I truly don’t understand this tendency among tech workers.

We were contributing to natural resource destruction in exchange for salary and GDP growth before GenAI, and we’re doing the same after. The idea that this has somehow 10x’d resource consumption or emissions or anything is incorrect. Every single work trip that requires you to get on a plane is many orders of magnitude more harmful.

We’ve been compromising on those morals for our whole career. The needle moved just a little bit, and suddenly everyone’s harm thresholds have been crossed?

They expect you to use GenAI just like they expected accountants to learn Excel when it came out. This is the job, it has always been the job.

I’m not an AI apologist. I avoid it for many things. I just find this sudden moral outrage by tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist about what it is we were all doing just a few years ago.

The problem is that its reached a tipping point. Comparing Excel to GenAI is just bad faith.

Are you not reading the writing on the wall? These things have been going on for a long time and final people are starting to wake up that it needs to stop. You cant treat people in inhumane ways without eventual backlash.

Copyright was an evil institution to protect corporate profits until people without any art background started being able to tap AI to generate their ideas.

So let us compare AI to aviation. Globally aviation accounts for approximately 830 million tons of CO₂ emission per year [1]. If you power your data centre with quality gas power plants you will emit 450g of CO₂ per kWh electricity consumed [2], that is 3.9 million tons per year for a GW data centre. So depending on power mix it will take somewhere around 200 GW of data centres for AI to "catch up" to aviation. I have a hard time finding any numbers on current consumption, but if you believe what the AI folks are saying we will get there soon enough [3].

As for what your individual prompts contribute, it is impossible to get good numbers, and it will obviously vary wildly between types of prompts, choice of model and number of prompts. But I am fairly certain that someone whose job is prompting all day will generally spend several plane trips worth of CO₂.

Now, if this new tool allowed us to do amazing new things, there might be a reasonable argument that it is worth some CO₂. But when you are a programmer and management demands AI use so that you end up doing a worse job, while having worse job satisfaction, and spending extra resources, it is just a Kinder egg of bad.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-from-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-fired_power_plant [3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-us-ai-n...

> We’ve been compromising on those morals for our whole career

Yes!

> The needle moved just a little bit

That's where we disagree.

Let's be careful here. It's generally a good idea to congratulate people for changing their opinion based on evolving information, rather than lambast them.

(Not a tech worker, don't have a horse in this race)

I suspect people talk about natural resource usage because it sounds more neutral than what I think most people are truly upset about -- using technology to transfer more wealth to the elite while making workers irrelevant. It just sounds more noble to talk about the planet instead, but honestly I think talking about how bad this could be for most people is completely valid. I think the silver lining is that the LLM scaling skeptics appear to be correct -- hyperscaling these things is not going to usher in the (rather dystopian looking) future that some of these nutcases are begging for.

> The needle moved just a little bit, and suddenly everyone’s harm thresholds have been crossed?

Its similar to the Trust Thermocline. There's always been concern about whether we were doing more harm than good (there's a reason jokes about the Torment Nexus were so popular in tech). But recent changes have made things seem more dire and broken through the Harm Thermocline, or whatever you want to call it.

Edit: There's also a "Trust Thermocline" element at play here too. We tech workers were never under the illusion that the people running our companies were good people, but there was always some sort of nod to greater responsibility beyond the bottom line. Then Trump got elected and there was a mad dash to kiss the ring. And it was done with an air of "Whew, now we don't have to even pretend anymore!" See Zuckerberg on the right-wing media circuit. And those same CEOs started talking breathlessly about how soon they wouldn't have to pay us, because its super unfair that they have to give employees competitive wages. There are degrees of evil, and the tech CEOs just ripped the mask right off. And then we turn around and a lot of our coworkers are going "FUCK YEAH!" at this whole scenario. So yeah, while a lot of us had doubts before, we thought that maybe there was enough sense of responsibility to avoid the worse, but it turns out our profession really is excited for the Torment Nexus. The Trust Thermocline is broken.

Well said. AI makes people feel icky, that’s the actual problem. Everything else is post rationalisation they add because they already feel gross about it. Feeling icky about it isn’t necessarily invalid, but it’s important for us to understand why we actually like or dislike something so we can focus on any solutions.

Two things:

1. Many tech workers viewed the software they worked on in the past as useful in some way for society, and thus worth the many costs you outline. Many of them don't feel that LLMs deliver the same amount of utility, and so they feel it isn't worth the cost. Not to mention, previous technologies usually didn't involve training a robot on all of humanity's work without consent.

2. I'm not sure the premise that it's just another tool of the trade for one to learn is shared by others. One can alternatively view LLMs as automated factory lines are viewed in relation to manual laborers, not as Excel sheets were to paper tables. This is a different kind of relationship, one that suggests wide replacement rather than augmentation (with relatively stable hiring counts).

In particular, I think (2) is actually the stronger of the reasons tech workers react negatively. Whether it will ultimately be justified or not, if you believe you are being asked to effectively replace yourself, you shouldn't be happy about it. Artisanal craftsmen weren't typically the ones also building the automated factory lines that would come to replace them (at least to my knowledge).

I agree that no one really has the right to act morally superior in this context, but we should also acknowledge that the material circumstances, consequences, and effects are in fact different in this case. Flattening everything into an equivalence is just as intellectually sloppy as pretending everything is completely novel.

> The idea that this has somehow 10x’d resource consumption or emissions or anything is incorrect.

Nvidia to cut gaming GPU production by 30 - 40% starting ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1poxtrj/nvidia_...

Micron ends Crucial consumer SSD and RAM line, shifts ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1pdj4mh/micron_ends_...

OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank expand Stargate with five new AI data center sites

https://openai.com/index/five-new-stargate-sites/

> Every single work trip that requires you to get on a plane is many orders of magnitude more harmful.

I'm a software developer. I don't take planes for work.

> We’ve been compromising on those morals for our whole career.

So your logic seems to be, it's bad, don't do anything, just floor it?

> I’m not an AI apologist.

Really? Have you just never heard the term "wake up call?"

> tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist

i have yet to meet a single tech worker that isn't so

> I just find this sudden moral outrage by tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist about what it is we were all doing just a few years ago.

You are right, thus downvoted, but still I see current outcry as positive.

OpenAI's AI data centers will consume as much electricity as the entire nation of India by 2033 if they hit their internal targets[0].

No, this is not the same.

[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

At least Excel worked a lot better.

That's fine, you do you. Everyone gets to choose for themselves!

[dead]