| HN Mirror

Writing about AI, destroying the planet for data centers, there's a lot of money to be made.

That being said, AI seems kind of miraculous sometimes.

Similar to cars. So enticing that we make everything else in the world worse in order to maximize the profit, make it indispensable, subsidize it, and make the dependency on it irreversible.

And it's not even something to blame individual people for.

Driving away from all the other cars to spend a weekend feels like freedom.

Using AI to answer a question feels like a "bicycle for the mind".

But in fact it's more like a car. It requires massive resources and creates perverse incentives, and the result is ineffective and corrupt.

Both cars and AI are amazing technology and extremely useful, but using them is not an individual responsibility. It requires societal subsidy.

The environmental impact of answering a question on an obscure topic with ai model is less than an the impact of answering the question with an hour-long google search hunting for references or a drive to the public library.

That's true, and I am not anti-AI. I was not only thinking about the environmental effects of some single prompt or a certain amount of tokens.

Neither did I want to say that a car is always more wasteful than some alternative.

But defaulting to the behemoth is inefficient, unless everyone is driven to do it: then it's in some way reasonable.

By adding "corrupt" and "dependent", as well as the economic terms, I wanted to offer a broader critique and create an analogy, not just talk about energy usage on its own.

What I had in mind was: it's easier to go many places that are a mile or less from me, by car. Because everything is obstructed by cars. And I'm atrophied by lack of movement. Best would be to drive somewhere to move/walk.

People already do that in masses.

And doing shopping by car, because everything else seems unbearable, also takes away your time, apart from wasting energy compared to more, smaller shops that would be reachable by foot, bycicle etc.

I guess you know the argument.

Today, people's thinking atrophies because their LLM is probably right in their summarization of some Wikipedia article, plus 2-3 other random sources.

Or so.

Using the Wikipedia search function is not expensive.

But, I mostly had a bigger picture in mind than what is the cost of inference.

I think it's a good analogy in many ways, and personally I think car-centric society has a lot of flaws. I think the ease that AI brings to tasks may erode mental capabilities in the same way cars have eroded our collective physical health.* That said, it doesn't seem to me that we would be better off without cars altogether, despite all the related issues.

I am concerned about the environmental impacts that AI poses, but they don't seem to me to be so catastrophic. Solar and battery tech has made enormous leaps in the past couple decades, and we will need to pivot to clean energy future irrespective of AI.

*This said, I have become gradually more alarmed over the past decade at the lack of epistemological rigor in the general public, as made apparent through the rise of social media. I don't know that AI becoming a truth-seeking crutch for people wouldn't be more good than bad.

> it doesn't seem to me that we would be better off without cars altogether, despite all the related issues

Oh my god, no. I also want the benefits of automobiles! They are strictly more capable than, say, trains. That's where I would derail the discussion completely when going into details, but no, I am not against cars as a technology.

Apart from all the ethical and social arguments (logistics, ambulances, the elderly, etc etc). But that's not where I wanted to go.

I was making a leap here simply because of the whole complex around prisoner's, dilemma, the commons, state economy, and so forth.

Since at least ~100yrs ago, I guess cars and streets as the primary mode of transportation have also "won the vote" / are what the majority wants, so it's also an interesting analogy for diminishing returns maybe.

Building out more car infrastructure is certainly not controversial where there is absolutely none but there are commercial or residential buildings.

Anyway, lots of associations are worth considering here IMO. The ultimate limiting capacity here, when disregarding all environmental or health concerns, is simply space and the positive externalities (cities etc) around existing infrastructure.

meta_gunslinger 2 days ago

The problem with grandiose statements like the GGP's are that they compare a realized outcome with an entirely idealized outcome they have in their brains as an alternative.

RajT88 3 days ago

> I was not only thinking about the environmental effects of some single prompt or a certain amount of tokens.

Hand wringing about AI datacenter's environmental impact is well and good. We should keep the data centers accountable for their consumption and waste.

I just wish the same people had been upset the last 20 years with poor water resource management in a lot of areas (the west US especially) with urban, ranching and farming development.

> That's true, and I am not anti-AI.

Me neither!

no-name-here 3 days ago

The past may be past, but it's important that even now we point out the relative scale of resource usage, pollution, etc going forward of everything from cars to AI to golf courses to beef.

