@nic221

Based on the title and opening, greener data centers doesn't count as ethical in my book. (I opted not to give them my email to read the article. Sigh.)

The world's climate budget is real and urgent. AI, especially this power-guzzling kind, is eating too much energy, all the while making the world stupider and enriching the world's already-too-rich, who fancy themselves our saviors while really architecting our extinction.

These guys want us to believe that it's ethical to make a private playground and then label that playground green. It isn't. Climate solutions don't divvy up like that. The world is not so modular.

You don't get to solve just only your own private part of the problem, even if you can--which is often in doubt, and certainly here here. You are always part of the world. We need system solutions, not private ones.

The real cost here is opportunity cost. They could be solving the real problem but have invented an excuse to waste human energy and talent solving a contrived problem, one they invented, one that wasn't originally needing solving. Not even to mention that some involved physical resources may be finite and needed for other things.

The solution is not to pay for such new extravagance with new offsets while continuing the actual problem unabated, it is to finally solve the actual problem.

I'm sure they'll tell us AI can then solve this, but I can save them the expense: degrowth or human extinction are our actual options.

AI may suggest uglier ways to reduce population. Plagues, wars, etc. Or it may bypass us and try them on its own, fearing we won't have the stomach and don't see the urgency. My point is that we humans already know the space of options.

Yes, AI _might_ find a fuel source or way to cleanse the atmosphere, but now you're just talking pure gambling. We have more certain solutions now. We just don't like them. Or we're in denial about the need.

The core problem here is a decision by our plutocratic overlords that if solutions involve inconvenience, we might as well go extinct.

Extinction seems so distant, unfamiliar and abstract that we're not thinking it through. When it gets here, real soon now, It will mean an awful painful ending for everyone, whether by fire or flood or storm or drought or famine or pandemic.

#climate #ethics #energy #AI #Capitalism #LateStageCapitilism #collapse #degrowth

@Ruth_Mottram

The entire notion of investment as it has come to be is a sad one. We consider investments successes when they net us money and failures when they do not. Imagine if we used that same theory of meaning to talk about investing in our children!

What makes us money is far too often sociopathic, and what loses money is far too often things like sustainability or aspiration or other things that have very great value, just not tangible MONETARY value that you can hold in your hand or spend.

Would that we had a society and an economic system where people could and did routinely put money into things they wanted to have happen instead of things they thought would yield monetary profit. Given our system, it's no surprise that we too often invest in sociopathy. It generally pays handsomely.

So if you've invested in wind farms, whether it profits or not, it seems like a good investment to me. Even if no investment firm is going to hire me for giving such advice.

Some things are just necessary to do, and--when they fail--to do again, until they succeed. It would be great if all good things succeeded on the first try, but that is not the world. All we can do is the "try" part, and the "not being daunted" part, for things we care about and believe in, or things we need to have happen to survive, even and especially against powerful forces trying to keep us all from surviving in order to turn a quick buck.

#climate #WindPower #WindFarms #investment #capitalism #LateStageCapitilism #sustainability #society #economics #profit