alt Hacker News> Data centers don't use a particularly large amount of energy compared to literally any other commercial human activity. You likely use more energy driving to the store once than you do firing off AI queries for an entire year.
But they do use a lot of energy when you consider all the development and resource extraction that they necessarily imply, a factor that most people don't put into their calculations.
For a datacenter is not just a datacenter; it's an incentive and pressure to get others to develop competing datacenters, new models, new products based on them, etc; and the resulting pollution and energy usage from that is astronomical.
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Notice how the comparison is never to the absence of data centers.
It's always "Data centers don't use a lot of energy compared to using a particle accelerator to transmute lead into gold."
I'm sorry you're wrong. The more tasks we move to the digital world, the less carbon emissions will be emitted on net.
This is bad for human social cohesion imo, but objectively good for C02 levels if you claim to care about that.
Nothing physical we build for use cases in the digital world emits carbon on the scale of anything we build for use cases in the physical world.
And compute gets exponentially more efficient and uses less and less resources per unit of output over time. Combustion engines and humans in general don't get exponentially more efficient over time, for example.
You don't actually care about the thing you're pretending to care about if you're saying that AI is bad for the environment. It's probably bad for traditional social structures and institutions, but actually fantastic for the environment.