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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Yes, obviously AI is emitting way too much. It shouldn't even be producing 0.2% of global emissions, let alone 2%. My main grievance is that no one ever talks about improving industrial and agricultural processes even though they produce around 29% of emissions and 20% of emissions respectively.
The kicker is we need agriculture and industry, like it or not. Whereas no one apart from some billionaires and tech bros want or even need AI.
I mean sure. But we don't really need to torture animals, which is the big part of the emissions. We just like it a lot.
Username checks out.
%80 of ~~agriculture~~ agricultural land is animal feed. Not saying everyone should become vegeterian or vegan but I think the culture that pushes over consumption of animal based products (especially America etc) should be suppressed gradually.
Those percentages don't really add up to 100, though.
Something like 40% of American corn is used as a feedstock into ethanol fuel production. But that just strips out most of the starches and carbohydrates for fermentation into alcohol. The remaining proteins and fats are used mostly for animal feed. And somewhat surprisingly, the captured CO2 is sold as an industrial CO2 product, such as dry ice. So for that 40% of corn, we could say it's used for ethanol production. Or we could say it's used for animal feed. Or other processes. But it's really all of the above.
Modern American corn and soybean farming is just basically efficiently producing a bunch of bio feedstock into whatever processes can make use of those products, whether for human food, animal feed, industrial processes, etc.
The problem is, the models are really good at some things. We've been using these things since before chat gpt hit the market. It's identified tumors, cured a dog of cancer evidently, and with adversarial training beat the AI that beat the chess master in a matter of hours.
This is one of those disruptive technologies that isn't going back in the bottle. We're stuck with this crap.
(Note: I was convinced the dog cancer vaccine thing was bullshit but there's quite a bit of actual data, a fucking tech bro actually did it.)
Of no, a nuanced and grounded take on LLMs! Everybody get your pitchforks and downdooters!
Emissions from AI datacenters offend because of just how unnecessary they are.
Unnecessary power use, unnecessary water.
If you don't farm, people will starve. If you don't use AI, billionaires will starve.
OP is obviously sponsored by Altman.
It’s as though your implying that billionaires aren’t people, I like it!
Sadly, majority of Midwest is corn & it's not even corn to feed us.
yes, corn's biggest uses are feeding live stock and making ethanol, the second use, making ethanol it is quite bad at it compares to sugar cane, afaik for live stock it is very cheap for the ammount of protein it has and can diggested by pretty any livestock
Right, but there is the realistic option where we farm more efficiently.
Because as it is right now, we are farming and we are still starving. Food production is not a problem, In fact we overproduce.
So let's be more efficient with our food production which will also starve billionaires.
"overproduction" is a myth to raise prices.
if we produce less, prices rise because there's less supply and people would have to pay more for it.
I eat food, and the food I eat doesn't just walk to my place.
So... sure I'd rather have a lot less energy spent on agriculture and industry but if there is one place where I feel energy use is legitimate, it's feeding us.
Meanwhile I do NOT want better tools for scammers, spammers and fake experts.
Also without massive inputs in the form of fertilizer and pesticides, it's also not just growing by itself to feed you.
Also, the food I eat was already in the carbon cycle. The food (energy) datacenters eat is mostly sequestered carbon, not all emissions are the same. Hell, if we want to get into it fucking water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
A lot of the emissions from food are not things that are already in the carbon cycle.
Deforestation to turn forest into farmland.
Fossil fuels for equipment and to manufacture fertiliser.
Methane from animals is significantly more potent than if that same carbon was released as CO2.
A lot of it comes down to how much people want the product, combined with how easy it is to get rid of carbon emissions in the process. If people are against AI in the first place, it's easy to get rid of the carbon emissions. Getting rid of the emissions from concrete production is a much more difficult proposition.
Why do I get a feeling that OP doesn't talk much to farmers?
99% of the "solutions" to agricultural waste and carbon emissions are proposed with absolutely no input from anyone with even a sliver of experience in farming.
Is your point that it's hopeless to discuss it because farmers are unwilling to adopt new practices or because we've maxed out and no progress is possible, quickly revealed by talking to any farmer? Or is it that you believe me unworthy to talk about it because I am among the urban majority? It's unclear from your line of questioning.
My main point is that shit is happening everyday in that space. Electric tractors are becoming a viable option. New feed to lessen livestock farts are used. Ways to lessen expeditures and/or maximize output without increasing pollution are sought everyday.
Yes, I would surely imagine this is the case, and that if I were to talk to farmers I would have a greater understanding of the subject. In essence, this is my point—that there should be more discussion about this to more inform the general public. My lack of understanding of the topic is representative of the broader tends among the average person. Furthermore, I would imagine them to be even less informed than my already uninformed state due to their lack of interest in the subject.
Mainstream Media no longer has the reach that it used to. Nowadays you'll have to find your own spaces to discuss whatever you feel like discussing. If you actually feel like learning more about what's new in the agriculture space, I'm sure there are special interest groups to join locally/regionally where you are. Sadly I don't think you'll be able to get the topic to become a global interest - we all need food and most are willing to sacrifice quite a bit to keep the current level of comfort related to how to acquire said food. For the general populace, how the food got to the store is knowledge they'll have no use for.
