You also seem to live in a different world. I urge you to start getting informed on what needs to be done in order to build hardware (hint: it does not grow on trees).

> then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy.

Instead of using all those caps, look at the numbers: we have them. We use more and more energy.

> but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient.

Not sure if you really need the hint, but you shouldn't spend more time flying around the world.

> It's almost certainly a lot less than how much energy I spend using Google.

It is a fact that it isn't. Before Google, people were using less energy than we are now, period.

> Probably something that requires more energy than close to nothing looking at memes on your phone.

The industry that gets you your memes on the hardware you call phone is anything but "close to nothing" when it comes to energy. I would say that you are in bad faith, but with all those examples you've giving, it seems like you are just uninformed.

So let me be blunt: your kids will most likely die because of how much energy we use (from one of the plethora of problems coming from that). At this point, we cannot do much about it, but the very least would be to be aware of it.

How do you account for overall energy use being up massively, and rising at record breaking pace

>Nothing forces the rebound effect to dominate.

Human nature does. We're like a gas, and we fill to expand the space we're in. If technology uses less power, in general, we'll just use more of it until we hit whatever natural limits are present. (usually cost, or availability) I'm not sure I'm a proponent of usage taxes, but they definitely have the right idea; people will just keep doing more things until it becomes too expensive or they are otherwise restricted. The problem you run into is how the public reacts when "they" are trying to force a bunch of limitations on you that you didn't previously need to live with. It's politically impossible, even in a case where it's the right choice.

> Similarly, nothing forces AI or 5G to use more power than whatever you would have done instead

Am I missing something or has the need to vast GPU horsepower been solved ? Those requirements were not in DC's before and they're only going up. Whatever way you look at it, there's got to be an increase in power consumption somewhere no ?

> Nothing forces the rebound effect to dominate.

Not sure what to say to that. Yeah, it would be great if we didn't put so much resources into destroying our own world. I agree.

The fact is that rebound effect very much dominates everything we do. I'm not saying it should, I'm saying it does. It's an observation.

There is some limit to the rebound effect because people only have so many hours in the day, but we’re nowhere near the ceiling of how much AI compute people could use.

Note how many people pay for the $200/month plans from Anthropic, OAI etc. and still hit limits because they constantly spend $8000 worth of tokens letting the agents burn and churn. It’s pretty obvious that as compute gets cheaper via hardware improvements and power buildout, usage is going to climb exponentially as people go “eh, let the agent just run on autopilot, who cares if it takes 2MM tokens to do [simple task]”.

I think for the foreseeable future we should consider the rebound effect in this sector to be in full force and not expect any decreases in power usage for a long time.

> Do we use more electricity because of 5G? I confess I'd assume modern phones and repeater networks use less power than older ones. Even at large.

If we did exactly the same with 5G than what we did with 4G, it would be more efficient.

But why do we develop 5G? Because we can do more. It is more efficient, but we do much more, so we increase our energy consumption. This is called the "rebound effect". It's observed for every. single. technology.

As a data point, I turn 5G off on my phone and get several hours more battery life using 4G. I'm pretty sure the higher bandwidth is consuming more energy, especially since 5G works at shorter distances and probably needs the power to stay connected to cell towers.

The phones, towers, and networks are only the tip of the power iceberg. How much electricity are we burning to run the servers to service the requests that all these 5G phones can now make because of all the wonderfully cheap wireless connectivity?

But presumably the total use of energy has been going up, so while the relative percentage might be the same, I doubt very much that the absolute quantity of GWhr/year has stayed the same.

It's bad faith to talk about greenhouse gas emissions without taking into account the indirect contributions. When you use a computer, you cannot only account for the electricity that goes into the computer that is sitting on your desk.

You have to account for all the energy that went into extracting the materials from the ground, building the electronics, shipping it accross the world, and then the electricity to operate it.