I don’t understand why this comment is downvoted. The options to reduce total energy consumption were always humans voluntarily accepting lower quality of life (not just among the top 1 million or 100 million, but top 2 billion at least, so this was obviously not going to happen), or reduce total number of humans.
It would make a difference even if we humans could just accept the same quality of life we already have, instead of building more and more, larger and larger data centers, for whatever the future of AI is. Computers have become so much more efficient than they used to be, and despite any joke we can make about Electron apps and such, those are still reductions in energy consumption, and some people are building such extravagant compute facilities that far outweigh the progress people have made on reducing energy costs.
Really hoping the work here ends up producing solutions that can be taken advantage of by cities and towns since the smaller size factor requires a lot less onerous demands for deployment.
I assume energy use by electronic devices is a distant runner up of energy use compared to moving lots of mass (individuals + their large personal cars) lots of distance (to and from their large lots in far flung suburbs). And leisure travel of course, especially via airplane.
Oh, I bet you're right. I was only giving the first example that came to mind. I think transportation is a better example, a field where many cities (at least in the USA) could have better quality of life for less energy. When everyone drives their own car every day because public transportation is inadequate and inconvenient, we waste time every day stuck in slow traffic. With more convenient public transportation, the roads are more clear for cars, the air is cleaner, and people don't have to spend as much money on gasoline and car maintenance.
Me too, I printed it and underlined it, I will try to memorize some of the concepts and the exposition, because this is a cristallization of what I vaguely feel about the abuse of LLM I am currently witnessing
Absolutely with you on the abuse of LLMs. I'm deeply concerned about loss of competence and I am so burned out from having to deal with other people's messy and overly complex code.
I think people who think about this like us need to start building resilience for the very real possibility that in a couple of years we'll be the ones dealing with these awful LLM-generated code bases, fixing bad logic and bugs.
That is very true, although I also have the opposite example: some math books at Uni (e.g. the recommended one for calculus) were so dense with information that I could not make head and tails
I often had to buy a second book where the content was... well digestible
Yes and it was never a point, it was just much much denser but still infinite. And so uniform there was no net direction for collapse before expansion took over.
Since there are conserved quantities like energy and angular momentum it is impossible that everything just collapses. If something collapses, there is usually a large amount of matter which does not collapse to carry away the energy and momentum of the collapsing stuff.
Well... hold your horses, when you make solar panel self replicating and self-healing nano-machines that span all over the planet you would have beaten nature.
So far we have beaten nature on the aspect of sheer efficiency
The sibling comment about lift is one of the few things I can think of. Birds would have a tough time. The freezing point of water would also be lowered significantly.
Eliminating a gas while keeping all other partial pressures constant only affects physical processes. Biochemistry on the other hand only relies on partial pressures, and the number of organisms which interact with atmospheric nitrogen are literally so few that you could count them on one hand.
This is all pretty far afield though. There's no way biological processes are even going to have a dent in the ocean of N2 surrounding us.
It's not really clear to me what's your position. In the sense you state that you find it appalling, but what? The fact that there is a problem with such generative AI, the discussion that might follow, or its consequences.
Obviously the powers that be will try to use this at their advantage, trying to tighten a bit control over population, such as rendering AI models illegal, except a selected blessed few (read megacorp. ones)
IMO the general response shouldn't be just trying to defend the freedom position for freedom sake, but to find viable alternative solutions that don't mine the freedom of the population.
For example... we could try to use AI to detect if the images are AI generated or not :) And police should have the means to use AI, maybe given for free by the megacorp that benefit the most from AI
I use my cargo bicycle everyday because I never bothered to buy a car after Uni and cars where I live would be a major pain because of traffic and parking near my flat. I do have car sharing though. I would not consider me a bike enthusiast, but I like to get my metabolism going in the morning compared to car travel. Weather is no problem, you just need to dress accordingly. Many people in my city do cycle everyday. I play basketball twice a week and 80% of the players arrive by bicycle.
Many people live in places where weather is not favorable. Also in your example these are people who actively prefer physically active lifestyle - it's called selection bias, and I bet that they don't have long commute.
Nothing against bicycles here, just pointing out that it is not a solution for everyone.
Well, basically it all comes down to density and infrastructure if people will use other means of transportation. Bicycle accounts for 1/3 of all trips city wide.
Forcing people to active by either (partly) walking or cycling has great benefits for the public.
Careful. Because it works in a very cold place doesn't mean it works in a place that is not as cold.
Here (Pacific Northwest coastal areas) winters don't get cold enough for long enough to freeze the ground. We don't get a lot of snow but when we do it often starts as snow that is barely frozen. It melts and we get a layer of water on top of roads. Then if the air temperature drops to near freezing as the storm progresses that layer of water freezes, and gets covered with snow, We end up with snow on top of big patches of ice.
Compare to places where they get frozen ground and the air too spends a lot of time below freezing. They get snow on top of frozen ground instead of snow on top of an ice layer.
Fortunately we only get days where the air is cold enough to keep the ground heat from keeping the ground clear a few days a year and with plenty of warning so most people can just avoid traveling then.
What is their accident rate during winter? Cycling on ice is something I definitely will avoid even when the wheels are spiked.
I have seen this passive/aggressive policing in my city against the car commuters (I'm using public transport mainly) while the main cause of the problem is not the commuters but the city that doesn't encourage enough residential real estate development near the large office hubs.
True and to further nit pick, a study‘s conclusion is not always a fact.
By now we know that Studies confuse correlation with causation, fail to isolate correctly, are paid for by vested interests, are not reproducible or fabricated
Not to be too tin foil but that’s how it is, so it’s ok to call BS but I get your view that calling anything we don’t like BS leads no where
While this might be true, you'd have to study that as well to be sure. So essentially the question is what would happen if you for instance in a city take people from across the population and force them to use a cargo bike.
Joking apart (for I am joking, I'd never sponsor something that forces people to do things they don't want) My only point is that whenever I read something like this... well it stinks, because it goes against what I perceive as common sense.
Someone took my first comment too seriously, my point being that after so many studies read, weighted, measured and found wanting... I don't want to waste my time reading something that doesn't pass the smell test.
Who did they interview? People who have cargo bikes
Do they like them? Yes they bought them and either liked them to begin with, or are rationalizing, then there is a minority who's objective.
Ask people with Mercedes what's the car brand they like the most.
For example: I drive an Alfa Romeo and once I was stopped by a guy (in Germany) that asked me if I wanted to join a Italian Car Club... and he was the proud driver of a FIAT Tipo, not a car I'd buy for it's beauty or one I'd show in a car club, yet he liked it, and we are discussing a study that hinges on what people like?
EDIT: just to say... I agree with you, there's a bit of selection bias at work here
Electric cargo bikes could replace a lot of 'city' traffic for many people. Definitely in countries like Belgium / The Netherlands where there is a bigger cycling culture.
It mostly handles the use-case of "larger grocery shopping".
The long distance travelling is still the one that will require most people to own a car.
TLDR: From my observation. I use my car for 2 things:
- Larger shopping for cheaper goods ( supermarket). Electric Cargo bikes could fix this.
- Further distances > 20 km.
Edit: After my comment, I started reading the article and it's similar to what the article claims:
> It's not likely to totally replace your car, nor will it probably be your only bike. But access to a cargo bike can reduce car trips, and even car ownership, a study from Germany suggests.
