> While energy usage has not been disclosed, it’s estimated that GPT-3 consumed 936 MWh.
I'm a huge fan of energy efficieny, but this figure isn't all that much. Let's put things into perspective using some (probably somewhat inaccurate but probably somewhere in the ballpark) random internet sources, showing that this is less energy than a single long haul Boeing 747 flight. (CO2 footprint is probably different but somewhere in the ballpark.)
> A plane like a Boeing 747 uses approximately 1 gallon of fuel (about 4 liters) every second. Over the course of a 10-hour flight, it might burn 36,000 gallons (150,000 liters). According to Boeing's Web site, the 747 burns approximately 5 gallons of fuel per mile (12 liters per kilometer).
(I didn't find the right type of gallon where 36000 gallons == 150000 liters, but let's go with the liter figure anyway.)
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density, 1 liter of kerosene has an energy content of 35 MJ. 150000 liters of kerosene have an energy content of 5250000 MJ. 5250000 MJ is 1458.333333 MWh.
Add another dubious source just to check our calculations (this one uses a larger fuel tank, but we'll re-use the previous figure):
Not to mention that training a model is a "one time deal", where a successfully trained model can be reused by a lot of client (devices).
Considering the way AI can potentially bring benefits to humanity, i see it more like an investment.
For comparison, Bitcoin in 2021 used 110 TWh, solving a problem we've either solved millenea ago, or could be solved using much less power with premined coins.
> Not to mention that training a model is a "one time deal", where a successfully trained model can be reused by a lot of client (devices).
Inference is still done on GPUs, and is not cheap by any means. The number of GPUs you need to run the full 175B GPT-3 model in inference is vastly inferior to what you need during training, but the numbers of replicas of the model running in the backend to serve all customer's requests is vastly superior.
So it's more akin to a 747 being bought by OpenAI and kept continuously running than just one transatlantic flight.
Assuming the energy costs $60 per megawatt hour and that OpenAI isn’t making a loss on their “Davinci” tier, that’s 3-7 entire Bibles of output for the $ cost of the cheapest economy seats on the cheapest London to New York flights I found for the rest of this year, or (Edit: I first claimed 25 million) 1.5 billion [0] tokens per flight, using the previously estimated energy cost per 10 hour flight.
Their “Ada” tier is 75 times cheaper, with corresponding upper-bounds assumptions if they are not making a loss.
From the point of view of climate change, the fact that data centres are often and increasingly carbon neutral (because that’s the cheapest source of electricity, no carbon tax needed) while jet fuel isn’t usually derived from biofuel means there’s a significant possibility, albeit not a certainty, of a divide by zero error.
CPU inference of even the smaller version of GPT-3 would be way too slow for a public API.
What CPU did you benchmark on that gave you a cheaper inference price than GPU? In my experience, for GPT like transformers, they don’t come anywhere near what you can squeeze out of something like a Nvidia T4 in terms of either performance or $/token.
The problem isn't viability, it's the fact that PoS re-centralises wealth for almost no cost to the minter which makes it inferior to PoW. The problem with PoW is the green aspect, of course
So there is no wealth centralization in BTC or ETH?
Oh wait, most mining operations are in the millions of dollars range, nevermind the fact that 84% of all BTC is held by .3% of addresses with > 100 BTC...
You'll always have centralisation in any system, you're just trying to minimise it as much as possible. Mining operations require you to continuously supply to the system at cost, which is completely different to staking that requires extremely minimal to no cost for operation.
Both PoW and PoS have centralisation, but PoS vastly increases this centralisation, does it at a far faster rate, and "locks it in" (there is no feasible way to overcome the most powerful node in PoS, this is not the case thankfully in PoW)
I'll believe it when I see it, but it looks like it's been in the pipeline for almost 6 years[1], so I'd be very surprised if we see it before the crypto bubble bursts.
>> Not to mention that training a model is a "one time deal", where a successfully trained model can be reused by a lot of client (devices).
you are right, but never underestimate the collective stupidity of large software departments where they retrain every time someone makes a commit into their CI/CD pipelines.
I hope they’d notice that the server energy bill was higher than the salary cost of the developers making the commits in this hypothetical scenario. That said, hope isn’t generally sufficient, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens in at least one organisation.
I don't quite understand how a glorified chatbot "brings massive benefits to humanity", nor how a distributed trustless ledger could be achieved millenia ago.
I was thinking more of areas like early stage cancer detection[1], Fraud Detection[2] or the energy sector[3]
As for the glorified chatbot is of course one of the applications of AI, but i refuse to believe it has a very complex model, and the computational power required to use the model is also modest enough that most smartphones can execute it without any noticeable impact on battery life.
On the smaller scale, most of Apple's AI stuff is running on-device[4]. From iOS 15 all of Siri's "voice to text" happens on-device as well. While it's probably still a glorified chatbot, i for one enjoy being able to enter "pet autumn 2019" into my photo search bar, and be shown pictures of pets taking during autumn 2019, regardless of location.
