wouldn't be alive.

ML on x-ray pictures is super easy technology which partially already is better than x-ray experts. Its not far away to have build in diagonstics or cheap online services. And yes they will reach poorer people than before. It will also allow a lot more people to get better diagnosis.

My sister has a type of blood cancer, she would have been dead by now if research wouldn't have found a solution 13 years ago.

And no MS and OpenAI and google are not just using their DCs to write summeries. They use it to do research. A LOT actually.

And take a look at google ios and the research papers, plenty of medical papers coming from those big companies.

Alpha Folde 2? Changed a lot too

[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.