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11 posts total
 A sustainable energy system does not only require sustainable production, it also requires sustainable consumption. And at the moment, considering the vast majority of energy is produced by fossil fuels, sustainable consumption means consuming much less, until global emission have been reduced to acceptable levels. Current typical smart phone lifetime is 3 years.  @wim_v12e Others besides me have predicted this, and already it's coming true" "US slows plans to retire coal plants as power demand from AI surges" https://www.worldenergydata.org/us-slows-plans-to-retire-coal-plants-as-power-demand-from-ai-surges/ It is even worse than that, not only will this AI hype slow down phasing out of fossil fuels, it will also lead to a huge rise in emission from chip and server production and data centre construction. I wrote about this earlier, "The insatiable hunger of (Open)AI" https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/the-insatiable-hunger-of-openai/ From next academic year, all our undergraduate degrees in Computing Science and Software Engineering will have sustainability and decarbonisation embedded in their programmes. I'm proud of this.
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I wrote up how we got there: https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/sustainability-in-cs-education/ My #RakuLang Advent blog post is out: Day 4 – Embedding a stack-based programming language in Raku https://raku-advent.blog/2023/12/04/day-4-embedding-a-stack-based-programming-language-in-raku/ If all search queries are replaced by ChatGPT-style queries, what does that mean for energy consumption and emissions? tl;dr: Emissions would increase by 60x. "Emissions from ChatGPT are much higher than from conventional search" https://limited.systems/articles/google-search-vs-chatgpt-emissions/ If you need ChatGPT to be happy, then your happiness is too dearly bought. If you don't need it to be happy but still use it, then your convenience is certainly not worth that cost to the world. This thing uses obscene amounts of energy and water, at a moment when we can't afford to spend more energy on anything, but should be cutting our energy consumption drastically. And it's only the gateway to more and more of such services.   @wim_v12e I'm upset I won't be able to watch it live, we'll still be away from internet when the stream happens. I hope to read a transcript of it aftward :) Have fun! |
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