I’m not arguing at all that bitcoin is better in this capacity, but I am curious about the estimated MWh required to mine all the metal for all the coins.
While mining the metal probably hasn't been cheap, it's not as much a recurring cost as the cost of proof-of-work.
Besides, in my part of the world at least, i haven't carried cash in a decade or more, and most people i know don't either. Money is increasingly only a digital thing that exists in your (also digital) bank account.
Even "micro payments" between individuals is being handled here, for a decade or so, by MobilePay[1] on the domestic side, and PayPal on the international side, with Apple Pay looking to be a close contestant to both, at least for the 55-60% of the population using iPhones.
How do you handle the loss of privacy caused by using only non-cryptocurrency digital payments? Any mitigation measures one can take, or is it an all-or nothing proposition to have everything you ever buy logged? Can you see what other citizens buy, or is this privilege reserved to a few bankers, tech companies and government institutions?
Government institutions (the tax man mostly) are trying their best to limit the flow of anonymous transactions. Withdrawing a relatively large amount of cash (>=$1500) requires you to sign a form stating your intended purpose with the cash. Depositing a large amount of cash (>$750) requires documentation on how you came by this cash.
Crypto is nowhere as anonymous as everybody appears to believe. Every single transaction is on the blockchain, and can be traced from acquisition to being spent. Considering that all European exchanges are now obliged to report their customer details to the authorities (under the KYC of AMLD-V EU directive), it becomes a relatively simple matter to trace your money to crypto transactions.
Fortunately, Europe isn’t hit as hard with the customer profiling as the US is, and the EU is rather intent on protecting privacy, so your data purchase history is available only to youths relevant parties.
In case of MobilePay, the service provider can of course see the details, but all my bank sees is a text I’ve input when sending money, or what the sender has input. It still gets reported to the tax authorities.
Estimating the energy consumption of a decentralised network and making a concrete assumption about it is just not making sense as claiming bitcoin and traditional finance are on the same ground.
>>> While energy usage has not been disclosed, it’s estimated that GPT-3 consumed 936 MWh.
How was this estimated? Is that for the final model run, how about all the testing runs, funs that failed, parameter tuning runs etc. are those included?
You've compared one use of energy to another and found them about the same. Fair enough, but that's an utterly different issue to whether it "isn't all that much", which you have not justified.
Not an attack on your figures or your claims, just saying you've not addressed the point you set out to address.
Many of the big players in ML also go out of their way to ensure their daughters are using renewable energy sources. The CO2 footprint thus ends up much lower than the airplane flight.
Your point is incorrect. The energy in the fuel used to fly a plane can also be used to power a gas turbine electrical generator and thereby a computer. They are, at least in principle, fungible.
Their energy consumptions are fungible, but that doesn't mean the content or value of any particular training run or international flight is comparable.
Some flights run totally empty (airlines need to keep their precious routes) which uses a marginally smaller amount of fuel than a full plane, but provides no real value (nobody was transported to a location they wanted to be in). Other flights are normal, but also carry an individual of great importance, or play a strategic role.
Some training runs waste a bunch of power and then get thrown away. Others go on to serve users and make billions of dollars.
The energy cost is only a proxy for the fully loaded "value" of what you create with your energy consumption. That's why it's not comparable.
At first glance I thought this was going to be another 'tech X uses energy Y and so tech X is bad' but reading the article shows it focuses mainly on lowering the energy cost of computations using a number of different approaches that look interesting. Sparse matrices where every element doesn't need to be re-computed as most stay zero for example. I'm not sure what actual improvement this would bring, but they do follow a good basic notion: if you're going to discuss a problem, try to discuss possible solutions to that problem, and improving the energy-efficiency of computation is always a good idea.
The one issue is that translating electricity usage into fossil fuel equivalents for this specific application, without contextual information about similar energy demands, such as streaming video, data collection/storage/processing (be it at Google or the NSA), total router energy consumption in the global Internet, etc. might result in a distorted view of the relative importance of energy demand for their particular issue (training complex models).
Furthermore, it's not necessary to generate electric power with fossil fuels, is it? My view is that solar/wind/storage is the optimal global-scale solution, but placing energy-hungry steady-load data centers near baseload nuclear power plants is arguably an efficient solution (ask the insurers first, however). Hydropower is region-specific and as the drought shows, subject to going offline when needed most to run AC etc. It's not inevitable that power demands equate to fossil carbon emissions, in other words.
You're right on the face of it, the added context that's missing is Numenta has been pushing bio-inspired AI for like 17 years and nothing practical has come of it. If using some energy to achieve a practical goal is wasteful, using less energy to accomplish nothing is more so.
