There is a broad understanding for the need to fly less, as the aviation industry accounts for more than 2% of global CO2 emissions. Yet the data centres we depend on for computing already account for more than that, by some estimates up to 4% of global CO2 emissions.
But there are few calls or campaigns to compute less. If anything, it would appear that humankind has decided the best way forward is to compute more.
We are quicky becoming a generation of… generation.
Generate more images and video, stream your television shows, record your meetings, surveil your employees and customers, snap 10 photos of every scene to make sure you get the perfect one. Run it through an AI filter. Save everything in the cloud indefinitely. Keep feeding the generative tools with all that content. Rinse and repeat.
Except don't rinse.
All the while, oblivious governments are subsidising the establishment of more data centres to the detriment of local communities.
The data centres are the factories of our time. But we can not see them or their carbon footprint, so they are very easy to ignore. So we do. If we can stick with calling them clouds they even feel fluffy.
"A 2018 paper by researchers Lofti Belkhir and Ahmed Elmeligi forecast that computing would exceed 14pc of global emissions (based on 2016 levels) by 2040."
That was before generative AI.
« Data processing and storage has such a large carbon footprint for three reasons.
First, servers require electricity to run. Second, they need to be kept cool, which uses more power and also water. Third, the equipment itself is made from expensive resources and needs to be repaired and replaced.
“Computer hardware contains rare earth minerals and all sorts of stuff shipped from all over the world,” says Craven. »
« “One of the reasons why networking emissions are so high is because there is so little desire and capability to switch machines off because it will increase what we call the latency,” says Hussain.
Society demands that everything happens immediately, which means cloud services run constantly. “Everybody keeps everything humming at peak mode, just in case,” adds Hussain. »
A generation of generation. I mean, at least it's catchy, right?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/30/silicon-valley-data-giants-net-zero-sustainability-risk/
Posts in English
Imagine being a time metereologist and part of a task force that has to decide if and when we need a negative leap second to align our timekeeping with the Earth's rotation. A decision that could cause many critical computer systems to malfunction.
And then, because of the magnitude of that decision, being semi-relieved that the decision can be delayed by approximately 3 years because… wait for it.… the melting polar ice is slowing down the planet's rotation as it is moving mass towards the equator.
@wrenderlust
Exactly! It's like the human race keeps parodying itself.
Imagine being a time metereologist and part of a task force that has to decide if and when we need a negative leap second to align our timekeeping with the Earth's rotation. A decision that could cause many critical computer systems to malfunction.
And then, because of the magnitude of that decision, being semi-relieved that the decision can be delayed by approximately 3 years because… wait for it.… the melting polar ice is slowing down the planet's rotation as it is moving mass towards the equator.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00932-w
« “Today we see the consequences (of the mining) since there’s no more water. It has changed a lot in the last five years. Lithium production pollutes our land and water. The world must know that we don’t agree with this.”
[…]
The irony that the production of environmentally friendly cars is at the root of all this is not lost on her.
"Electromobility is promising so much change but this is not the truth. We won’t have electric cars here." »
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2024/3/16/surviving-the-white-gold-rush-life-in-south-americas-lithium-triangle-2
@wir @linuxtage
Ah, good to know. I wasn't aware the PDF file suggested anything 😅
The organizer of a Linux event in Austria (not Germany as I first wrote) shared a photo of the stack of printouts they've done of my Fediverse graphic. 🥰
Gotta love the early internet vibe this is bringing. Social media made with compassion and zero profit motives.
The graphic: https://axbom.com/fediverse/
The shared post (in German): https://graz.social/@wir/112167482767572418
@wir @linuxtage Very cool to see! Thanks for pinging me and letting me know ❤️
@Cloud68 @wir @linuxtage
Thanks, there is a PDF linked on that web page that should work I think?
@david_chisnall Interesting! Another reason to feel comfortable in the decision to not use Mastodon anymore ;) I wonder why they would have that design decision…
As part of my overarching work on digital ethics I've more often lately been looking at all the data that lives on after our passing, how it affects family, friends and acquaintances, and the many parties that control our online legacy. If we don't talk about it more it's very hard to know what to expect, understand risks and express wishes and concerns.
”Refusal is not merely a negation, but a pathway to different futures.”
Louder, please. 🙏
Fediverse appreciation post.
I don’t know about the apps you’re using but at no point in the Fediverse have I lost track of a post I was reading because the feed auto-refreshed against my will.
Which happens to me regularly on LinkedIn. (And I remember happened on the other platforms I’ve left.) Which should make you acknowledge – if you haven’t done so already – how that is a design feature on the other platforms, not a bug.
This. Alastair has been a huge inspiration to me over the years. Do listen to our interviews with him on UX Podcast , and attend one of this workshops if you can. Or invite him to your organisation!
Clip from the wonderful UX Copenhagen conference.
@elhult
> One objective could be to generate text that is satisfying to customers. 🤷♂️
Haha, fair enough. It struck me that they had that sentence because they expected AI to be more specific, my assumption being that this definition came into being before the LLMs did, but I'm not sure.
> I don't think the term AI is very good because it is too broad. The OECD definition has that problem too.
Definitely agree that the term AI is really just confusing, especially since there are so many different definitions going around. The EU AI Act being another example which has lots of words but which really boil down to "something automated by a computer".
> do you have any AI definition that you like?
Not really, for the same reasons. I think we should divide whatever AI covers into at least 2 or 3 different segments. The fact that "AI" is also used so extensively in science fiction really just means that it's destined to give people the wrong idea.
In Moral Codes, Alan Blackwell talks about 2 different kinds of AI:
"The first kind of AI used to be described as “cybernetics”, or “control systems” when I did my own undergraduate major in that subject. These are automated systems that use sensors to observe or measure the physical world, then control some kind of motor in response to what they observe. [...]"
"The second kind of AI is concerned, not with achieving practical automated tasks in the physical world, but with imitating human behaviour for its own sake. The first kind of AI, while often impressive, is clever engineering, where objective measurements of physical behaviour provides all necessary information about what the system can do, and applying mentalistic terms like “learning” and “deciding” is poetic but misleading. The second kind of AI is concerned with human subjective experience, rather than the objective world."
This is a good start for understanding why the public discourse can be confusing. Especially when people point to the benefits of type 1 when one is critiquing type 2.
Source: https://moralcodes.pubpub.org/pub/1mn2q39n/release/6
As a kid I spent so many hours on Flight Simulator II (on my Atari 800XL), I finally believed I could cope well if I had to take over the controls of a commercial plane. 😅. I mean I had TWO joysticks!
@dcm
I was thinking from a user perspective that a tool like ChatGPT does not have a clear objective. But with the interpretation that the user has some sort of objective then everything does I suppose.
I was struck by how different a general-purpose chatbot is from an AI built for detecting anomalies in x-rays for example, where the objective is very clear. My assumption was then that the definition was once written with specific applications of machine learning in mind.
@elhult
Maybe it's just me but I don't get the impression that ChatGPT has an explicit or implicit objective for example.
Looking at the definition of AI by the Organization for Economic and Co-operation Development (OECD):
"An AI system is a machine-based system that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments. Different AI systems vary in their levels of autonomy and adaptiveness after deployment."
Based on this, if a language model has no explicit or implicit objectives it is not an AI.