Ben Thomson in a long article today about the AI bubble and its potential benefits, especially lasting power infrastructure:
It’s sobering to think about how many things have never been invented because power has never been considered a negligible input from a cost perspective; if AI does nothing more than spur the creation of massive amounts of new power generation it will have done tremendous good for humanity.
@manton He’s not factoring in the environmental costs, though, which is a matter of increasing concern. But I guess if you think you’re “building God” you don’t pause to consider the damage you’re doing to the ecosystem.
@ayjay I do think we should be pushing for as much renewal energy as possible. The new data centers in Norway are hydropower. Texas should be mostly solar and wind, but I don’t think we’re close to that yet.
@manton Mother Jones just had a story today about wind and solar in Texas. The TLDR is that it’s growing fast regardless of politics.
@manton We need renewable energy to replace the energy we’re already using, not to power a whole bunch of new crap. The first step towards getting out of debt is stop buying new stuff.
@dwalbert I hear you, but I’m also resigned to slow progress unless there is massive new investment. AI has kickstarted that effort. A good balance would be requiring renewal energy for new data centers and providing some percentage of that back into the grid.
@ffmike That matches what I’m seeing. A few days ago we drove to Corpus Christi and there is a huge wind farm that wasn’t there last time we were there. Hundreds or thousands of turbines. It’s just a good idea.
@manton Worldwide, the percentage of AI datacenter energy demands fulfilled by fossil fuels is over 60%. And that’s 60% of an unprecedentedly large amount of energy use. It’s going to be environmentally catastrophic, I’m afraid — the big AI companies certainly aren’t going to slow down to wait for renewable energy sources.
@ayjay @manton The environmental impact is my biggest concern with AI. It’s a pretty big bet that we’ll get this all figured out before we make the planet unliveable.
This tidbit about heating 500,000 square feet of building space with the water to cool the supercomputer they (Nvidia) are building at Oregon State piqued my interest though. www.fororegonstate.org/stay-info…
@manton @ayjay @kimberlykg similar proposal for heating share here in Lansing, MI.
There’s a lot of populist groundswell against building these things so the companies that build and run them seem to be testing some new carrots.
@manton @kimberlykg @ayjay honestly I’m a bit skeptical-though hardly well informed on the nuances. The local power company is facing infrastructure and investment shortfalls and it feels like this company sees opportune conditions to gain a foothold locally.