I got into AI after a grad school career split between mathematical signal processing and computational neuroscience. I knew folks back in the early 2010's looking at joining Numenta. The ideas are absolutely good to explore, it's the execution that's lacking. Maybe their big breakthrough is just around the corner, but how long do you wait for product 1 alpha build 1 before calling out vaporware?
Additionally, the ideas here are well represented in mainstream deep learning research by the supposed energy offenders. For example, here are links representing practical applications using sparse inference, continuous multitask learning, and specialized hardware -- just by Google.
The article is marketing to folks who care about the environment, but have limited background on modern ML (and perhaps also energy economics).
That's valid. As I was reading through it I was wondering if their claims about how brains actually work internally were all that well supported, things like:
A biological neuron has two kinds of dendrites: distal and proximal. Only proximal dendrites are modeled in the artificial neurons we see today.
Nerve cells in the brain also have what, ~20 different chemical neurotransmitters modulating the state of the neuron in question, and this looks a lot more analog than digital... any kind of one-to-one correspondence between biological brains and digital learning networks never seemed all that realistic to me.
I don't think their scientific claims are all that inaccurate, maybe some stuff is simplified but that's inevitable. To my understanding, the issue is more converting that advanced scientific knowledge into something tangible.
Can I build a Google photos competitor using spiking neural nets for content recognition? Can i train GPT-4 with 50% of the power bill of GPT-3? Can i dare hope for better accuracy or robustness for some production task? Or better compressed nets for edge computing? I'm not seeing anything like that. We've known a long time that ANNs as implemented today are very crude compared to biological neurons; they really just share a name. What's supposed to differentiate a company from a lab is taking that insight and doing something concrete with it.
A neuron in the brain is more like it's own microprocessor than just a memory cell anyway, which is why the current style of ANNs ('bio-inspired' or not) will never come close to the computational complexity involved in anything like a mammalian brain.
Yes he is not keeping current. Modern AI is differentiable functions, taking about "neurons" and their mapping to brain hardware at this point is old school at best.
Saying a particular sector (AI/Crypto/...) consumes a lost of energy and we should do something about it, is like treating the symptoms and ignoring the root causes. The problem is mostly how we produce energy, not how we consume it. Consuming less energy on a particular sector means people in that sector have more money to spend on other things and those other things also cost energy (ok maybe less). To be clear I'm not saying we should totally ignore how much energy a sector consumes but most of our focus should be on how the energy is produced.
I don't think this is correct. I think that in essence what we've learned over the past 100 years is that we need to be more conscious of the totality of the cost benefit analysis, because what happens is that a lot of industry can can make private profits by exploiting public goods. So it's actually encouraging that we're starting to more objectively look at different activities and "Ok, here are the private profits of this industry and here are the public costs". Energy is a really simple element of that, and in AI it's probably not the most important, but it is very easy to measure. It's very easy to say "If you want to do this AI stuff, it's going to mean X tonnes of carbon or Y tonnes of rare earth metals or Z square miles of wind turbines".
Having said that, in Crypto it's a much more compelling argument because it's like "Here are some obvious, big costs that are fundamental to the system, and there are almost no benefits" whereas in AI the nature of these algorithms is that we're likely to improve them, so comparing training GPT-3 is kind of like measuring the power draw of the LHC. It's certainly big and it's certainly something we can talk about, but no one thinks we're going to be building 100,000 LHCs.
> Saying a particular sector (AI/Crypto/...) consumes a lost of energy and we should do something about it, is like treating the symptoms and ignoring the root causes. The problem is mostly how we produce energy, not how we consume it.
For AI, sure, for crypto (if PoW), no.
If energy was a tenth of the cost, PoW crypto would use 10 times more.
You do have a point, and I agree that making the production-side clean should be a large focus, but there are valid arguments for reducing consumption, too, I think.
Supply of energy is limited, and so there is a market effect: overconsumption by some players can increase the cost to other consumers.
Market economics should mean that the resulting increase in profit margin turns into an opportunity for more-cost-effective competitive entrants.
Most of this assumes no collusion between players in the market. If, for example, company A provides a product that is knowingly energy-inefficient and half of their board members also sit on the board of energy company B that is experiencing record profits -- and could easily acquire company C that theoretically has a cheaper energy production solution -- then perhaps problems could occur.
(note: the shared-board-seats is mostly a lazy, hypothetical and probably unlikely example. similar issues could probably occur due to vocal activist investors, capital funds, potentially even pools of shareholders aligned on similar goals. these theories rest on the idea that consumer adoption of products isn't entirely organic and rational, and that demand can be manufactured/guided)
Totally agree. 5% of power plants are responsible for 73% of emissions [0]. That's like 1500 power plants. Rather than fix the emission issue at this small source, many would rather blame the population at large. Rather than fix 1500 big issues, they'd rather change the behavior of billions of individuals. It makes no sense.
