[AlexandrB]

> I won’t speculate on how he would have felt about generative AI, but I can say that GenAI is something I care about. It causes a lot of problems for a lot of people. It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains.

This kind of stuff drives me crazy sometimes. There's is little that's unique to AI here. These are the effects of any kind of industrial expansion. They're also the effects of population growth, in general. This stuff is a problem iff AI is a scam or hugely oversold and these resources are being wasted. But that's a different argument and a less clear-cut one.

> It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands.

This point also deserves special mention. Most green technologies (solar panels, electric cars) also require a bunch of cobalt. Again, the "badness" seems to depend on your a priori evaluation of what the cobalt is being used for and not the cobalt mining itself.

I think there's also a pretty good chance that if a robot that could mine the same cobalt with no human intervention appeared tomorrow, many folks would complain about "hard working cobalt miners in Africa losing their livelihood to automation".

[ericd]

>This point also deserves special mention. Most green technologies (solar panels, electric cars) also require a bunch of cobalt. Again, the "badness" seems to depend on your a priori evaluation of what the cobalt is being used for and not the cobalt mining itself.

Neither solar panels nor Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries require cobalt. Pretty sure all the emphasis on that is mainly meant to cloud things and try to paint these things as just as bad for the environment as eg coal, and apparently it's been very successful based on how frequently I see it repeated, but it's not true currently. It was true with NMC batteries, but I think those have fallen out of favor even in EVs, and grid scale is dominated by LFP. Don't think solar panels have ever needed cobalt, they're glass, aluminum, silicon, and a bit of silver/copper. Thin films have cadmium sometimes, but those aren't the ones in use en masse for solar farms.

[wwweston]

There’s a lot of good points in your comment, but fwiw it’s not clear whether they exist to dismiss a complaint or muster focus on the issues.

You’re right to point out that we’re all opted in at multiple levels to tech dependent on mining operations with a terrible human cost. I’d love to see these dangerous mining operations made safer with tech and policy, and you’re quite right that individual opt out is unlikely to have any effect (much less selective opt out from LLMs). Is that the end of the story?

If we’re just here to complain that someone’s marginal harm reduction posture is marginal I’m not sure that’s an effective rebuttal. Collective effort to lay new tracks and untie people off the old ones has more power than complaining someone used their personal trolley switch to shunt to a track with slightly fewer people.

Of course, that goes for people manning their personal switches too. And it’s worthwhile to pause and appreciate the scale and complexity of the problem.

[AlexandrB]

I think my main point is that these particular concerns largely depend on someone already sharing the author's opinion - that AI is bad. They're not convincing otherwise because most other IT buildouts (e.g. "cloud computing", cryptocurrency) have a lot of the same drawbacks. Whether these costs are worth it or not then depends entirely on the nature of the technology they're being used for (which is why I brought up green tech).

[fhd2]

> I think there's also a pretty good chance that if a robot that could mine the same cobalt with no human intervention appeared tomorrow, many folks would complain about "hard working cobalt miners in Africa losing their livelihood to automation".

Well, yeah? Just because the current work safety situation is bad, doesn't mean being out of a job couldn't be worse. I'd love a world where more automation meant less, safer, higher paying work for everyone. Our world never worked like that, to my knowledge, and I'm not sure it ever will.

[AlexandrB]

> I'd love a world where more automation meant less, safer, higher paying work for everyone. Our world never worked like that, to my knowledge, and I'm not sure it ever will.

I'm not sure what you mean because that's literally what happened. The only remaining caveat is that it's not yet "everyone", but even that part is improving. If I was born in feudal Europe I would have spent my life planting, weeding, and de-pesting potatoes by hand instead of sitting at a computer in a climate-controlled office.

[phyzome]

The cobalt thing is apparently misinformation. You've been misled.

Technology Connections did a great video that goes into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

[AlexandrB]

Sorry, I did a quick google search which seemed to indicate that cobalt is present in solar panels and batteries and not a deep dive. The broader point, that whether mining X mineral for Y purpose is bad depends entirely on what you already think of Y, remains.

[phyzome]

I don't think it depends.

Mining practices can be bad even if the minerals are used for a purpose that we judge as good. Those can coexist (in tension, which is where we end up thinking about tradeoffs).