Comment by tibbon

I care a lot about the environment. It seems obvious that there is an impact, but it seems relatively small- something that if it wasn’t AI would be counted as a rounding error by many.

People keep raising AI’s environmental impact to me as a concern, and I’m open to learning more, but at this point it seems potentially even long term neutral if it really does insert the efficiencies to productivity that many claim it will.

For example: look up the co2 impacts of gas powered lawn equipment. By one number I found that in 2020 it released 30 million tons of co2 in the US alone. Yet, when this equipment was coming into popularity no one expressed the moral panic they are over AI.

I know people who will stomp around about how AI is bad, and then go use their gas powered leaf blower for a few hours.