I feel like this is not going to gain a lot of traction but just in case anyone ends up here I can't pin down a great source but I've heard / read that the entire IT sector consumes something in the neighborhood of 5-9% of global energy, and that that percentage doesnt have a linear relationship to the expansion of the IT sector.
The more reliable government resources dont even seem to bother to list IT as a major energy consumer, although its obviously embedded in most / all traditionally recognized sectors.
Not to mention how much IT enables us to avoid using energy! Better routing, just in time manufacturing and storage, teleconferences replacing flights...
The IT industry also uses primarily electric energy which is easier to make green than for example long-range trucking, farming, or long-distance flights.
Airliners account for 2.5% of global CO2 emissions [1], yet we are working to ban passenger air travel to protect the climate. 5-9% is huge in comparison, and we should legislate restrictions on wasteful computing before the climate emergency gets any worse.
Look at how inefficient and harmful for the environment software has become. Devs and corporations are throwing away CPU cycles like it's no big deal when they use large, overly abstracted software tech stacks. You don't need a 3GHz CPU when 500MHz will do the job just as well with greener coding practices. It's time for common sense tech reform in order to protect the environment from this kind of corporate waste.
Whatever specific idea you have in mind is either not commonly held, not sensible, or both uncommon and non-sensible. If it was both common and sensible, we’d already be doing it.
If we invested all the money it would cost for “greener coding practices” in to public transport we would see absolute massive gains vs an almost unmeasurable gain from the code.
I wonder if you could create a nuclear powered cruise ship to ferry people cross the Atlantic in two or three days. If you could do that cheaper than a flight I might be interested in that. Air travel is terrible and if you could relax and have your own cabin it could be a really pleasant experience while not producing any travel based emissions.
We can often easily substitute planes for trains for absolutely massive gains. I don't think there are massive gains to be had for tech. I'm sure someone will show me a post about how C uses a few watts less but its not even close to the gains that can be had elsewhere.
From what I see in companies, probably half of the data and workloads out there are pretty much useless or barely used. At home, I think most of us could do a better job by shutting down everything when we are away.
Their careful comparison of the efficiency of AI vs the human brain is hilariously absurd to me.
It seems to assume a disembodied "brain in a vat" model, as if brains aren't ordinarily attached to a large clump of flesh that typically attempts to accumulate as many resources as it can, and often enjoys combusting large quantities of fossil fuels hurtling around in various metal enclosures.
I suppose we could be very efficient at image classification once AWS announces their new h5.large "MT bare human" instances, where gigantic banks of people are set to work solving CAPTCHAs with their incredible performance per watt specs.
Or we could redo the analysis with other cherry-picked measures and find the "human architecture" is orders of magnitude less efficient at multiplying large integers, and come to the conclusion that we should replace all babies (which have a wasteful decades-long training period) with ARM chips.
It costs a lot of money because we think those computers should have rights. But under more permissive legislations it would be so cheap and accessible that we wouldn't need to do much of the modern AI research. I assume this is what they meant, with slavery there would be much less need to do AI research, self driving cars is hard but slave driven cars is easy, the whole point of AI is that it lets us create slaves that we don't feel bad about abusing.
> Amazon already did that, it is called mechanical turk.
That's what the "MT" stands for :)
> the whole point of AI is that it lets us create slaves that we don't feel bad about abusing.
Yes, that's exactly right. The article glibly compares the energy efficiency of AI with the human brain, completely ignoring any other concerns, and pretends it means something.
Playing by those sets of rules would enable the sorts of analyses I outlined above.
Your interesting take does ignore the fundamental point however that the human brain requires both far less energy and far less training data to learn. The takeaway for me is that there is huge scope to improve our machine learning techniques.
I didn't really want to get into the specifics of the article, since I believe the entire analysis is fundamentally misguided.
But I think the article's specific claims about image recognition (they use the example of identifying pictures of cats) are completely false:
- The article claims models must be retrained from scratch if they are to identify cartoon cats instead of real cats. This is absolutely false and transfer learning is old hat by machine learning standards.
- The article cites the fact that an image recognition model "requires many weights and lots of multiplication", as an example of inefficiency, as if human brains don't encode trillions of weights in the connections between their billions of neurons.
- If AI models could only identify a few hundred photos per hour, this would undoubtedly be used as evidence of inefficiency. By the same token, if we consider the cost of training amortized over the subsequent cost of image identification, image recognition models are are far more efficient at scale than humans, even if we grant massively overstated estimates of training costs.
- All humans must go through an incredibly expensive, labor-intensive training process, before which they will completely fail to reliably identify a cat.
- Humans required billions of years, the death and suffering of trillions of organisms, the terraforming of an entire planet, and vast amounts of energy to run a stupidly inefficient Monte Carlo "pretraining" phase.
I can't help but come away with the feeling that I've been trolled. They managed to pick image recognition, an area where efficient AI models approach or exceed human performance, to prop up an absurdly myopic comparison that wouldn't make sense even if they got any of the details right.
