I’ve come to a place where I understand why providing context for claims about e.g. “AI’s water usage” does nothing to resolve the debate. Once people have decided that they disapprove of a practice, any amount of resource consumption is definitionally too much. The numbers are not load-bearing.
On the bright side, it’s objectively more useful than crypto
I almost agree with you. I'm the nutter who wrote kWh/GB is a nonsense metric on an IETF mailing list and got quite a bit of pushback from academics. Same on other metrics. However, UNCTAD now says it is nonsense too. As do the Greening of Streaming and others. It matters.
I have some concerns about AI being applied inefficently at scale because its currently artificially cheap but broadly I agree. There is a larger way in which "Climate Change caused by things I don't like" happens in the discourse that's not a good foundation for difficult collective action.
Well, that's the point, right? Given a limited resource, society should, in fact, have open debate about which uses are acceptable and which are wasteful. No?
@tedunderwood.me well at least we all were able to reach consensus that DH completed the corporate destruction of the humanities
I think the fundamental displeasure is the general sense that this is all about enclosure of resources by a richer and richer group of insiders regardless of whether the specifics always verify that claim