Hacker News Reader

How much energy do 1 billion people consume? I don’t think this is the criteria we should use.

Those people are still gonna exist though, right…. Right…?

You mean in token form?

The people still consume (basically) the same amount of electricity though, regardless of their employment status.

Edit: though perhaps you're making the point that the AI energy usage is a drop in the bucket compared to its overall usefulness. I agree on that.

It’s more that energy usage isn’t a useful metric - because trying to minimize it leads in entirely different direction (and pretty dark).

Ideally those 1b people would contribute value elsewhere in the world, leading to a big net gain rather than just displacement - and we’re hopefully getting bigger gains for the energy invested. Of course that’s ignoring likely concentration of value, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com