I bet YouTube/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok/NetFlix spend orders of magnitude more resources uploading/transcoding/streaming videos than all the AI models training costs put together.
a) Stop using the term carbon footprint. It was invented by BP to scapegoat and market, it defocuses us.
b) Blaming tech or civilians doesn't help. Blame countries. China, U.S, Germany etc need to step up. Ban coal power production -- coal industrial power combustion and mining is everything bad
including radioactive (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...) -- promote nuclear.
c) At this point add serious teeth to treaties. Countries not taking steps are costing future lives and resources. We are going nowhere otherwise.
P.S. Practically, too many powerful countries have serious incentives to offload responsibility, and as this is a prisoners dilemma game in the sense one cheating screws everyone, that there are no peaceful means to achieve this goal. So let's not kid ourselves.
> there are no peaceful means to achieve this goal
The EU's border-adjustment scheme isn't perfect. But it's in the right direction. Clean up your own act. Assign a broad-brushed adjustment to goods coming from dirty origins and use the proceeds to (a) further clean up your act or (b) incentivise others to clean up theirs.
I would hope so. The problem is numbers don't much at this point and there are strong incentives if you have to pick between economic growth or being green. And the fear (irrational or not; your pick) to nuclear doesn't leave a lot of options.
But that is a step that might, and I say might, with a lot of salt help. The problem is we don't see this happening. Germany, for instance, was increasing their coal mining volume prior to the Russia Ukraine war and were not going to make the independence goal.
P.S. I was going to edit my comment to add the efficacy of sanctions and other similar measures, but yours covers it. Thank you for your comment.
I agree. But we are betting on the game changing -- by addition of a new technology or by nuclear becoming accepted as a basis power production or being able to construct high capacity batteries out of non toxic/abundant elements.
Addressing the energy cost of "large" but rare events is a remarkably low leverage way to improve environmental outcomes.
Alongside training AI models, Spaceflight is the other issue that comes to mind. These things look bad because of "big" numbers or plumes of soot coming out of engines, but when added up they account for such a small fraction of emissions that they won't be useful focuses for a long time.
Focusing on them now detracts from places where we can have real impact: human transport, cargo transport, food production, clothing manufacture, carbon capture, and so on.
This ignores renewable energy. What's the problem with renewables? Intermittency. Which is perfect for training. Just use a battery for a 10 minute buffer and start/stop when current energy price drops due to wind or sun energy flooding the grid.
Lol, this is a good angle for Numenta to take, but for all the time and brainpower they've spent so far you'd think they could come up with one thing that moves the needle in practice!
Numenta was founded in 2005. They’ve been pushing their idiosyncratic views on AI for almost 20 years with no impact that I can see. I guess they are upset that other people are doing AI without them.
> Many large companies, which can train thousands upon thousands of models daily, are taking the issue seriously.
No they don't. Because:
> Continuing to build larger and more computationally intensive deep learning networks is not a sustainable path to building intelligent machines.
If they'd care, they would evaluate how they threaten humanity's future by emitting more CO2 versus how they improve humanity's future with the services they provide.
Instead, they start from the idea that their services are a non negotiable absolute net positive (TBH it's obvious since it's their raison d'être)) and that CO2 is a negative that can be managed. Whereas, to me, it's the opposite: CO2 is an absolute non negotiable negative and the services might be changed or removed.
You are ignoring that all major cloud providers are aiming to be carbon neutral in the next few years and regularly publish their progress on that front. They take this very serious because people keep asking them about this and they don't like it when they have to give answers people won't like. Most companies at this point are well aware that they don't have forever to clean up their act. And most of the big tech companies have actually been very pro-active on this front for quite some time.
Pretty much all new data centers are powered using renewables. Not because it's cleaner but because it's cheaper. If your main consumable is a lot of electricity, you are going to want to source it cheaply. Which these days means the same as using renewables. Mostly that's a mix of them generating their own power and supplementing that with renewable energy on the local market. That has been the case for quite a few years, which is why companies like Google and Amazon figured out that they were also helping themselves financially by pushing hard for carbon neutral well over a decade ago.
So, whatever goes on in those newer data centers is pretty much not emitting any co2. Aside of course from manufacturing of hardware and construction of the site, which would be a separate topic.
Some of the older data centers are still powered via coal/gas plants, especially in the US. Those will likely clean up their act in the next few years. All the big cloud providers have announced roadmaps for becoming carbon neutral. Once that is done, data centers will use a lot of energy that is generated sustainably.
That doesn't mean that there aren't issues around this. E.g. the Netherlands is reluctant to host more data centers because they are claiming all the sustainable energy that is available in the local market and they have to worry about powering the rest of the country in a sustainable way too. And since that costs a lot of money, having Facebook or Google then get subsidized to use all of the newly available wind power looks a bit bad.
