Not really. Non-chat/image bot AI that is more resource-efficient and specialized actually exists and may indeed make the world better, depending on use case.

It’s also not hard to imagine a world in which the image/chat bots are developed on a different agenda and thus with different results. Granted, they’d still be power-hungry, given current hardware, but you could alleviate a lot of the pain of developing dozens of competing models and of the pointless pro-fossil push that currently comes alongside AI.

The dog being “cute” to you is kinda not the thing that should define the dog. Would you say that kinda thing about humans?

The video makes it clear that Joe Rogan “did not understand” the Wapo article during 6 different podcast episodes. This is method. There’s a reason this guy is still being promoted though wildly off-base.

The issue is not AI in itself. The issue is that the current iteration of AI chat/image bots is shoved down our throats by billionaires with a eugenicist agenda.

That’s a many-edged sword.

If people tell you, “you can do better” simply as a tactic to shift blame, it’s disingenuous. However, individuals going, as much as possible, plant-based and car-/flight-free and in general consuming less, those still are very good and even necessary steps towards ensuring survival of the species. Those steps also provide a degree of credible moral standing to those individuals on those topics. And we won’t ever get to system change either if there isn’t a critical mass of individuals who change their behavior, thus proving system change is possible.

E.g., the fact that plant milk is a thing now and every supermarket carries at least three varieties and brands now, is because consumers changed their behavior as much as it is about Alpro and Oatly marketing and lobbying.

To a degree, production currently is always decoupled from consumption right now. Somehow, we allow ourselves to landfill 30%+ of the new clothes that are produced worldwide currently. Same for food. Flights need to be 80% full to be individually profitable, but airlines will not simply discontinue a unprofitable route right away, because that would endanger their landing rights at the affected airports. Meta and the Google and Amazon will still start construction on new AI-focused data centers and force AI responses down your throat, because that is the future they already sold to their investors and AI is a loss leader right now anyway. Somehow, there’s also this class of antisocial rich assholes that emit hundreds of times more than you do and whose behavior can torpedo any kind of climate action.

And all of that you can’t affect much from the pure consumer angle, you need to organize and act politically. Ultimately, your power comes not from your individual action itself but from the fact that it may help convince more people to do the same.

All that said, the suggestion “delete some mails” here is just remarkably useless. Even compared to other barely useful suggestions like, say, “limit your total Youtube/Tiktok/Instagram time to 2h/wk” or “downgrade your video streams to 360p”.

Bizarre. Apparently asking providers to cut off some AI or crypto shit ain’t possible. No, instead you gotta pointlessly ask individual consumers to delete a few mails, as if that made any kind of difference.

feminist supremacism

Oh dear, did I miss the point where that part came in somehow?

It makes no sense at all to use this argument to reason in favor of building out energy generation that needs a decade+ to come online and which only ever works with massive corporate and state support.

Solar starts to work at the scale where a random dude in Pakistan screws a couple of panels on their roof without any permits. Nuclear starts to work at the scale where either a corporate behemoth (like GE or Siemens or Hitachi) or a multi-billionaire-financed startup sells a concept to a state-subsidized utility and then they collectively go through years of permits and construction.

Even if solar were a little more expensive per kWh at scale (which is mostly a matter of tuning the calculations the way you prefer), it’s just so! much! easier! to roll out.

And no, we don’t need an ever-increasing supply of power. What we actually need is for people to have a standard of life that they’re happy with. Which has some relation to use of energy but unlike what the article suggests, that correlation is nowhere near linear. People in the US don’t have proper healthcare, they live in sad places cut apart by vast car infrastructure, their cities are still suffering from the aftermath of redlining, etc. — their energy consumption is higher than in many parts of the EU, yet their standard of living is, on average, a lot lower.

People should stop trying to manifest new reactor types. Especially in the face of climate change which really doesn’t leave us much time before shit hits fans even harder. Usually, the lead time on new reactor designs is even longer than on other reactor designs and half the promised features don’t materialize, and you’ll likely learn that the private company building the plant has accidentally forgotten one crucial element on the spec-sheet.

I don’t agree with @grue’s at all, but I think we can still agree that Greifswald appears to be an outlier in that it was especially badly built and managed. This fuckup of a plant is probably not indicative of every other plant.

the most expensive renewable

Ftr, Uranium is not renewable.

I don’t buy the “unsafe” argument

The thing is that the well-known nuclear catastrophes, at a minimum all resulted in fairly large areas right in the middle of civilized land being lost to humanity for the foreseeable future. So, even if overall death rate is only somewhat higher than for e.g. wind energy — wind energy does not lead to such devastating local effects. The other thing is, nuclear needs skilled teams to manage plants at all times, even when they’re shut off. As soon as your country goes off its routine because military coup!, nuclear plants become a massive danger. Also, nuclear plants can make for devastating attack targets during a war (obviously the attacker would need to value mayhem and defeat above colonizability).

And finally, nuclear danger is (within human time frames:) eternal because you need to store some materials safely for a very long time; “nuclear semiotics” is an actual thing studied by scientists somehow — yet I’ve never heard of “oil semiotics” or “solar semiotics”.

I think all of us here agree that fossil energy sucks. Please instead compare against wind/solar/batteries, not fossil energy.

Mmh, I don’t know. Right now, we’re hitting 1.5°C, and depending on whether you ask the mainstream or extreme doomers, our trajectory until 2100 is 2.7…6°C. In essence, I am not sure where 2.5°C is coming from, it’s neither current state nor a prediction.

Apparently a large part of it is on the back of HVO (which is a ~scam), and the article doesn’t mention whether overall parcel volume has increased either.

Thanks for the sensible idea.

What if said private army turns on itself? That’s basically the scenario we all are enacting as part of humanity right now, except on a much smaller scale. I fail to see why that sort of mindset wouldn’t propagate among a private army.

Repost: https://feddit.org/post/13486648

Upton Sinclair, apparently.

Grist’s penchant for long-windedness makes me “headline-only folk”, so thanks. :)

Electric energy generation is just one (large!) part of the equation, and one of the more hopeful parts too. But the article makes only a passing mention of transportation, doesn’t mention (electrified) heating, doesn’t mention nutrition, doesn’t mention plastics, doesn’t mention environmental changes that are now running without further human intervention like thawing tundra and deteriorating eco systems.