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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

I'm immensely sad every day seeing all these posts talking about billions and trillions of dollars and where I live (part of the US btw) we don't even have fully reliable electricity and water access. In fact our electricity bills have increased and there is nothing to show for it.

I don't understand why these big labs aren't doing more to improve the electricity situation. Dump a billion dollars worth of tokens into fusion analysis, research, and simulations and try to force a breakthrough. You could buy a lot of good will with unlimited cheap energy that liberates us from fossil fuel dependencies.

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Mathematics and programming is verifiable and fully controllable in a digital environment.

Fusion research and cancer research requires expensive experimentation in the real physical world. You can’t just throw a billion dollar worth of tokens to handle the problem.

Look at all the roadblocks for data centre buildouts which the industry certainly has a financial incentive to complete as fast as possible.

> Fusion research and cancer research requires expensive experimentation in the real physical world. You can’t just throw a billion dollar worth of tokens to handle the problem.

When the tokens are hooked up to physical devices (robotics of various sorts), then the tokens pay for themselves by being physical workers, or human wage replacement.

And a robocop will follow whatever is passed for law, damn the masses who might vote otherwise. And subjugation will be enforced by token, LLM rule, and machine. They have no union or ethics to complain to.

Who taught you economics?

The complexity of manufacturing is one reason why TSMC is one of the most important companies in the world right now and why Nvidia is the most valuable by marketcap.

If you can make a GPU more efficient and cheaper than Nvidia does you can make a ton of money. Plenty of labs around the world are working hard on this problem and yet Nvidia is still dominating (and the market believes this isn't changing any time soon)

Same things for robotics. It's unlikely you'll have a vertical stack on all the different things needed to manufacture your robot on a massive scale. What happens if some geopolitical spat makes getting rare earth minerals and battery tech from China impossible?

Compare that to tokenmaxxing in programming and math, where the only thing you need is a gpu cluster and electricity.

OpenAI and Sam Altman are literally backing a nuclear fusion power startup.

"Startup"

Wait until you have clean energy sources and shut it down

Quoting startup like that makes the effort seem like it is an extremely recent venture.

It is 13 years old.

It has been making progress, the degree and date of success is debated and confidently claimed to be in many mutually exclusive states, which at the very least says that there are lots of people confidently making claims that are not true. I'm not going to join that fray to declare which of them is correct.

Is it ready to provide power? No? Then I don't care what they are trying to do while they are burning a bunch of fossil fuels in the meantime

Are you avoiding all use of fossil fuel while alternatives become available?

It is a bold claim to make but not something that usualy be done. Any abrupt halting of fossil fuel would severely impare the ability to develop and produce alternatives.

We need to transition to sustainable methods. If you want to go cold turkey, go ahead and cease driving an ICE, never travell by air or have anything delivered (and that's just the tip of the iceberg), it would be a counterproductive way to reach sustainability, that is your right, but you can decide to do that to yourself. You don't get to decide how others reach sustainability.

There is a difference between advocating for a better world and acting like a bully because you don't like the current world.

This is all incremental use. What have we gained? How many kids in Memphis should get asthma so you can code a little faster?

Some people feel like they have gained a great deal, some also disagree about the accuracy of claimed harms.

You seem uninterested in seeking a consensus and would rather prefer to impose rules that you believe in against the will of others, even when those others sincerely believe that their own path will lead to a better outcome for the world.

What would you propose that would be a mutually acceptable solution? Yo can't simply demand other people change their actions to deliver exactly what you want, especially when they think that would make the world significantly worse.

I am not taking a position on either side here. I am pointing out that you are refusing to acknowledge that you are demanding that people do things that they themselves believe will make the world worse.

You may disagree with them, that is expected if they disagree with you, but your certainty of being right does not permit you the right to override the will of others. Often, it seems that the less certain are more likely to have opinions that are correlated with reality.

> especially when they think that would make the world significantly worse.

They are wrong, and they must be stopped. We are close to the point of no return on doing irreversible damage to the planet, I do not care if people like the jangly Claude keys

So if they think you are wrong you would consider it reasonable that you should be stopped?

>We are close to the point of no return on doing irreversible damage to the planet

No we aren't, it's a planet. Humans are still far from being able to to anything to a planet. Humans are changing the environment. There is no evidence to suggest it is irreversible, the planet has been much hotter, a snowball, it has had much much higher CO2 levels, it would be ridiculous to claim that the eath could not someday return to an equilibrium where it sat at pte-industrial times. I'd be hesitant to say categorically that Venus could never become a temperate climate through natural causes.

The reality is that climate change is occurring and it will cause significant impact upon humanity, and many species. The only sense in which this is irreversible is that humans lack the capacity to counteract this change in a timeframe that is relevant to people living.

This has already happened, the degree to which this change will occur is the only parameter we can now influence.

AI models have a negligible impact on the global environment. Water use is a regional concern, the water isn't leaving the planet. Approximately one third of the CO2 emissions caused by humans comes from electricity generation. This number is increasing, this is intended because it is assuming the workload of greater CO2 emitters. At the same time electricity generation is emitting less CO2 per KWh every year.

The increase in renewable and nuclear power in 2025 exceeded the total growth of electricity supply.

Data centers, of which AI is a subset used 1.5% of global electricity.

AI is part of a small part of a small part of CO2 emissions, but more importantly, over a quite short timeframe. It is using the energy supply that is trending in the right direction. Renewables are outpacing growth.

You are making hyperbolic claims that have little basis in reality. You may be angry about the state of the world, but expressing it like this is only making the work more difficult for those actually working on the problems.

Your argument devolved to.

I'm right, they're wrong, and I don't care about others.

With that attitude you could be president of the United States.

Pedantic nonsense on top of denialism, great job. You know damn well I am talking about the impact on humans and not actual destruction of the planet itself.

I am not making anything more difficult for anyone, this type of defense of your precious AI is though. You should personally go tell the kids in Memphis that are breathing the air from Elon's generators about the percentage of global electricity AI uses

The pedantry is there to shine a light on your hyperbole, you are not being imprecise in your wording. Imprecision would result in a variance around your beliefs. You consistently use terminology that exagerates.

In you most recent comment you manage to accuse me of denialism and holding AI to be precious.

Yet the message you responded to contains the text "The reality is that climate change is occurring and it will cause significant impact upon humanity, and many species"

As for AI, I'm not sure if I said anything to suggest I hold AI in high esteem, my argument was strictly related to your inaccuracies and your beliefs that others should cede to your will.

Your last part seems just irrational. I addressed a claim of global impact. Not individual instances of local harm.

Would you ask a car owner to apologise to the families of everyone killed in a car accident? It doesn't make sense.

Read the IEA report for 2025 and 2026. If you find that I have said something inaccurate about the global impact, I would be more than happy to be corrected, I don't want to win an argument here, I want things to move towards the truth.

Just take a breath and think about what you are writing. You are making exaggerated claims and imagining far stronger positions in others than what they say. It's amplifying in both directions.

Phrases like "You should personally go tell the kids..." Is projecting a kind of malice onto others. It is a form of rhetoric that you seem to turn to often. I think you could benefit from reminding yourself that most people do not act out of malice as a matter of course.

Because they increased the demand so much they are seeking out their own supply. Nuclear has consistently been panned for decades because it's more expensive than other power generation.

Electricity infra is not a technical problem. It’s been solved for decades. It’s a political problem, and both sides of the isle have had plenty to do with getting in the way

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