this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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It is already showing really great potential.
Then the news drops that all of the progress we made on global warming has been undone by the energy usage caused by AI.
So sure, AI will live up the hype, and we will still die a slow and agonizing death of heat and suffocation.
But at least we will have AI friend chat bots to comfort us through the end.
That doesn't even make sense. I have the mild suspicion that the fossil fuel industry sponsors nonsense like that, as a distraction from sane measures.
What we need to do to stop global warming is very simple: Stop using fossil fuels. We must not add CO2 to the atmosphere.
AI has nothing to do with that. It's just one more use for electricity. If we wanted to stop global warming, we would get the electricity by saving elsewhere, or generating more carbon-neutral electricity, with solar, wind or what not. We simply chose not to do that.
CO2 doesn't only come from fossil fuels. It comes from combustion in general.
We can go nuclear, but look at how Russia has ruined its entire country trying to do that (if you are not aware of how severe the radiation problem in all of Russia, not just Chernobyl, has become, there are tons of youtubers that do documentary style content, Plainly Difficult is one of my favorites).
Solar, wind, hydro can do it, but the amount of CO2 produced by manufacturing the generators is still massive. Its just producing the CO2 upstream in the process instead of during the actual power generation. It would take so many solar panels and windmills to replace burning coal that producing them would still release an amount of greenhouse gasses that rivals just burning the coal.
I don't disagree that we can make try moves to mitigate the damage, but giant red flags went out about Crypto mining. The power draw from AI is far surpassing that, and AI has hardly even started to spin up yet.
I hope for the day we figure out how to produce unlimited energy without destroying the atmosphere in the process, but its Newton's Third Law. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Each "solution" comes with its drawbacks, but our thirst for electricity only ever grows.
The answer would be to make AI draw less power, not to create more power in different ways.
There is no way we are going to get CEOs to scale back their AI power draw when it gives them the ability to scan everyone's face and spy on them in a comprehensive, existential way. They are already using it on Anti-Zionist protesters. They are never going to give that kind of power up, but that kind of power requires an insane amount of... power.
That's FUD.
Sure - the concrete in a large hydro dam requires a staggering amount of electricity to produce (because the chemical reaction to produce cement needs insane amounts of heat), but there's no reason any CO2 needs to be emitted. You can absolutely use zero emission power to high temperatures needed to produce cement.
And not all hydro needs a massive concrete wall. There's a hydro station near my city that doesn't have a dam at all - it's just a series of pipes that run from the top of a mountain to the bottom of a mountain. There's a permanent medium sized river that never stops flowing that comes down off the mountain - with an elevation change of several hundred metres. It provides more power than the entire city's consumption and does so while only diverting a tiny percentage of the river's water. As the city grows, the power plant can easily be upgraded to divert more of the water though pipes instead of flowing uselessly down towards the sea.
Covid and Russia's war created massive fluctuations recently but if you look through that noise global CO2 emissions are pretty much flat and have been for a few years now. They are almost certainly going to trend downwards going forward (a lot of countries already are seeing downward movement).
The simple reality is fossil fuels are now too expensive to be competitive. Why would anyone power an AI (or mine crypto) with coal power that costs $4,074/kW when you could use Solar at $1,300/kW (during the day. At night it's more like $1,700 to $2,000 with the best storage options, such as batteries or pumped storage). Or wind at around $1,700.
Nuclear is $8,000/kW unless you live in Russia, where safety is largely ignored.
Hydro can be cheap if you happen to be near an ideal river - but for most locations it's not competitive with Solar/Wind. So hydro is safe as a long term power generation method into the future, but it's never going to be the dominant form of power unless (like my city) you happen to have ideal geology.
Where do you think rebar comes from?