But all that means is that there's a lot of healthy demand for clean power that short term outstrips supply. Lots of companies are working to tap into that rapidly growing market. Which is good news for our planet. Any market that supplies a lot of clean & cheap energy can expect to see businesses trying to make use of that. Especially energy intensive businesses like data centers. So, there's a great incentive for governments around the world to make that happen.
So, perhaps the wrong reflex is to argue that we should all become Luddites to reduce demand on renewable energy. The right response is to argue for sourcing your cloud services sustainably. Most cloud providers can probably tell you which of their data centers are clean and which aren't. They might not be very vocal about dirtier ones but you can choose which regions you host in and which ones you skip and make some educated guesses. Interesting way to nudge them a little harder. That's on you, not them. Not a lot of companies do that yet. But they could. And IMHO they should.
this is not revolutionary, all of this has been discussed before.
the stuff about inspiration from the brain confuses me too... it reads a bit like neither ai nor neuroscience is particularly deeply understood. its very basic stuff.
If it's profitable to run the AI given it's energy costs, that means all is fine, no? If you think it shouldn't consume all that energy, shouldn't the energy be more expensive?
Not necessarily; while I wouldn’t apply the term in this case, the idea of a “sin tax” is an example of where society says a product or service must be made more expensive to discourage use, even if it’s otherwise profitable.
Bitcoin used all the energy and took all the profits, so there isn't enough left for the AI. duh.
Or, and hear me out, using energy to push society forward isn't necessarily bad.
Maybe instead of vilifying every new technology that uses energy for the last 20 years, including the internet: (Dig more coal the PCs are coming https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=56f...), perhaps the impetus should be on incentivizing green energy production.
"Just use less energy" arguments are insane. Even when we improve the energy efficiency of our processes, that just leads to said process happening more - not an overall reduction in energy use. Just look at historical energy consumption trends to see this.
Anything less than producing more energy more cleanly is missing the point. Long term energy usage trends do not go down.
This is my primary concern with fusion. I have a gut feeling that fusion existing could actually accelerate consumption and thus climate and environmental change. I have been trying to find research about this. I recently found the book Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism by Ozzie Zehner, which I think may be interesting.
I should note that I am not against fusion and absolutely think we should be doing it. However, it's my feeling and something that I'm trying to learn about that we should also be doing many other things. For example, conservation of land and habitats is no longer viable. We have got to be restoring these things as best we can if we have a chance against climate change. I think it should be renamed environmental change, because that's more accurate and paints the more serious picture. Climate change seems to phrase it in very human-centric terms. We also need another economic system whose end goal isn't corporate world domination. We need an economic model that drives innovation but also redistributes and is sustainable. What's interesting is that this is exactly what nature accomplishes. But humans have gone off the rails in terms of consumption. However, with our adaptability and technology, we have been able to continually consume more and more, whereas other animals (e.g., rabbit populations) cannot continually exist outside of some bounds and are checked. What's interesting is trying to understand where our bound or what our check is going to be. I have a feeling that our destruction will eclipse our adaptability and technology at some point. It will not be pretty when that happens.
As other commenters have pointed out, it's not just power usage that will increase. Because there is a huge amount of material and processes that will be mined, disposed of, exhausted, pollute, etc. in addition to drawing all that power.
There has got to be a nice graph that correlates power usage with these things, but I have yet to find it.
That’s possible. However there are also a huge number of things that would be great for the environment like really complete recycling, very land efficient agriculture, ocean cleanup, etc, that would become economically feasible if energy were really cheap.
> like really complete recycling, very land efficient agriculture, ocean cleanup, etc, that would become economically feasible if energy were really cheap
Do you have any resources on those topics? I'd like to learn more about that how cheap electrical energy enables those.
I think the YouTuber Isaac Arthur has a video (or possibly many videos) on that, but he does so many videos and they’re so long I don’t want to risk linking to the wrong one.
The TLDR summary for your quotation is: Complete recycling — with enough energy you can break everything into atoms; Very land efficient agriculture — the cost of glass and metal for greenhouses and desalination is mostly energy, likewise most of the stuff needed to make vertical farming worth considering.
(I don’t remember Isaac Arthur mentioning ocean cleanup, but that may just be flawed memory).
> As other commenters have pointed out, it's not just power usage that will increase. Because there is a huge amount of material and processes that will be mined, disposed of, exhausted, pollute, etc. in addition to drawing all that power.
These are all the things which allow us to live in a modern society with a high quality of life. More power is a more modern higher quality of life for more people, citing the last few hundred years.
We live in a closed system with limited resources. More power means more quick resource consumption and faster pollution. In other words the quality of our environment will degrade faster. During the last few hundred years humanity has reaped the benefits of indiscriminate resource consumption giving little thought to the consequences, in practice borrowing QOL from future generations and from the environment. Imho it's not a long-term sustainable practice though.
