• Skullgrid@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    4 months ago

    ok, but

    1. Is it still bad if they use renewables? in which case, it’s not horrendous, is it?

    2. what about the rest of their servers?

    3. Fuck facebook

    • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      4 months ago

      If we are abundant in renewable energy no but if we are still at a level where available renewable energy can be used to replace non-renewable, then AI tech needs to justify its use cases too.

      and servers yes, social media related data center energy consumption should be put under heavy scrutiny too. Especially considering some energy hungry social media platforms like facebook are lately causing more harm than good (on other fronts such as political propaganda and racism). I doubt any of these are gonna happen soon though since many governments are heavily invested in using social media and LLM chatbots for propaganda and surveillance.

      • masterspace@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        4 months ago

        We already have a way for society to decide what is and isn’t worth spending power and effort on and it’s called money.

        Increase carbon taxes to incentivize clean fuel sources and ban predatory advertising and data tracking behaviour because it’s problematic.

        We do not need to setup a separate shadow economy to gatekeep what is and isn’t worth spending eoectricity on.

    • FrenchThrowAway
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      4 months ago
      1. Power consumption is still power consumption, so 2 290 000kgCo2 is a lot, even if it’s way lower than what it would have been with coal plants
      2. They only talk about power consumption and not server hardware footprint, cause power consumption is the easier to offset
      3. Yes