That seems to get a bit philosophical. Are you not gonna use your laptop ~8 hours a day thanks to generative AI? If you still do, that part is constant.
Are you gonna get less done in those 8 hours? Probably. Is it good for the environment to get more done in less time? Can't really answer that one generically. We humans do a lot of stuff simply because we can.
If unemployment goes up 20% from generative AI (just a made up number for narrative purposes), are those 20% not gonna sit in front of a screen all day? Are they perhaps even going to play games that max out their machines instead?
Of course another way to see all this is to argue that we need 20% less humans now, so we save any environmental costs those people induce. Seems a bit gruesome to me.
There’s an assumption here that Gen AI makes everyone more productive.
I find it’s quite the opposite for me. The time saved on generating a response is spent making sure there are no mistakes, misrepresentations, or plain BS. In code, it’s making sure it didn’t generate subtle security errors and the like. I find it’s better at wasting my time than anything.
And then having to read my GenAI-using colleagues’ “work.” What they could have explained themselves in a few minutes becomes a wall of text they didn’t bother to review, let alone write. Waste of time.
We ought to consider that this isn’t the revolutionary tool that’s going to replace workers. That’s capitalism talking and it has a problem on its hands: shareholders want profits for all the money they’ve dumped into these ventures and API tokens aren’t covering their costs right now. Of course they want us to believe it makes everyone instantly more productive since that would sell more API tokens.
… they’ll just deal with how to actually make money with this and hide or justify the environmental damage later.
All of your complaints about generative AI will be fixed with more engineering. I suggest comparing the state of generative AI to the state of automobiles, radios, and rockets now versus a decade after they hit the public consciousness. Even centuries-old civil engineering has its generative AI failure moments like Tacoma Narrows.
All of these fields and many more solve their problems through engineering. The same is true for AI, and the pressure put on them for energy/water consumption will drive that engineering.
You writing remids me, what the heck had us so damn distracted 20y ago, cos in front of google (if that may be a starting point ~20y ago) we had heard much of it, not? ...OT...but what was with the radiation levels caesium an uran that past day measured ...what is in norway...or...um...realy off-topic... (to downvote till deleted, please)^^
>Of course another way to see all this is to argue that we need 20% less humans now, so we save any environmental costs those people induce. Seems a bit gruesome to me.
Seems a bit of a straw man to me. Perhaps there's some light between ecosystem literacy ("carrying capacity is real") and mass murder? :-\
A third way (which differs only in timing) is thinking we can support 100% of the people who exist right now, but acknowledge that if you iteratively "add 20% more people" enough times eventually we will exceed the environment's capacity.
If you think any solution that might be proposed to that is "gruesome" (AKA the usual anti-population modulation trope) just look at the cruelties people inflict on each-other when humans blindly exceed the environment's capacity.
Though I suppose such "law of the jungle" ad hoc population control could be preferred by many, since it effects mostly the poor and powerless, whereas intentional population policy would effect all people equally.
Yes, sorry, that was a strawman, didn't quite realise it. On that point, I _do_ believe that there are too many humans. I'm certainly not in favour of taking any drastic measures against that, but in the long run, I think we'd all be better off if there was less of us. Seems like we have a dynamic right now that will see to that over time: demographic transition.
But my main point - which I didn't make very eloquently - is that we humans do have a tendency to keep ourselves busy no matter what, sometimes doing things that are objectively pointless, sometimes doing things to the detriment of our species. I think the majority of what I've spent my life building falls into one of those two categories, unfortunately. Most applications of generative AI I've seen certainly do. And even if we do things that are objectively beneficial, we still spend resources doing so.
I think it's cool that there's research into the magnitude of that. If you want to save money, you start by understanding what you spend your money on, to use an analogy here.
Are you gonna get less done in those 8 hours? Probably. Is it good for the environment to get more done in less time? Can't really answer that one generically. We humans do a lot of stuff simply because we can.
If unemployment goes up 20% from generative AI (just a made up number for narrative purposes), are those 20% not gonna sit in front of a screen all day? Are they perhaps even going to play games that max out their machines instead?
Of course another way to see all this is to argue that we need 20% less humans now, so we save any environmental costs those people induce. Seems a bit gruesome to me.