AnarchistArtificer

"AI data centers are just one of many things contributing to CO~2~ emisions."

A useful perspective is to reverse how we frame the causative logic here; the fossil fuel industry is contributing to the AI data centre madness. There's a lot of evidence of fossil fuel executives and lobbyists pushing for AI because it helps to justify their existence in a world where renewable energy isn't just cleaner, it's cheaper.

What this means is that we have two problems to solve when it comes to CO2 emissions:

• Humanity's apparent level of dependence on fossil fuels, when accounting for deliberately wasteful endeavours like mega data centres. and
• Humanity's actual level of dependence on fossil fuels. This is higher than it should be and requires some changes to society to improve, but it's not nearly as high as it might seem at a glance.

These are both problems we need to solve, but the method is different for esch

I'm a mediocre hobby programmer, and for me, the hardest part is coming up with the concrete specifics of what to implement.

I'm actually half decent now (for a hobbyist), but I remember that when I first moved from coding along with worked exercises in textbooks, to actually trying to solve real life problems, it got exponentially more difficult. The textbooks say "use this tool to achieve this goal", and even if you're bad at using that particular tool, you can put all your effort into doing it well. However when you're having to make the bigger decisions for yourself, you have to choose what tool to use, and I found that super hard — especially when having to choose between an approach that I felt confident with that wasn't quite the right tool for the job, and a new tool that was completely new to me (and if I am unfamiliar with a new approach, am I sure that it's the right tool?).

At one point, when I was deep in a personal project, I had a period of a few weeks where I had no reliable access to internet, and so I did most of my coding using paper and pen. It forced me to think more deeply about the implementation I was using, rather than just diving straight into the code

Yeah, I feel like the author of this blog post read the referenced piece in a quite adversarial manner. Even if a programmer does no talking to stakeholders at all, the planning and design part of the process is still huge, and largely invisible if all you're looking at is the end result. That invisible skill and labour is the difference between a mediocre personal project of mine, and the output of a seasoned professional.

I'm not AI, just struggling to articulate myself in matters like this. Though I can see why you thought it was AI — reading it back, I can see that there are a few phrases that are common AI-isms. I'm pretty opposed to AI use at the best of times, but I agree with you that it would be fucked up to use it for this.

Even just the video (before the reaction to criticism) left a super bad taste in my mouth. I remember an aggrieved knitted described their own feelings around it as being that it was easy to enjoy the edutainment material he produces when it was in a topic they were confident he knew more than them on. However, when they saw how shoddy the knitting video was, that made them feel uneasy about even the non-knitting related content, because what if that was as plagued with errors and bias as the knitting video, except they didn't notice it.

What I was especially salty about with the video is that there was a non-problematic way to say "look at the cool research that involves throwing modern science at ancient textiles crafts" — highlighting research by people like Elisabetta Matsumoto, a physicist and a knitter. I was so hyped when someone reviewing the video mentioned Matsumoto's research, as I was aware of her research already from being a ridiculous nerd.

I'm sorry that things got bad enough to require inpatient care, but I'm glad you were able to get some help — I hope it did actually help. I know from firsthand experience that one never fully recovers from PTSD, in the sense that you can't go back to how things were before. However, I also know that it's possible to continue living life with the psychological equivalent of a massive scar, even if it is still red and angry and often painful — but not really possible to when instead of a scar, you have an open, gaping wound.

I hope you were able to make some progress towards healing, even if it'll take much longer to fully heal.

I also appreciate your attempt to leverage your own experience to promote compassion for Green. I've not read the rest of the comments here yet, but I can imagine there are a lot of people with uncharitable stances towards the situation. I am pretty steadfastly anti-AI, but I think it's important that we consider the person at the centre of any problematic AI use

Diminishing returns on steroids? No, clearly we just need to pump EVEN MORE MONEY AND DATA into this

I disagree with the "Pandora's box is open" angle because my beef isn't with the technology, but how it's being used in practice. It's a socioeconomic problem, but a technological one.

Cory Doctorow articulates it much better than I can^[1]:

"Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We'd have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.

But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible.

If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors."

If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong.

"And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis."

This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes."

Even with the technological limitations that AI faces at the moment, we could be doing so much more with it. I love this radiography example because so many of us have experienced someone in our life getting cancer. AI is absolutely capable of improving the rate at which we are detecting cancer at an early stage, which would absolutely save lives. Instead what we're getting is that it is being used as an excuse to heap more work onto doctors and radiographers, worsening the situation for everyone.

I do agree with the broad strokes of what you're saying, because absolutely it does take time for any new technology to integrate itself into society and become useful. However, I don't believe that AI in its current form is capable of becoming commercially viable (and by "in its current form", I am talking about a paradigm that demands excessive building of super resource intensive datacentres)

Edit: forgot to add the citation [1]: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/