[ch71r22]

That's a false equivalence. AI is not the same as aluminum cans.

All technologies have political, social, ethical, and economic aspects, and not all technologies are the same. AI is not, in reality, powered by CO2-neutral electricity. As the article mentions, AI is the fastest-growing energy user in the world, so it probably merits a deeper look than aluminum cans.

[Legend2440]

AI is also an incredibly useful tool that could automate many industries, so it deserves some leeway because of the benefits it provides.

And while it is 'fastest-growing', it is small as an absolute share - around 0.2% of total world CO2 emissions.

[dminik]

So it can both outprice people as well as take their jobs? Well, leeway away.

[Legend2440]

The only reason we have the standard of living we do today is because of automation. I welcome more of it.

[dminik]

Only insofar as you were able to keep a job. If you lose your job to automation, and there are no more jobs left, what do you do? Where do you get the money to keep your standard of living?

[Legend2440]

Either we will invent new jobs, as we have always done in the past.

Or if truly all jobs can be done by machine, we retire and go live a life of fully automated luxury space communism.

[dminik]

I wish I could share your optimism.

[cuu508]

Incredibly useful for some definition of incredibly useful. What I see:

- I now regularly receive AI-written spam emails (marketing pitches, "vulnerability reports").

- I was receiving AI-written garbage quality pull requests. It got so annoying I closed pull requests on my project's repo.

- When I try to contact some company's customer support these days there's a good chance I will be fed slop by an agent posing as a customer support person, this is absolutely infuriating.

- When I search for information on the internet, for certain queries, 90% of the results is slop.

- AI crawlers are DDoSing websites.

- The already mentioned things – hardware getting more expensive, climate impact, unethically sourced training data.

[atemerev]

Aluminum production is one of the largest electricity consumers out there, much larger than AI.

[Legend2440]

True in fact. Aluminum manufacturing is responsible for roughly 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and if you add in metal manufacturing as a whole it comes up to 11%. Refining ore is very energy-intensive.

[TiredOfLife]

> AI is not the same as aluminum cans.

True. AI is actually useful.