Demand for AI is driving the derivative of demand to go up, breaking forecasts.
I wonder how much money will spill over from AI investment into the power plants needed to support them. they're not going to stop a data center from coming online because there's no power for it, they're just going to build power for it.
Variable renewable energies like solar and wind are not well suited for continuous power demand - solar is only available during daytime when it is sunny, wind has a capacity factor of about 20%. Hydropower or nuclear are the most reliable options, the latter also cleaner than VREs with fossil backup
I suspect so. I've been seeing increasing amounts of outrage about it over the last several weeks, anyway.
This is the wrong moment in history to dramatically ramp up our power usage. We need to be doing the opposite of that, and we've already had a few big ramp-ups over the last several years.
Disagree, now is the best time to be increasing energy production and expenditure — it is the hallmark of development of a civilization. Using less energy means the stagnation of our civilization.
How are we going to advance our technology without spending more energy?
The scale of energy usage today are fractions of what it will be in 20, 50, 100 years…
The problem is that increasing energy usage has environmental repercussions. Until we figure out how to deal with that, increasing energy usage strikes me as being extremely self-destructive.
> How are we going to advance our technology without spending more energy?
Ignoring the question of whether or not advancing our technology should be our top priority, how are we going to do that if we keep pushing the world into a state that is hostile to human life?
I'm sure there will be some, but even if one takes most of the AI claims as exaggerated, current machine learning is orders of magnitude more useful than bitcoin ever was.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 44.5 ms ] threadI wonder how much money will spill over from AI investment into the power plants needed to support them. they're not going to stop a data center from coming online because there's no power for it, they're just going to build power for it.
This is the wrong moment in history to dramatically ramp up our power usage. We need to be doing the opposite of that, and we've already had a few big ramp-ups over the last several years.
How are we going to advance our technology without spending more energy?
The scale of energy usage today are fractions of what it will be in 20, 50, 100 years…
We must build big, build now.
> How are we going to advance our technology without spending more energy?
Ignoring the question of whether or not advancing our technology should be our top priority, how are we going to do that if we keep pushing the world into a state that is hostile to human life?