Comment by Aurornis
7 hours ago
As usual, any emissions headline that doesn’t include comparisons or perspective is simply trying to scare you.
For some perspective, air travel produces on the order of 1 billion tons of CO2 annually. In other words, this AI adoption CO2 number is 1/1000th of the CO2 emissions of air travel alone.
Anyone doing hand-wringing about AI CO2 emissions but not giving a second thought to major contributors like air travel or industrial processes that produce many orders of magnitude more CO2 isn’t actually concerned about CO2 emissions. They’re just looking for reasons to be angry about AI or data centers.
Also called “fake concern”. There are people who are threatened that AI can undo their status in society. These are the sorts that bring up ridiculous arguments against AI. Which is simultaneously useless to society but also extremely harmful. Simultaneously so costly to run that it is a bubble but also so cheap to run that so many data centers are not needed.
Then there are the pause AI sorts that try to cash in on regulatory politics.