It's like saying if we didn't have cheap commercial flights people would travel by foot anyways and would consume more resources for food &co. than the plane would consume in fuel...

80% of generative AI queries wouldn't even exist as google searches.

To be clear, your position here is that insurmountable barriers to information is the preferable state of the world?

One claim of the parent comment was that AI is ineffective. For the purpose of finding answers to questions, it is more resource-efficient than the alternatives, and, to your point, capable of answering questions that were impossible to answer via other means before. In what way is that ineffective?

16bitvoid 3 days ago

No, they're saying that 80% of genai queries (aka anything sent to an LLM; I won't speak on the validity of the percentage) are not things someone would search on Google. It's things like trial-and-error vibecoding, openclaw-like agentic loops, talking to chatgpt like it's a person, etc. In other words, most genai queries are not for getting "obscure information" or even getting direct information at all. It's about either getting it to do something you don't want to do yourself, or using it as a replacement for someone else (junior dev, therapist, friend, significant other, etc).

A request that isn't asking for information isn't a query

I do plenty of AI queries, both pragmatic ones and some for entertainment: witnessing talktotransformer was mind-bending already at the time! And since then, I've tried frontier models, local, coding agents, and use plenty of them on the regular.

I awe at the capabilites of generative AI.

I also enjoy sitting in or driving a car.

I did not want to make a moral argument, unless you consider each and every form of utilitarianism as moralism.

lxgr 3 days ago

That might be true, but at least I started asking way more questions since we’ve had competent LLMs.

MSFT_Edging 3 days ago

Vonnegut said in his last living work that the greatest addiction modern people face is the drug of cheap oil.

We got addicted to the convenience and overuse, and have started a mass extinction event because of it.

The perverse incentives will come for us all.

It is exactly this thought, in the form of this sentence, that could replace almost all of my comments in this thread.

It feels depressing, but I think the same. When thinking about the larger world, it becomes increasingly hard to ignore. And of course it is not new.

There were "doomers" already in the midst of the 20th century, but it doesn't mean that they were wrong.

MSFT_Edging 2 days ago

There's nothing the selfish hate more than hearing their "choices" have a net negative effect. They hate the "doomers", because it puts a damper on their little side-effect free party. Doomers are more often correct because it only requires bare minimum pattern recognition. It requires more effort to defend an action that will certainly be different this time.

AI, Crypto, car-centric urban planning, cardboard suburbs in a barren field with bright green grass.

You tell someone that their selfish choice to drive a pickup truck only to haul something maybe one time a year, they shit their pants. They can't stand it, they start personal attacks and ask "what about you??". They seem to know it's wasteful, damaging, etc but they deserve it for some reason.

bloomca 3 days ago

I agree with your message but not sure about the conclusion. Cars themselves are commodified luxury available (in the US pretty much required) to everyone, and they do need to be subsidized, both in terms of infrastructure and the lifestyle they require.

But with AI what is the exact price? My understanding is that R&D is extremely expensive, but running non-SOTA models is not that bad. We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications.

Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand?

Thanks for asking an open question about my point.

First, because I initially failed to answer your more closed questions (this paragraph is edited in):

> We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications. Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand?

I don't think there's a way around making the best of AI capabilities with minimum price and maximum control, and I'd agree this is met by on-prem data centers, just not in a rationally targeted way.

Back to my original comment:

Because it (my conclusion) was not so clear, and maybe I just wanted to highlight some observations without delivering a real argument for or against things [, I thank you for your open question].

The utility/leverage aspect for AI seems more esoteric than the one for cars because, apart from Chatbots, it's more hidden.

And also, similar to cars (or many other phenomena of industrialization), yes, my first vague point was the subsidization of infrastructure. But also, the power gap: that's something not only associated with AI or cars, but with a lot of technologies we all hold dear: sewage, powerline, logistics, etc etc.

What reminds me of cars in the current AI frenzy is the fixation on cementing infrastructure. And also, I think, a lot more people agree on, for example, some kind of universal right to, for example, clean water.

But all of industrialization confronts people with questions of efficiency, inequality, and collective support.

Most people would, for example, support a right to get a minimum amount of clean water when you are living and working in a tradionally inhabited space (if you're on the social-darwinist side) or at least not harming society (if you're more of a social democrat).

