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by natas 29 days ago
I feel like we've already had this discussion with respect to Crypto; crypto used more energy than banks (which proved to be false, but whatever); and water. Now AI uses magnitude more energy than crypto (or humans) and somehow they're now saying it's okay?
2 comments

That's a great fallacies of our times:

    - I don't like crypto, so it's bad,
    - I like AI, so it's good, even if it's destroying our world.
We're all grown up children at the end of the day. We like our toys and are in denial of its harms. Scale doesn't matter.

BTW, I believe that AI is a good thing in its ideal case, but we need to sort its energy use and data ethics issues.

> crypto used more energy than banks (which proved to be false, but whatever)

The true accusation was that crypto used more energy than banks per transaction. Your framing is very dishonest.

How is framing it the way society at large frames it dishonest? That “per transaction” is exactly the kind of nuance that never makes it to the public discussion.