Comment by ternnoburn
Comment by ternnoburn 16 hours ago
Then again, if you can stall a nascent polluter before it becomes entrenched, maybe that's the right time to intervene. Getting people to not eat meat is hard, we've been eating meat forever. Getting people to not use LLMs? That's where most of us were up until very recently.
"Don't use LLMs" is just another variant of "don't use electricity".
Reframe the problem like that and then realize that no one's going to do it: global electricity use is constantly increasing. Fortunately, global renewable energy use is also growing incredibly rapidly.
Which problem seems more tractable? Because reality has already proven it: people will happily switch to clean electricity and keep using electricity. They won't voluntarily use less electricity unless they get some benefit from that - i.e. reduced expenditure, or just plain more stuff (i.e. my LED lights consume a fraction of the power of my previous halogens, but are brighter and I have more of them and also can change light color on a schedule).