And, similar to the buildup of car infrastructure, and the procurement of resources, space etc for maximum building, giant data centers can obstruct people in buying drinking water. Or walking outside (AI obstructs traditional methods of online collaboration).

nilkn 3 days ago

The original point of the stock market was to fund gigantic society-level projects (like railroads). Modern VC has replaced some of that at smaller scales but not all of it at the largest scales. So this could just be the stock market performing the function it was designed to perform -- helping fund something transformative on a societal level.

onlyrealcuzzo 3 days ago

> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing...

Where did all the stock gains go before AI?

FAANG / MAG-7.

Was everything from 2012-2020 fake, too?

They went from ~9% of the sp500 to ~35% over your timeframe...

[1] - https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...

trimbo 3 days ago

> So where is all the productivity going? Where is the value?

Infrastructure doesn't produce value overnight. How long did it take the Interstate System to provide measurable value? I asked Gemini. Supposedly increased national productivity by 25% over 39 years[1]. But if you drove on a newly finished interstate in 1959, you saw the same cars just moving a lot faster.

That's what we're seeing right now. People can produce an incredible amount of stuff really quickly with AI. Is it directly connected to measurable productivity across the entire economy? No, because, realizing a mass productivity increase from infrastructure takes time.

atleastoptimal 3 days ago

Not sure what your point is. Stock markets are based on money going into securities based on estimated future value. Even if AI were doubling productivity at a non-AI company, there is more leverage to that money going into an AI company.

The question is, is AI leading to massive productivity gains in companies that implement it? AI productivity gains take time to diffuse, but so far companies in the S&P 500 are seeing very high growth. YOY earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 is 21.7% https://advantage.factset.com/hubfs/Website/Resources%20Sect...

> YOY earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 is 21.7%

Now remove the companies selling the AI shovels: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIAjbZxacAARHwD.png

> Not sure what your point is.

My point is that they're selling us Skynet and the end of employment as we now it, things that we shouldn't even have to measure to perceive the results of, yet no one is able to measure any of it

Pointing a finger at nvidia, google, and the other few companies stuck in circular investment schemes that shouldn't even be legal and saying "OOGA BOOGA line go UP, UP GOOD!" doesn't count in my book

Jtarii 3 days ago

Charitably the lag time for this technology to have noticeable effects could just be ~5 years away. Similarly to how computers didn't have a big impact for a decade after they were introduced as people got used to using them.

no-name-here 3 days ago

Your grandparent comment:

> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing...

Parent comment:

> Now remove the companies selling the AI shovels: https://pbs.twimg....

From your linked image, "excluding AI stocks" is "+16%" (the figure with AI stocks is far higher).

Your sole source says +16% excluding AI - in what kind of market is +16% “nothing”?

toasty228 2 days ago

> in what kind of market is +16% “nothing”?

It's nothing because it happens all the time, it's not statically relevant, like not at all: https://www.macrotrends.net/2526/sp-500-historical-annual-re...

This forum is full of techies with very strong opinions about their toys but 0 economical, political or historical education, and it shows

no-name-here 2 days ago

Those kind of returns would generally be considered at least ‘good’ even if they weren't excluding some of the best performing stocks such as AI as was done here. Some periods truly have no returns or even negative returns, even without excluding some of the best performing stocks like was done here.

And even more so since inflation was 2-3%, not considered high, during most of that period.

atleastoptimal 3 days ago

Is the image you provided depicting revenue, or stock value? My point is about revenue.

Revenues don't matter when you sell a dollar for 50ct and half of the deals are circular anyways

atleastoptimal 3 days ago

So you're claiming that the revenue growth of the S&P 500 over the last few years is largely due to "selling dollars for 50ct" and circular deals?

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/this-is-how-the-ai-bu...

Yes.

> AI-related stocks have accounted for 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth and 90% of capital spending growth since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

AussieWog93 3 days ago

Literally right here. eComm business turned around from losing money to profitable in less than 12 months after vibecoding a bunch of solutions to variousn problems we were having.

bawolff 3 days ago

> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing...

I mean, do you know what the value of those stocks would be if AI didn't exist. Maybe they would be much more negative. Maybe we would be in a recession. Without a control this type of analysis is meaningless.

And that is even assuming that AI productivity gains are happening now instead of 5-10 years from now.