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Lasciate ogne speranza, o voi ch'entrate
I wrote about this last year, but AI has become even more politically salient (see Figure 1) and the aesthetic of environmental catastrophising has become even more pervasive—which is NOT COOL and ergo shouldn’t qualify for this list. However, Andy Masley has been fighting the good fight against contextless or downright incorrect claims, and the examples he’s calcualted are very FUN and COOL. For example:
Every second you spend walking outside wears out your sneakers just a little bit, to the point that they eventually need to be replaced. Sneakers cost water to make. [My best guess is that every second of walking uses as much water in expectation as ~7 chatbot prompts](https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about#:~:text=Even just going,for 24%2C000 prompts.). So sitting inside at your computer saves that water too. It seems like it’s near impossible to raise your personal emissions and water footprint at all using chatbots, because using all day on something that ends up causing 1% of your normal emissions is exactly like spending all day on an activity that costs only 1% of the money you normally spend.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-178698076
If you’ve ever taken a trans-Atlantic flight, to match the energy you as a single passenger used on that one flight, you would need to ask ChatGPT 11,800,000 questions. That’s 400 questions every single day for 80 years, or one question for every 2 minutes that you’re awake for your entire life.
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for?utm_source=publication-search
He has many more!
One thing I’d add is that in the long run demand tends to finance more clean generation and non-potable water infrastructure where it’s cheapest, so the net impact of AI on the environment depends less on “AI is energy-intensive” and more on where and how we build the next MW and the next $m^3$ of water.
Figure 1: AI’s perceived importance as a political issue is increasing at the same time that climate change and the environment’s perceived importance is decreasing. Via David Shor.
I’ve embedded the website but you should just download the app, friend.
https://kk.org/thetechnium/50-years-of-travel-tips/
New Zealand and Ireland have much in common: we have comparable age-structures and immigration levels, our productivity growth rates over the past five years have looked roughly comparable. Ireland also has a high minimum wage compared to the rest of the OECD, although their Kaitz Index is not so high as ours. Ireland has a cornerstone agriculture sector, at least historically, and produces a high proportion of their GHG from agricultue. Their regulatory issues are similar to ours, in spots, with regulation impeding growth and driving up construction and housing costs. Ireland also has a lot of young people leaving to Australia. And yet, Ireland has a higher GDP/GNI* per capita that we do and, what’s more, Ireland is frequently cited as one of these countries we ought to emulate to rejuvenate our economy.
When told that “New Zealand should be more like Ireland,” my former colleague—a real mensch—would run this playbook: Ireland's headline GDP per capita, and even GNI* per capita, are inflated by its status as a corporate tax haven—not a novel playbook; the novely is this: once you look at measures that strip out multinational accounting—disposable incomes, actual household consumption—the gap with NZ largely evaporates, or even reverses.