distal

No, even this is a very bad idea. Ideally, no books are destroyed. A close relative of mine works as an archivist. They have tons of examples of how digitising and then destroying can create extra burdens. The data on hard drives or flash devices is too fragile.

I know that in disciplines such as math there are very often have books with less than 50 copies in circulation. The LLM companies buy maybe 2 of a given book which are subsequently destroyed with no backup data. You're now at 48 in circulation, that is a significant reduction. Rinse and repeat a couple of million times and this starts to have a major influence on knowledge.

What's perverse about it is that the data from the books is stored extremely badly within the models. So not only are you destroying sources, you are also necessarily falsifying them.

Pretty sure information that is hard to come by on the internet includes rare books.

How on earth do you equate curbing wasteful production with halving living standards and what makes you believe that having a lower living standard gives rise to violence? The per year-per person CO2 emissions of Swedes hover at a relatively cool 3.5 tons, while US Americans are emitting 13 tons (2023 statistics). Sweden has half the population density of the United States and is a relatively large country in terms of area. Swedes enjoy higher living standards than US Americans, are therefore more comfortable and they significantly are less violent with gang crime taken into account - which is, just so you know, pure racist fearmongering that plays into US-Israeli imperialist interest.

Let's look at Argentina, because here the standard of living is actually lower than in the States. Argentina's homicide rate is below that of the US's. And I'm not even one to glaze South America, especially not Argentina. Take Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia, countries that are relatively crowded compared to Argentina and have even less, they have analogous relationships, that is, there is no clear relationship between violence living standards. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)

But do you see a pattern in your assumptions?

Not me saying that going vegan, changing energy and giving up luxuries no one needs like travelling to Fiji every few years would prevent this even with eight billion people.