Well in the agricultural sense the only thing we can do is to make more people vegetarian (not really happening)/and make more affordable plant based milk. The latter one is actually in here already! I've seen plant based milks not that much more expensive than a cow's milk in Hungary.
While switching to plant based food is an obvious course of action which would have drastic benefits, several other methods exist by which agricultural emissions. These include:
Farm equipment electrification
Now I'm picturing tractors with the power arms that you see on Vancouver buses. Putting up wires over the fields in the right pattern would be a huge project, though. Oof.
to make more people vegetarian
You don't necessarily need people to go full vegetarian. Just eating less meat is a much easier sell. If 2 people eat 1/2 as much meat as they otherwise would, that's just as good as 1 person going full vegetarian.
The type of meat also matters. Beef is much higher in greenhouse gas emissions than any other type of meat. So if you just switch beef for, say, chicken or pork, you're already doing a lot better.
You don’t necessarily need people to go full vegetarian
This is me. I haven't completely cut out meat, but I'm down to eating it maybe once or twice a week. Breakfast is usually peanut butter toast, lunch is usually leftovers, so that leaves dinner planning.
A lot of this came from a health issue early last year. I shifted my diet significantly and ended up loving some of the veg recipes!
Once again “general populace” means “people in the United States”.
The rest of us are still in the Paris agreement, and where I’m at one of the most heated political arguments is about emissions from agriculture.
All are horrible and a problem but what do we get out of these three? Doesn't take a genius to see something of value in two of them.
To improve agricultural processes, eat local organic foods. It's actually quite a large community.
also, the co2 equivalent of 1kg of tofu vs 1kg of beef is approx. 16 fold because of ruminants farting methane. BTW, this means that producing 1kg of cheese produces more co2 equivalent than 1kg chicken, eggs or even pork
thank you, finally somebody says it
the big energy revolution will happen in industry. everything else doesn't matter.
even the agriculture sector basically doesn't matter since most of the GHG emissions are re-absorbed the next year. literally it's a cycle.
and the most effective way to do anything is to build solar & wind energy. that really changes the picture. reducing industrial output doesn't work without hurting like 90% of the population either through job loss or material losses.
Turn electricity into wind, solar, and nuclear, and you'll not only shrink electricity's impact to a sliver, but also bite a chunk out of industry due to removing the need for oil, gas, and coal.
Those two are the biggest global emission contributers.
Agriculture needs to move away from land use and into significantly more GM and vertical farming, "organic" products be damned.
well established industry itself seeks efficiency. The emissions are generally from energy use, Energy costs money, they try to find more efficient ways. Stable industries will have already done a lot of innovation to improve efficiency and may even have hit diminishing returns to research once their processes are well understood. Pick any industrial process and you'll find loads of papers on efficiency at all steps. But at the end of the day if you need to smelt iron ore into high quality pig iron, you're going to need a lot of heat for a period of time. Best way to reduce industrial GHG emissions is probably to buy less stuff or maybe buy better quality stuff that lasts longer. Not many consumers wan't to do that though.
Agriculture is weird because we've pushed yields up very high with all the fertilizers and monocultures and so on, but i'd think its similar, diminishing returns - and maybe yields have actually been pushed higher than they should for long run soil health, so you might have a viscious cycle of fertilizer development. You could maybe try to shift people to have less meat and more crops, or maybe stuff like seaweed or algae based food, or try to stop them overeating. I feel like the food industry does get a bit of stick for obesity - not that that seems to do much.
Problem with AI is the bubble that means the focus of effort is unlikely to be efficiency; so long as investors are dumb, don't know what they're buying and/or speculation oriented then the bang for buck investment (in the short term) is to generate hype. They'd gladly burn energy, to generate more hype to, borrow more, to buy more energy , to generate more hype, to borrow more . . . all the while they're 'crowding out' boring established investments in well understood processes.
I wouldn't say that the emissions are all from energy use. Cement and steel making both directly emit CO2 (From coke or calcium carbonate), which makes up a significant portion of global emissions.
“General populace”?
This meme wildly overestimate that the genpop has the faintest clue about the cost of AI. In my very few discussions with people that even bother to bring it up with curiosity absolutely none of them understood how big of a resource hog data centers are. A few might’ve had a clue that AI results can be wrong, but then they went on to basically apologize for AI’s current errors by stating how much good it could do via research while not having any idea what was different between say medical AI and one they use to make their animated memes or converse with.
Motherfucker the AI bullshit isn't better than the rest of the emissions; it's actively compounding them in a way we do not fully comprehend, and is absolutely moving the timeline of our extinction up by decades. As a wicked sick bonus, AI is also destroying all the funding systems we would've used to try and fight Climate Change in the private market.
Fighting AI is not ignoring the rest of the problems; it is fighting to make sure we CAN CONTINUE to try and deal with those problems.
"improving industrial and agricultural processes" sounds like something nuanced and complicated that should be (and probably is) discussed by field (both meanings) experts. Not the general public.
Note that OP is using a bit unrelated title. They're doing it in case you forget to click their image.