Comment by Jaxan 11 hours ago
There is a third way of making AI cheaper: using it less.
We have seen many technologies which have been made so much more efficient (heat pumps, solar panels, etc). Really great achievements. Yet the amount of (fossil) energy we use still grows.
I appreciate your reply, thanks!
About the “individual choice”: it indeed is, unless tech companies make bad choices. Like GitHub recently showed a button “what are my PRs?” When pressed it asked copilot to give you the list of PRs (incomplete btw). But there already exists a page for that! This is just wasteful and we should blame a company for that.
The average person doesn't care enough about not using fossil fuels to lower his quality of life. If your plan of action is moralizing at them until they do we might as well nuke ourselves back into the stone age for all the effect it will have.
The benefits of technical solutions is that you get the desired effect without any real trade-offs. I don't really care if I use a boiler or a heat pump to heat my house, because the end goal is to heat my house. I don't really care if I use an electric car or dead dinosaurs car, I just want to get places.
Make the efficient, more climate-friendly alternative a better deal and most people will switch. Tell people that they should give up their cars and AC because the planet will be 3C warmer in 100 years and you'll get an eye-roll. If you want the more environmentally-friendly but also more expensive option to win then the only real option is government subsidies, not preaching - enlightened self-interest trumps all.
I do not agree with this perspective. A lot of people care not only about their own quality of life. But also the life of their peers, children and even people they don’t know. Many people make sacrifices to help others and the planet. It’s only a recent (western) idea that we can just sit back and only care about our own quality of life.
But do those hypothetical people care enough to make some actual sacrifices for those strangers?
For most people, replacing your car with an electric one isn't a big deal. Replacing a car with public transportation is either impossible (living in the boonies), incredibly difficult (suburbia) or merely very annoying (city).
I very much doubt the average person is willing to give up his car for some nebulous greater good of some strangers half a world away, especially when he hears of Jeff Bozos of this world shutting down half of Venice for a wedding so 50 private jets can ferry fellow fat cats to have a good time. But you, Joe Schmo, ought to use paper straws, sit in 30C room in the summer and sit at home instead of traveling for vacations. To save the planet.
The situation isn't much different in non-Western countries. Over the last few years China did more for electrification from renewable sources than the rest of the world combined, and yet they're also building a lot of coal power plants because that's what they have so that's what they'll use, damn everybody else. India isn't going to willingly stay poor so that ivory tower elites can feel good about themselves. Countries with oil reserves, majorly non-western, certainly aren't going to not extract it for the good of the planet.
This argument is so strange because I don't really know anyone who actively cuts down their own emissions and at the same time think its fine that billionaires fly private jets everywhere. They're the first ones to also push for billionaires to be responsible.
FYI in some cities, replacing a car with public transport is an improvement. Don't have to find parking. There isn't enough parking for everyone in any city that didn't massively overbuild parking. Cars are physically huge.
Also don't have to be sober to go home from the bar. I'm convinced ubiquitous public transport (especially on Friday and Saturday all night) informed German drinking culture.
Similarly you can go from point A to B to C to D to A without having to go back to B to get your big metal box and drag it to D. Exploring the city is way easier. If you've never experienced the freedom of walking around a city designed to be walked around... you should, that's a pretty basic life experience and it's weird how the US government has blocked it from you.
Using less is always an individual choice. But not a realistic one to expect 8 billion+ people to take. That's also why fossil fuel usage is still increasing.
However, you might be too pessimistic here. Fossil fuel usage is actually widely expected to peak in the next few years and then enter a steady decline.
Michael Liebreich of Bloomberg NEF did a pretty interesting editorial on this decline a few weeks ago: https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/liebreich-the-p...
He uses a simple model with some very basic assumptions (conservative ones) where he shows how short term fossil fuel usage still increases. Mostly this is just market inertia. But then it will start decreasing and then some decades later, it declines all the way to zero with some long tail of hard to shift use cases.
He uses some very basic assumptions about economic growth continuing to grow by an average of 3%, a base assumption of renewables outgrowing energy demand increases by 3%, etc. You get to a modest fossil fuel decline by 2040, majority renewables powered economy by the 2050s. And virtually no fossil fuel left in the economy by 2065. The years change but the outcome stays the same as long as renewables outgrow demand increase.
There are lots of buts and ifs here but he's explicitly addressing the kind of pessimism you are voicing here.