this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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A lot of things are solved, but capitalism means that we need a profit motive to act. World hunger is another good example. We know how to make fertilizer and how to genetically alter crops to ensure we never have a crop failure. We have trains and refrigeration to take food anywhere we want. Pretty much any box that we need to check to solve this problem has been. The places that have food problems largely have to do with poverty, which at this point is a polite way to say "I won't make money, so I am okay with them starving"
Im not sure what's the point here? If we dont like LLMs and data centers using power then we use existing strategies that work like taxing their power use and subsidizing household power use which btw we're already doing almost everywhere around the world in some form or another.
The data centers are actually easier to negotiate and work with than something like factories or households where energy margins are much more brittle. Datacenter employs like 5 people and you can squeeze with policy to match social expectations - you can't do that with factories or households. So datacenter energy problem is not that difficult relatively speaking.
I am agreeing with you that the solutions exist, but the will to implement them is going to be the hard part. A big dampener is simply going to be the profit motive. There is more money in siding with the data center than a the households. Are households okay with an increasing in price? Data center is likely to manage that better, or even just pay a bribe to someone. I used food as another example of a problem that is solved. We can grow food without fail and build the rail to get it to where it needs. We just don't because need does not match profit expectation. There are talks of building nuclear power for some data centers, but such talk would not happen for normal households.
People definitely underestimate how cooperative big tech is relative to every other business mostly because big tech has a lot of money and very few expenses so friction is relatively a bigger bottle neck than almost any other industry. So I still think that pressuring openAi into green energy is easier than pressuring Volvo (or any manufacturer) which already is really brittle and has huge negotiation leverage in the form of jobs it provides.
Take a look at any other business niche and no one's comitting to green energy other than big tech. As you said yourself no other niche want to build their own nuclear reactors to satisfy their own green energy need.
I think its OK to hate on big tech because they're billionaires but people really lose sight here and complain about wrong things that distract from real much bigger issues and paints the entire movement as idiots.