More power means the ability to do things less efficiently - to pollute less. Steel, concrete, liquid fuels could all be carbon free, and what has been emitted sucked out of the atmosphere. Nearly every process that pollutes could be made to not - it 'just' takes energy.
As for everything else, we've barely even scratched the surface of this rock we're standing on - to say nothing of the rest of the dist system.
Do you really intend to argue that the quality of life in just about anytime before the 1960's is better than it is now? Quite a lot of people were still stuck on the subsistence farming treadmill.
>Nor do I think that is a given fact. More people starve today than there were people alive a few hundred years ago
So no credit for feeding the billions who eat on the back of modern, energy intensive, fertilizer production?
> on the back of modern, energy intensive, fertilizer production
One of the very things destroying the environment and negatively affecting public health?
> So no credit for feeding the billions
This isn't school and human lives and people are not statistics. The question to ask is "at what cost?". Does feeding those billions suddenly do anything to help the 800 million or so starving in a world that has enough to feed them? What about the illions of animals and plants humans have destroyed over the past few hundred years? Again, at what cost?
A related aside: when humans originally started to utilize agriculture in the beginning of human history, the overall affect was a net negative in health, life expectancy, and efficiency (i.e., time spent working).
The number of people in extreme poverty today — defined as less than $1/day income adjusting for inflation relative to 1996 — was about 733 million in 2015 vs. 965 million in 1820. Likewise, the estimated number of people globally who are systematically going hungry is between 720 and 820 million.
The world population in 1820 was about 1093 million.
One of the absurd things about longtermism is that they assume that no matter how high the quantity of humans is and no matter how contrived the method of increasing the quantity is, they assume their proposed system will result in people living lives worth living so simply increasing the number of people is a net good, when it is entirely plausible that they also create unimaginably high numbers of unhappy people but their complete earth surveillance program simply eliminates them before they can cause a rebellion and destroy the wet dream of 10^58 people living in a tiny room with a permanently attached matrix like VR setup.
I think there’s a straw man somewhere here. It’s not like utility monsters/demons and the “mere addition paradox” (AKA the repugnant conclusion) aren’t already a well known issue from the philosophy studies of utilitarianism.
It's not just the usage of fossil fuels that causes damage to the environment. More energy from fusion will allow more precious resources to be mined, more wasteful stuff to be made, more trash to throw out.
I'm not against fusion at all, but it is important to remember that carbon dioxide isn't the only problem harming the planet.
>We also need another economic system whose end goal isn't corporate world domination.
We have economic democracy, participatory economics and good old Freiwirtschaft (can be translated as free (as in freedom) economics by Silvio Gesell.
>What's interesting is that this is exactly what nature accomplishes
Capitalism only allows for growth, whenever the economy isn't growing, people get fired and you have an economic recession or depression. Freiwirtschaft simply allows for both growth and decay. There is no discontinuity i.e. recession and no unemployment when the economy isn't growing. People will keep working to maintain their existing capital, that includes restoring nature.
Do you have a source? How is that calculated? I suspect it's a rather complicated calculation. Questions like what defines a person in this context, what defines electricity usage, where did it go or come from if it did change, etc. seem like important ones to answer.
3887 TWH in 2010 / 309.3 million people = 12.57 MWH per person.
3954 TWH in 2019 / 328.3 million people = 12.04 MWH per person.
3930 TWH in 2021 / 331.9 million people = 11.84 MWH per person.
And that’s with over a million electric cars added.
Likewise if one looks at total energy consumption in the US:
2000: 98.7 quadrillion BTU / 281.4 million people = 350 million BTU/person/year
2019: 100.5 quadrillion BTU / 328.3 million people = 306 million BTU/person/year.
On the other hand, increased use of global manufacturing and reliance on ocean transport is concealed by this metric. Still, it doesn't look like overall things are getting worse.
For the CO2 metric:
2000: 20.9 tonnes per capita
2019: 15.7 tonnes per capita
According to the below EIA article, things are getting worse worldwide.
> Global electricity consumption continues to increase faster than world population, leading to an increase in the average amount of electricity consumed per person
Well, sure. You have developing countries... developing, in addition to the (difficult to quantify) outsourcing effects that I mentioned above.
Note that I really want electricity usage to go up a lot, too. It's just overall primary energy usage that we want to stay level or go down. That's why I used the primary energy usage metric. After all, moving to an electric car or replacing natural gas heating with a heat pump "increases electricity usage."
But that energy also serves way more people than before. Chinas energy use went up a lot, but their standard of living also went up a lot and is now comparable to cold war USA/Europe. You can't leave that out.
We've had basic heating, insulation, and lighting efficiency improvements. Also, population has moved from colder to warmer climates. You can probably count up your personal energy usage and see that it's reduced. LED lighting, CRT televisions obsolete, vehicle efficiency, and so on.
Meanwhile, people mostly use a couple devices with high energy efficiency that are used for basically everything, instead of twenty lower quality devices...
