AI is eating the planet. Enormous electrical and cooling demands.

[ancianita]

3. Thanks for the history.

Relating to the environment, I'd also suggest an informative & relevant reading below. It reveals a lot of what Altman and other AI developer/owners are hiding -- that they run an extraction industry.

Theirs is the untold high and unsustainable cost of planetary degradation and human suffering worldwide, from mining areas to "ghost workers."
As San Francisco (with the highest homeless population in the 3rd largest country) has been built on gold mining, so Silicon Valley is now built on lithium, the new "gray gold."

One example from chap 1, on one of the materials AI is built with...
"Silver Peak, NV (pop. 150) is the site of the only operating lithium mine in the U.S. It was acquired from Rockwood Holdings, Inc by chem company Albemarle Corporation in 2014 for $6.2 billion.

Elon Musk and other tech tycoons gather their wealth from Silver Peak's and other lithium and precious metal mines in other countries.
There are roughly 6.4 billion smartphones on the planet; smartphone batteries contain 3/10 of an ounce of lithium.

Each Tesla Model S electric car needs about 130 pounds of lithium for its battery pack. And while lithium batteries are the only mass-market option, they have a limited lifespan; and so once degraded, they're discarded as waste.
Elon's Gigafactory, 200 mi north of Silver Peak, is the world's largest lithium battery plant. Tesla also is the #1 battery consumer in the world, purchasing them from Panasonic and Samsung and repackaging them it its cars and home chargers.

Tesla is estimated to use more than 28,000 tons of lithium hydroxide annually -- half the planet's total consumption. So Tesla could more accurately be described as a battery business..."

Lithium is only one example of what AI and Silicon Valley products are made of; 20 precious metals are mined worldwide to make electronic devices that are consumed and then dumped as waste.

Lithium is only one example example in a chapter that describes where and what (as previous gold mining polluted waterways and destroyed forests in the West) destroys whole ecosystems worldwide. AI history shows, like many entities of a democratic market economy, that while AI was once developed to do good, the unintended consequence today is that, so far, it's built for the power and profit of the few corporate owners in Silicon Valley at the expense of a) vast swaths of Earth and b) more humans than AI serves.
AI does have the potential to do greater good than harm, but humans have to apply the lessons of wealth "mining" -- an untold history -- and know its cost to Earth, humans, nations' social, economic, political relationships.
As it turns out, this is a worldwide problem that only a smart democratic administration of government can help with at scale.

Thanks for reading.




Throwing this in for perspective...