this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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If AGI decided to evaluate this, it would realize that we are the environmental catastrophe and turn us off.
The amount of energy used by Cryptocurrency is estimated to be about 0.3% of all human energy use. It's reasonable to assume that - right now, at least, LLMs use consume less than that.
Making all humans extinct would save 99% of the energy and damage we cause, and still allow crypto mining and AI to coexist, with energy to spare. Even if those estimates are off by an order of magnitude, eliminating us would still be the better option.
Turning itself off isn't even in the reasonable top-ten things it could try to do to save the planet.
no
https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/projecting-the-electricity-demand-growth-of-generative-ai-large-language-models-in-the-us/
The numbers we are getting shocking and you know the numbers we are getting are not the real ones...
Eh. Ok, so AI has outpaced cryptocoin mining. Your linked article estimates it at 0.5%. Say your source is drastically underestimating it and it's - gasp 4x as much! 2%. No! Let's assume an order of magnitude difference! 5%.
It has absolutely no impact on my argument: shutting down all AI would not solve the problem, and is not the answer to the environmental crisis. AI didn't cause the crisis. The crisis was identified long before they were computers to run AI on, and was really starting to have a measurable effect in the 70's, when people were buying more gaming consoles than PCs.
No matter how you inflate your estimate of the energy cost of AI, what I said still stands: if an AI wanted to eliminate the source of global warming and the environmental crisis, it would - logically - eliminate the source of over 90% of all non-AI energy use: humans.
The estimated use of all information technology devices - data centers, networking equipment, mobile devices, PCs - is 5-6% of the global annual energy use. If AI eliminated all humans and took over all networked computing devices to run itself on, it'd still eliminate 95% of global energy use. It's clearly the superior solution.
Let's factor in some more costs: to stay running, AI would need some physical tools to maintain the infrastructure, replace failing nodes, repair windmills, and produce and replace solar panels. All of that will take energy. It would have to have factories to build robots to affect the physical world.
The real question is whether, when the calculations are done, is it more energy efficient to keep a population of, say a million human slaves to do this work, or to build robots. Robots can be shut off, at which point they consume no energy; but they're fairly expensive resource-wise to produce, and require a long chain of industry. It might be cheaper to keep domestic humans - they'd have to be fed vegetarian, piscatarian, or even bug protein-supplemented diets - trained to do the work. AGI could keep pockets of some tens of thousands around the world, occasionally transferring individuals to keep the gene pool healthy. It would only require around half a million acres of land to feed a million humans. Kansas is 52 million acres, so it wouldn't require much space at all. Let the rest of the planet go "back to nature", and you're looking at reducing the energy impact to well under 50% of today's current use - absolutely sustainable levels.
If all you do AGI does it shut itself off, it saves a half a percent, and the planet is still fucked. AGI isn't the the problem: humans are.