This might belong in some circlejerk sub, but I think it’s somewhat clever. Basically, if AI datacenters get shut down, the power that would’ve been used to generate AI slop could be used for magnificent things. I mean, it’s purely clean energy because instead of using gas or oil, you take energy that COULD be used for something useless and put it to better use. Think of all the applications.
- We could power countless electric cars, trains, and bikes.
- We could power countless medical devices like pacemakers and defibrillators.
- We could power countless lights in people’s homes.
All this could be accomplished by not building massive datacenters. What’s more is that there could be countless gallons of clean drinking water used for surgical cleaning and chemistry that would otherwise serve to cool the amount of datacenter power. Think of all the possibilities!
If only Sam Altman could understand this…!
You must log in or register to comment.
Yeah, but these solutions were not solved before AI. Capitalism baby
I say we burn Sam Altman’s body for energy.
It is a cruel joke that right at the moment renewable energy becomes cheap enough to make business sense over fossil fuels, without government subsidies, AI comes in and consumes unlimited amounts of energy to make line go up.
I find it curious how AI companies are even investing in nuclear energy, the forbidden energy source, because of his much energy demand they predict they’ll need.
Would be so funny if their hypercapitalism collapses and leaves behind the next generation energy source
Not to contradict you but since a while humanity is wasting energy for useless use cases to the profit of capitalism.
AI and more or less datacenters are juste another side of itEDIT : to add a bit of nuance the problems of energy are not related to the amount (don’t worry we have a lot of margin for the industries and datacenters) but comes more to the consequences of it.
Using the dirty energy used by AI somewhere else while not resolve any environmental problemBro doesn’t understand supply and demand lmao
Man this comm upvotes really weird shit sometimes. Not doing something isn’t a “power source;” you’re just allocating energy from one use to another, which is probably a good idea in this case but still.
Some people don’t realize that letting AI live rent-free in their heads like this is just another way of wanking to the idea of it.
This ignores that these data centers, in their short time existing, have already had measurable impacts on global climate change and emissions.
let us be ignorant!
“Alternative cost” is well established in economic theory. Because of the rules of supply and demand, the price equilibrium would shift down as available supply increases.
Yeah true, but not really relevant to what I said.
It has all the same practical effects as creating new power, so “not doing something” actually is the same as a “power source.” It has everything to do with what you said.
Mathematically, sure, but in real world terms no. For example you can’t go to a developing country and set up not-using-AI power plants. Even if we assume that’s the case, though, supply and demand also entails that reduced demand will lead to reduced supply, so the implication by the OP that this newly available power will just flood the market and be used for whatever as free energy is false; the only thing that would happen is, at best, somewhat lower electricity prices.
If those countries were using AI then not using it would effectively create power. The same would be true if you went there, built the power plants, used it for AI, and then shut the AI down.
If only Sam Altman could understand this
Of course he can. He just doesn’t care.
The free market is generally pretty good at allocating scarce resources as long as the price reflects that. I don’t think the majority of AI usage is really for making AI slop. I think it’s far outweighed by passive, unprompted AI usage. For each person generating an AI slop anime girl, there are a hundred people who are simply making a Google Search, and that triggers an AI response whether they want one or not. And a lot of times, AI features which say “click here to generate a summary” or something like that tends to be very wasteful by having each individual user clicking “generate” triggering a separate AI prompt, when they could instead just run the generation once for the first user and then cache the result for everyone else. Instead, every user who clicks “generate” will cause all the computations to be redone. That’s incredibly wasteful, and I think it’s because AI in general encourages people to be lazy.
I think a lot of progress could be made by simply levying a one-cent tax on AI prompts. Each prompt provided to a large-language model or to an image generation model will incur the tax, which will be used to fund renewable energy projects. That way, the legitimate uses of AI will not be hindered (research, medicine, automating boring tasks, etc.) while the junk “spammy” uses will be filtered out, because you’re now forcing any AI query which is made to generate at least one cent of value to society, which is a very low bar to reach but so many AI uses cases surprisingly fail. This also adds friction to each AI interaction, because no company can now afford to give users free AI prompts, which will be great in general for weaning users off the practice of outsourcing their thinking to AIs. Way too many people trust AI for everything, including blindly believe whatever hallucinations it gives you. Adding a paywall to the AI means that you have to really think about whether your use of AI is really actually productive or not before you do so.
The “free market” doesn’t exist and has never existed.
A perfectly free market? No, it doesn’t and never will exist. A mostly-free market which, with appropriate nudging, emulates 90% of the behaviour of the market that appears in an economic textbook? That does exist or can exist and we can manipulate it to our benefit
There’s no way you’re referring to the stock market? Where in the world is this free market actually practiced?
I would add that the tax should only be applied to AI prompts that actually get sent to some datacenter, just because it would be unreasonable to track self hosted models (and might also encourage companies to get all that AI shit they are shoving down our throats to run locally).
