[dbingham]

This is "whatabboutism" which is a logical fallacy.

Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI. Both have climate impacts, independently of each other, and we should be dealing with the climate impacts of both simultaneously.

Regardless, don't assume the person you are talking to isn't consistent. Peruse my personal blog and you will see that I, in fact, ran a whole city council campaign on a platform of "to fight climate change we should not be driving".

[Zambyte]

> This is "whatabboutism" which is a logical fallacy.

No it isn't. You don't optimize a piece of software by profiling it and rendering a flame graph, and then ignoring the sections of code that the most time is being spent in. You work on optimizing the paths where the most time is being spent, because that is where your effort has the most room for impact. If we are trying to optimize carbon emissions instead of time, we look at the biggest sources of emissions first, because that's where our effort has the most room for impact.

> Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI.

I never said they did. I said they should be fighting both if they actually care about the issue.

> Peruse my personal blog and you will see that I, in fact, ran a whole city council campaign on a platform of "to fight climate change we should not be driving".

Excellent, you are fighting both because you care about the issue. Thank you for your service.

[CamperBob2]

Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI.

Actually they do, because the best way to get cars off the road is to replace many if not most of their occupants with AI.

Private ownership of cars is not the problem. The assumption that people have to drive all over the place to get stuff done is the problem. Let's work on that.

[feoren]

> the best way to get cars off the road is to replace many if not most of their occupants with AI.

I'm so confused by this. Instead of one person driving a car to the store and parking, now the car is driving itself to the store with one person in it, dropping them off, and then either parking, or driving itself around more, back to the house or to a distant parking facility. In crowded cities, the car is just going to drive around the block empty for an hour instead of paying $12 for parking. Single-occupancy vehicles are a big problem now; I don't understand how introducing a bunch of zero-occupancy vehicles are an improvement on that? It seems very obvious to me self-driving cars are going to significantly increase the total number of miles driven every day in the world.

[CamperBob2]

I didn't say anything about self-driving cars. You still need to go to the store, if you don't get your stuff delivered by someone who is (hopefully) delivering to more than one house.

You don't need to go to the office. Neither does your car.