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Comment by km3r | Hacker News Reader

This is why people in left wing areas need to oppose datacenters bans. Regulate them. Require green energy investments that more than offset their load. Use some of that flowing AI money for the betterment of society.

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You don't need to specifically regulate green investments for datacenter. Just introduce CO2 emission tax and the industry will find efficient ways to reduce CO2 emissions.

Or efficient ways around those regulations.

Less waste of resources is still waste of resources.

How much of the AI generated content is actually useful, how much useless, how much harmful?

Datacenter wouldn't stop, and there would be some country or area which allows it. Unless they regulate the entire world, we should focus on lowering CO2 globally, and that means allowing datacenter in your neighour if your energy is better.

It’s not either Texas or Sweden, it’s either Texas or Texas and Sweden. You just get more datacenters and more CO2 output.

Except you don't actually ban it, you just move it to texas.

That content is coming either way.

And if you require them to over offset their load to the grid, it's literally fossil fuels burned over all.

Except they wouldn't move to Texas but would also build in Texas. So you don't get a less polluting datacenter but you get one less polluting and one more polluting datacenter. A Swedish datacenter doesn't simply replace one in Texas, it's an additional one.

Some of it is useful, and from an environmental perspective, if it eliminates some other activity (e.g. team of workers driving to/from work and their office heating/cooling) then it can even be a net positive.

I would agree that there should be some tariffed token usage based on CO2, efficient datacentres pay little, polluting ones pay a lot - would help even the field and export good practice.

> it eliminates some other activity (e.g. team of workers driving to/from work and their office heating/cooling) then it can even be a net positive.

By completely replacing workers with AI? Unless their new job will be from home or out in the open, they'll continue to consume the same.

If we're talking of completely eliminating people, I guess we can consider the emissions they would cause during their whole extant life. Should we kill them or just wait for them to die of starvation?

I think "people in left wing areas" is weird phrasing. There is nothing inherent about an area that makes it left or right wing. "People who live under governments who are responsive to collective issues such as climate and energy prices" would make more sense.

Here in America, it's the left wing that's more interested in ai regulations and bans. Cares about green tech.

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