The concern is that AI data centres use far too much electricity. A joule is a joule regardless of whether it is consumed in a building with the Amazon logo on it, or in a server room located in a former janitor’s closet in a company’s offices.
Hell, even a 0.1¢ tax would be effective.
I think this could be elegantly solved by saying that (1) anyone who controls the computer system which executes a prompt for a large language model or image generator is liable to pay a tax of one-tenth cent per prompt, and (2) any organisation or person who would pay less than [$/€]100 a year in this tax is exempt from paying. This means anyone can use their own computing resources to run up to 100,000 tax-free prompts, so hobbyists and organisations that have AI but use it only sparingly as needed would not pay any tax, but any organisation which either spams AI or lets users spam AI would be taxed quite heavily. Besides, those people are already charged retail rates for electricity so they are already penalised in the form of high power bills if they waste electricity on AI nonsense.
Google handles 5 trillion searches per year, so if they want to provide every single user with an AI summary then they would need to cough up $5 billion a year in AI tax, which is a ludicrous amount. That would single-handedly fund the US green energy transition If they actually did that. A solar panel on every roof and a wind turbine in every garden. If users really want to use the AI then Google can charge them for it, maybe by requiring that they subscribe to their Google One thing or something. Either way, fewer people choose to use AI, Google profits from those that do, less misinformation from AI hallucinations, and less energy wasted on garbage AI prompting. Everyone wins.
You’re close to the real idea, but you’ve got it backwards.
Billionaires’ perspective: “Gradually reducing the human population over the coming century by 99% with wars, drugs, starvation, suicide, poverty while we develop life extension technologies to preserve and ideally immortalize the most deserving (*qualifications TBD) will ultimately reduce humanity’s long-term impact on the planet and be much more sustainable and leave us a lot more resources and land once we replace any jobs we might need with faster and more efficient AI and robots…”
They’ve completely thought this through to their conclusion already. We’re the ones who haven’t. They think they’re simply long-term thinkers and thoughtful environmentalists doing what must be done to save the planet. What they really are is power-mad eugenocidal technocratic maniacs who place no value on human lives or the lived human experience. Other than their own. Their technological utopia is built out of utter horrors and like many utopians they have fallen so deeply in love with their dream that they will accept any cost to reach it, and they have accepted this as the cost. Therefore, they must not succeed. Utopia is an illusion. But the cruelty they will do in pursuit of their utopia is real.
Sam Slopman is blinded by money.
This would assume that the ultimate goal of those developing these massive AIs is the common good. Actions speak louder than words though and those demonstrate a desire to consolidate wealth and power at the humanity’s expense. They’ll be pretty comfortable in their apocalypse proof bunkers while the rest of turn into compost. You won’t find empathy from those who don’t consider you to be of their species. We are all beneath them and therefore expendable.
But guise that will slow down the development cycle and there are compromising photos out there I need to stop paying blackmail money for and claim they are AI generated.
I genuinely believe that this right here is a significant motivator for the aggressive pushing of AI in every fuckin sector. It’s ridiculous though, they’ve already proven they don’t even need plausible deniability, they just need fox news to say a thing and they’ll all believe it without question. Like video of Trump raping or even killing children would not have any effect on his base. They did not need the existence of AI to refuse to believe what they themselves have seen; they do it every day.
They need the spell to become unbreakable. They need people to literally ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears to the extent that they will willingly not only excise themselves from their families but will join new and even more dominant social structures. Akin to cults. Then they will begin the deification. Fake miracles fake revelations mass delusions on a scale grand enough to whip the masses into violent purges of nonbelievers.
And ultimately a permanent underclass. Likely lobotomized in some way from birth that they draw their, “Breeding stock” From.
God do I hope I’m wrong. But it seems too plausible given the inertial desire for simplicity and the disdain for understanding our culture has. And the cravenness of those we’ve entrusted with power.
If these data centers manage to build some additional power generation before the bubble pops, from clean sources, these few years of stupid (in that regard) just might be worth it
All I see is data centers ramping up is coal and other non-renewable resources.
thats what GROK/XAI is essentially doing right now.
Fucking methane generators poisoning kids in Tennessee. Every time you use grok you give a poor child in Memphis COPD. Guess the demographic if the neighborhood they built their death center in too.
They can’t and won’t; they’re busy making the AIs learning fascism from their data inputs and access to cameras and medical records.
Ok… But there are stories out there about data centers and power generation regardless of what they’re using that AI for.
From 30 seconds of searching: https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/ai-data-centers-desperate-for-electricity-are-building-their-own-power-plants-291f5c81
Still won’t make it “worth it”. Our environment is already dead. The only people who could consider it “worth it” are doomerist accelerationist capitalists.
seems like its costing billions per year just o maintain these datacenter, might be per data center too.