No, our dependence on fossil fuels to product energy is harming our planet. I feel like it’s long past time we reinvest in nuclear energy. It’s the one thing we can do to significantly reduce fossil fuel consumption over the next decade.
Solution was there many decades ago. Yet look at the state of nuclear energy now: plants are being closed instead of new ones being built. This is so annoyingly hypocritical. People who manufactured the crisis are now pushing onto us non-solutions to ensure we end up with neither energy nor environment
It's amazing how even today most rooftops don't have solar panels. We have the technology and resources to solve our energy problems, the only thing missing is the policy.
> even today most rooftops don't have solar panels
I'm installing rooftop solar. It makes me feel good.
Its output is an order of magnitude more expensive than utility-scale solar behind the meter. The solution has to be renewables + storage + zero-carbon baseload, i.e. nuclear. Everything else, including calls for rooftop solar, is a distraction.
Rooftop solar isn't cost-efficient, or Walmart would be putting solar on its roofs instead of just virtue signaling with it in the parking lot. (Apologies to whoever I took this from.)
Edit: (You might say, isn't cost-efficient yet. For all I know parking shade structures could have turned the corner already; they used to require tax incentives to break even.)
> Rooftop solar isn't cost-efficient, or Walmart would be putting solar on its roofs instead of just virtue signaling with it in the parking lot. (Apologies to whoever I took this from.)
Walmart has more parking lot space than roof space, and parking lot solar doubles as covered parking, which itself has value.
Even if both were cost effective, it makes sense to do parking lot first (with accompanying PR) and then rooftop later (with another round of PR).
I live in a highrise and when I look down, almost every single building, residential, office space, government, even schools, they all have solar on the roof. Almost every home owner has solar on their roof as well. It’s basically just rental properties without.
If there were a cost for pumping pollution into the atmosphere required to generate electricity then that cost would be passed on to you the consumer and then it might be 'cost-efficient' to install solar.
Trying to reduce fossil fuel use by outcrowding it with various things is like pushing with a string. Especially as we are used to using underpriced energy very wastefully. Fatal, megadeath (or even giga-) inducing amounts of easily accessible fossil fuels will be pumped and dug out of the ground unless it's just regulated down.
Yes we need other forms of energy production, but it's suicidal to try to just use them in this supply-pushing way, we don't have time to faff around with that.
Year 2022, I know people in America are comfy in their homes. But here in Europe, people are dying few thousands KMs from our borders. Who the fck cares about carbon footprint or green energy...
I hear you don't like war. Neither do most people.
Reducing energy consumption would reduce the increased chances of future energy and climate change derived wars according to current models.
I'm sure these people will gladly put themselves in a position to decide which are valid uses for energy so they can enlighten us all with their wisdom
And those who don't obey should be intimidated into compliance. After all, this is a fight to save the planet and your casualty is a small price to pay
And THEN ... "asteroid" is an anagram for "Ai do rest" ... that would just automatically plug into the Earth's natural electro-magnetic field as both an energy source and a means of subtly influencing "evolution" of lifeforms that could be influenced via their nervous systems ...
First to stop clapping. By attaching an inconsistent critical theory to something complex like machine learning, it elevates the ideological speaker to being percieved in the eyes of an audience as equivalently competent to the people whose work they are criticising. This is the trick of all critical theory, and if you do not challenge them, it means that you are going to have to pretend someone yammering on about climate justice knows anything about your field.
Saying something "harms the planet" these days is just code for pointing out targets for subversion, subjugation, and governance. The next best they can do is be bullying and disagreable. I'm tired of this bullshit narrative stuff. What's doing the most harm to our planet is putting up with it.
I'm a huge fan of energy efficieny, but this figure isn't all that much. Let's put things into perspective using some (probably somewhat inaccurate but probably somewhere in the ballpark) random internet sources, showing that this is less energy than a single long haul Boeing 747 flight. (CO2 footprint is probably different but somewhere in the ballpark.)
https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/qu...
> A plane like a Boeing 747 uses approximately 1 gallon of fuel (about 4 liters) every second. Over the course of a 10-hour flight, it might burn 36,000 gallons (150,000 liters). According to Boeing's Web site, the 747 burns approximately 5 gallons of fuel per mile (12 liters per kilometer).
(I didn't find the right type of gallon where 36000 gallons == 150000 liters, but let's go with the liter figure anyway.)
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density, 1 liter of kerosene has an energy content of 35 MJ. 150000 liters of kerosene have an energy content of 5250000 MJ. 5250000 MJ is 1458.333333 MWh.
Add another dubious source just to check our calculations (this one uses a larger fuel tank, but we'll re-use the previous figure):
https://www.withouthotair.com/c5/page_35.shtml
> And fuel’s calorific value is 10 kWh per litre. (We learned that in Chapter 3.)
150000 l * 10 kWh/l = 1500000 kWh = 1500 MWh, so about the same.