Google Is So Very Green That Their CO2 Pollution Has Risen 51% In Just 6 Years - Thanks, AI!!!

[paleotn]

1. AI can't be done at the scale envisioned without frying the planet.

Not with existing or "just out of reach" silicon technology. The chips we've known for decades. For AI to reach its "promise", the scale of server farms and electricity generation needed to drive them, and more importantly, cool them, is beyond our imaginations. We're bumping up against the absolute limit of Moore's Law (reduce the size of chip components, thus cramming more on a single chip) and every new innovation designed to push that limit is harder and more expensive, and then even harder and even more expensive, and on and on. A prime example of diminishing returns.

The smaller you get, the more heat you generate from a single chip. Thus the cooling budget (keeping the components from failing, or simply melting) gets bigger and bigger and bigger. In conjunction with continued miniaturization, just "wire" together more and more and more servers, turning a significant chunk of the planet into a bunch of ginormous server farms, not to mention the footprint of the electricity generation plants necessary to power and cool all of that. And the carbon footprint simply to MAKE all of that. Not a world I want to live on. And no one wants to interrupt the drunk, AI party with practicalities. Too much money to be made and lost on this pipe dream.

https://physicsworld.com/a/moores-law-further-progress-will-push-hard-on-the-boundaries-of-physics-and-economics/