I think thereās a really odd gap in general supply chain knowledge in which people scapegoat AI as this new devastating environmental concern, when internet data centers have been an environmental problem before that. The internet already had the infrastructure to support it in 2017, before GPT-1 was released. Data centers are not a new problem. The internet already had a large physical presence, but people didnāt really think much of it until there were new AI-related developments (and then attribute all data centers to being related to generative AI? Where do people think YouTube videos are stored? The literal clouds in the sky?)
A Makeship plushie has a bigger carbon footprint than a thousand LLM queries but it is seen as an acceptable environmental impact, because it has been deemed socially acceptable to contract low wage factories in the Global South to make toys to sell to customers worldwide at a 3000% markup, with all the profits staying in the Global North. Not many people think of that environmental impact
