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Comment by thedevilslawyer | Hacker News Reader

What's the energy imprint of the human doing the same work that AI is now going to do? If AI's imprint is less, what is the right thing for us to do?

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My go-to example is when some EU initiatives proposed labeling mobile phones by energy use. It completely missed the forest for the trees, as a prime example of overoptimization if your goal is carbon emissions reduction.

Nearly any other daily activity of a consumer in the developed world uses orders of magnitude more energy and resources than scrolling TikTok on a phone.

Examples?

– Driving to work: commuting burns far more fuel in a week than your phone uses in a year.

– Gym sessions: heated, lit, air-conditioned spaces plus transit add up quickly.

– Gaming or watching TV: bigger screens, bigger compute easily 100x and higher power needs vs phone gaming.

– Casually cooking at home: using a metric ton of appliances (oven, stove, fridge, pans) powered like twice a week, replaced every ~10 years.

– Reading print media: a daily newspaper or weekly book involves pulp, ink, shipping, and disposal.

– Streaming on a laptop or smart TV: even this draws more power than your phone.

– Taking a shower: the hot water energy use alone dwarfs your daily phone charge.

Of couse not doing any sports or culture is also not what societies want, but energy wise a sedentary passive tiktok lifestyle is as eco friendly as it get's vs. any other real world example.

Phones are basically the least resource-intensive tool we use regularly. Externalities, context, and limited human time effects matter a lot more than what one phone uses vs the other.

Even e-readers already break even with books after 36 paper equivalents

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/25/1252930557/book-e-reader-kind...

Kill the human?

If you don't want to go there, it doesn't really matter how much energy the human uses because the human will just use the same energy to do something else.

Not necessarily. I think the point of comparison here is how much energy does AI use to e.g. generate a video, compared to the energy used not by the human themselves, but by running XYZ software on a computer with a beefy graphics card for however many hours it'd take a human to do the same work.

Indeed. Everything taken into account - work getting done takes energy. And if an agent can do a task for less energy than a human, then indeed it's a benefit. This would be the apt comparison, instead of looking at some overall datacenter energy consumption.

While that's a valid point of view, as long as the human is the bottleneck, it's not going to scale to infinity and beyond.

Human's got to exist and needs to work to eat. They don't really, necessarily, existentially need to be 10x productive with the help of AI.

But I'll be honest, that's not really a solid argument, because it could rapidly lead to the question of why they do this exact job in the first place, instead of e.g. farming or whatever else there might be that can be called a net positive for humanity without reservations.

Or a team going to a location and filming, etc.

I've been thinking about this. If the human-equivalent of training an LLM is sending hundreds/thousands of students through college for many years, I can't help but think that the energy needed for both outcomes is comparable.

The human is alive anyway so zero extra footprint.

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