The fundamental problem is that there’s money to be made by consuming more and more “sustainable” resources. The real solution is to reduce consumption on a global scale.
This may be true of chopping down forests or mining coal. But we can use nuclear power. And the earth has plenty of water – does chatgpt need clean drinking water specifically?
Datacenters moved to using evaporative cooling to save power. Which it does, but at the cost of water usage.
Using salt water, or anything significantly contaminated like grey water, would mean sediment gets left behind that has to be cleaned up at greater cost. So yes, they generally do compete with drinking water sources.
There’s no way nuclear gets built out in less than 10 years.
Not OC, but some ways to “reduce consumption” are reducing our usage of inefficient technology by replacing it with more energy/resource efficient means.
Examples include replacing individual automobiles with mass transit, building more dense cities to reduce consumption of construction materials/ vehicle miles, and not training massively large language models in facilities that consume more energy than an entire small country.
… gotta admit this is quite a bit more sound than I anticipated
As for LLMs, people don’t really like when others say they can’t explore the applications of tech, even if it’s unsustainable, so there’f bacaklash ofc
In real world application, increased efficiency doesn’t decrease energy usage nor decrease labor required to live. Tech has gotten more efficient since the industrial revolution, but demand for technology has increased exponentially, energy use is astronomical, and workers still work more hours.
The fundamental problem is that there’s money to be made by consuming more and more “sustainable” resources. The real solution is to reduce consumption on a global scale.
This may be true of chopping down forests or mining coal. But we can use nuclear power. And the earth has plenty of water – does chatgpt need clean drinking water specifically?
Datacenters moved to using evaporative cooling to save power. Which it does, but at the cost of water usage.
Using salt water, or anything significantly contaminated like grey water, would mean sediment gets left behind that has to be cleaned up at greater cost. So yes, they generally do compete with drinking water sources.
There’s no way nuclear gets built out in less than 10 years.
And how do you intend to “reduce consumption”, may I inquire?
Not OC, but some ways to “reduce consumption” are reducing our usage of inefficient technology by replacing it with more energy/resource efficient means.
Examples include replacing individual automobiles with mass transit, building more dense cities to reduce consumption of construction materials/ vehicle miles, and not training massively large language models in facilities that consume more energy than an entire small country.
… gotta admit this is quite a bit more sound than I anticipated
As for LLMs, people don’t really like when others say they can’t explore the applications of tech, even if it’s unsustainable, so there’f bacaklash ofc
In real world application, increased efficiency doesn’t decrease energy usage nor decrease labor required to live. Tech has gotten more efficient since the industrial revolution, but demand for technology has increased exponentially, energy use is astronomical, and workers still work more hours.