people who take issue with the economy of "AI" (a post-hoc label applied to many disparate technologies but I digress) and specifically of its "environmental impact" are like. understandable in that they are up in arms about the need for sustainable technologies. but the reality is that AI is both a drop in the bucket and also one of an infinite myriad of technologies which are violently wasteful, some of which are critical technologies for the way our society is organized and (neutrally) the way that the ruling economic order functions (like datacenters, which is what people seem to really mean when they say "AI's environmental impact" because people seem to not understand concepts like "local hosting"), and others of which are like, completely frivolous and active socially harmful technologies which are almost universally reviled which are incomprehensibly wasteful that nobody seems to be crusading against.
think about junk mail. I remember someone on commieblr talking about junk mail this way once. do you know how much energy goes into making junk mail? think about it. there's the paper that goes into printing the shit. there's the ink, which requires production and therefore economic resources (trivially). then there's the packaging, there's the actual physical mailing, there's the imposition and immense pressure on postal services which could be prioritizing more critical shipments but are having to dedicate tons and tons of resources to shipping, essentially, garbage to your house.
you will receive the junk mail. you will open it (or not) and dump it immediately in the trash can, where it is either dumped in a landfill and decomposes, or burned, either way contributing to massive CO2 emissions. junk mail is genuinely a giant circle that burns resources for no other reason than that companies are either making a gamble that seeing an ad for a particular car dealership is able to make you more inclined to buy a car there (arguable) or making the gamble that your illiterate grandmother who does not understand how scams work (neutral) will become a victim of a scheme to empty her life savings for the betterment of an industry which is predicated on ruining the lives of the elderly (reprehensible). and yet very rarely do people seem to be up in arms about junk mail.
and the world is full of shit like this. advertising in general is like this. telemarketing is like this. how much human life is burned up in service of wasteful industries which objectively contribute nothing but antisocial detriment to everyone involved, both worker and "customer" / mark alike? At least "AI technologies", as it were, have the nominal potential to have a revolutionary impact on something, eventually, that might better someone.
There are far more actively reactionary and politically violent technologies and industries with far higher body counts than "AI technologies" but the reality is that most of these people don't actually care about the blood tax of the ruling economic order, they only care about posturing and in-group signaling to each other about the Culture War Du Jour and want a reason to jerk themselves off for being superior for being an "underdog" in a losing war against the reality that the technology of "AI" is here to stay, one way or another. you don't actually care about environmental impact, you're literally just here to jerk yourself off. either that or you genuinely do earnestly believe in saving the planet or whatever but you are such a credulous idiot that you are functionally a non-agent politically anyways, less an agent and more a cumulative physical force for destruction, like a mob trampling a fallen person.




















