[JohnFen]

> By contrast, the unglamorous and largely disregarded business of making cement accounts for around 7 per cent of global emissions.

Oh, that's not a good example of the point they're trying to make. The emissions from concrete are a point of major concern and are frequently discussed. A ton of effort is being put into trying to reduce the problem, and there are widespread calls to reduce the use of the material as much as possible.

[dsr_]

The only useful point that they make is that predictions about unending growth are always wrong in detail. Every actual hockey stick turns into a sigmoid, then falls. Meanwhile, a new hockey stick comes along.

[Mistletoe]

But AI training has been behaving like Bitcoin mining, which constantly increases the difficulty. AI companies so far have been having to release costlier and costlier models to keep up with the Joneses. We don’t want the final iteration to be a Dyson sphere around the sun or the black hole at the center of our galaxy so Gemini 10,000 Pro can tell us “Let there be light.” Or maybe we do, I don’t know.

[timschmidt]

DeepSeek has shown that significantly less costly training is possible when incentivized. Even for SOTA models.

[Kye]

The previous 9,999 Geminis promised they'd solved entropy and said the words with no real effect so people stopped listening to it. It's very lonely now.

[nerdponx]

Also modern infrastructure is literally built on concrete. Whereas the broad benefits of AI are dubious by comparison.

[PTOB]

Has he considered exactly how much concrete is needed to build a datacenter campus?

[Diggsey]

Essentially zero as a fraction of global concrete usage...

[quickthrowman]

A 6” concrete slab (excluding footings) has ~18,500 cubic yards of concrete per million sqft (54 sqft of 6” slab is one cubic yard of concrete)

[beepbooptheory]

In general there seems to be a big given in the argument that I don't think is obvious:

> At the other end of the policy spectrum, advocates of “degrowth” don’t want to concede that the explosive growth of the information economy is sustainable, unlike the industrial economy of the 20th century.

This seems to imply we all must agree that the industrial economy of the 20th century was sustainable, and that strikes me as an odd point of agreement to try to make. Isn't it just sidestepping the whole point?