I'm a little tired of the environmental argument against AI. It feels contrived, like people are fishing for a "problemism" to use to oppose it to avoid harder discussions.

Let's compare AI to one typical 20 mile round trip commute. I asked Gemini and Claude and compared to see if the results looked good, but feel free to check.

One ~20 mile round trip commute: about 5700 Wh in an EV, about 27000 Wh in a gas car (due to thermal efficiency).

Comparing to the EV that's about 1,400 ChatGPT queries, 2,800 AI code completions, and 380 AI image generations.

Ordering lunch on Doordash uses the same power as days and days worth of very heavy AI usage, and that's if the dasher is driving a very efficient car. If they're driving an inefficient gas car it's like weeks of heavy AI usage.

Ultimately what matters is where we get our power. If we are getting it from CO2 emitting sources, what we do with it after that is not relevant. Make AI memes? Order burritos? Boil spaghetti? Who cares. The solution is to replace CO2 emitting sources with cleaner sources.

I also think people are avoiding the big fat elephant: wealth inequality. The whole problem with AI that bothers people is loss of jobs and possible wage suppression. The problem isn't AI, it's inequality and the fact that our system is basically regressive at this point with wealth being actively transferred upward.

But that's a hard complicated discussion and involves confronting powerful forces. It's easier to make stuff up about AI being some uniquely bad energy or water waste when it's not. This is really what "problemism" is all about: using a contrived or exaggerated or mis-attributed problem to avoid a hard or complicated conversation.

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rustystump 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I think it was a carry over from crypto days. Crypto terrible for energy etc etc. AI is also compute heavy so same deal. Regardless of real world use environment arguments are hard to sell because everything in modern life is terrible across the board.

I am pretty sure that the beef industry is far worse than data centers. Dont get me started on plastics.

Stronger arguments can be made “against” ai then energy use.

	▲	api 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Everything in modern life is terrible compared to how it could be. There is quite a lot of room for improvement. But compared to living in extreme poverty in parts of the developing world today or the life of a peasant in the Middle Ages? It’s much better for the vast majority of people. It would have to get a lot worse to be as bad as subsistence farming or filthy slum life. I think the most frustrating thing though is that many of our problems are self inflicted. The subsistence farmer and the slum dweller are victims of circumstance or societal forces far outside their control.