Mastodawn

#introduction I'm a researcher in the field of AI, working particularly on the environmental impacts of AI, but also agentic AI and applied machine learning.

I have mostly moved away from social media, but haven't been able to get off of LinkedIn, which is more or less required ("highly encouraged") for my job.

LinkedIn is a very strange jungle of AI-slop, regular slop, and sometimes useful tidbits and news. This Mastodon-account is an attempt at moving communication to a better platform.

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Zoidberg For President 5d ago

@ejhusom Welcome!

So what are your proposals to get rid of genai and data centers ?

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Erik Johannes Husom 5d ago

@ZoidbergForPresident Thanks a lot!

I don't really know how to realistically stop the tremendous waste happening with genAI and data center expansion. I'm very inspired by topics such as "Computing within limits" (https://computingwithinlimits.org), permacomputing, and frugal computing, but technological solutions are not going to help us; what we need is a change in attitude/culture/values/policy.

I think awareness (as weak as it sounds) helps, so I'm trying to highlight the costs as much as possible.

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JT Leskinen 5d ago

@ejhusom Hello and welcome! Great research subject btw. I am just now writing a report for an Erasmus project, where we mapped the use of AI among European youth workers, and their hopes and concerns regarding AI. Environmental issues were relatively high on average, but lower on the list of concerns compared to, for example, data privacy and false information.

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Erik Johannes Husom 5d ago

@milesizdead Thanks a lot!

That sounds exciting! Interesting to hear about the results. In a way, it matches my own concerns – even though I work mainly with environmental issues of AI, I'm even more concerned about societal consequences (although environmental impacts are also a societal impact). Particularly I'm worried about inter-personal relationships, communication, and cognitive effects (learning and education).

Anyway, it's great that people are aware of the environmental issues.

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JT Leskinen 5d ago

@ejhusom Youth workers (as informal educators) in our interviews were concerned about learning, actually. When young people were presented with questions or tasks, they went straight to ChatGPT instead of discussing the task with their group. Media/technology education was high on the priorities the youth workers felt that their work should focus on in the future.

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Erik Johannes Husom 5d ago

@milesizdead

> When young people were presented with questions or tasks, they went straight to ChatGPT instead of discussing the task with their group.

This is one of the things that really troubles me. Think about the diversity of ideas we miss because of this... It's like our confidence in our own thinking just evaporates (and I'm feeling the effect myself as well).

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<10%5d ago

@ejhusom
I abandoned LinkedIn when MS bought it; I was already close enough to retirement that I didn't feel any need. Your news of its current state doesn't come as a surprise.

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Mario Angst 5d ago

@ejhusom Hi and welcome :)!
Great research topic, thank you for doing the work on that. To me, I've come down to being mostly furious at the indirect impacts of the GenAI hype in terms of misallocation of resources, which we could really need somewhere else right now... think very much proven technologies for climate change mitigation.
I feel you on the LinkedIn bit and you characterize its contents in a way I can definitely recognize - I'd also add that the site itself is just a maddening piece of web design to me, how cluttered can you make something 🤣? Still, also for me, for some of the very local research community and some fields, it is just (also maddeningly) the only place to get some news on what people are doing or excited about.

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Erik Johannes Husom 4d ago

@mario_angst_sci Thanks a lot :D

Strong agree on the misallocation of resources!

And regarding LinkedIn: Yes, it's super-cluttered, and a single browser tab with LinkedIn somehow uses 900MB of RAM on my computer!? I'm amazed at what the software they manage to produce, and not in a good way ;P