I would be fine if data centers paid the full cost of their existence, but that isn't what happens in our world.
Instead the cost of pollution is externalised and placed on the backs of humanity's children. That includes the pollution created by those datacentres running off fossil fuel generators because it was cheaper to use gas in the short term than to invest in solar capacity and storage that pays back over the long term. The pollution from building semiconductors in servers and GPUs that will likely have less than a 10 year lifespan in an AI data center as newer generations have lower operating cost. The cost of water being used for evaporative cooling being pulled from aquifers at a rate that is unsustainable because it's cheaper than deploying more expensive heat pumps in a desert climate.... and the pollution of the information on the internet from AI slop.
The short term gains from AI have a real world cost that most of us in the tech industry are isolated from. It is far from clear how to make this sustainable. The sums of money being thrown at AI will change the world forever.
Given that data centers use less energy than the alternative human labor they replace, they actually improve pollution. Replacing those GPUs with more efficient models also improves pollution because those replacements use less electricity for the same workload than the units they replaced.
This is such a wild take. You're 100% correct that AI-generated art consumes less resources that humans making art and having to, you know, eat food and stuff.
Obviously, the optimal solution is to eliminate all humans and have data centers do everything.
I just had an incident like that a month and a half ago. Customer reported repeated internet outages in the morning. Lots of back and forth by phone and email, and the only conclusion I could come up with is that the ONU or router was flaky and needed to be replaced.
Nope. Ended up going on site one day. It turns out that the power bar everything was plugged into was sitting on the floor at the back of the desk in the customer's office. When they sat down first thing in the morning, they would often jostle one of the power supplies just enough to cause a restart. Moved the power bar over 2 feet to the left where feet couldn't reach it, and the problem was solved.
LibreOffice is good enough for many use cases. A competing product doesn't have to be a 100% match feature for feature to be Good Enough for most users.
This is why I like building outside plant. You put the fibre up on poles or pull through ducts, splice it, bring it into the building, hook it up to the equipment, make sure it's working and.... you're done. It works until something breaks, usually for a very clear reason (power outage, drunk driver, rodent, vine, lawnmower man, fibre seeking backhoe, dump truck, direct lightning strike, thermal cycling of a marginal splice, failure to seal a gasket properly resulting in water intrusion that stresses fibres when the water turns into ice, ...), but those become quite rare if you're done your job properly.
On the other hand, software is never done. Even simple features, like headphones, regress these days. (I missed a meeting today because my phone decided to send audio notifications into the black void of the heat death of the universe because I didn't unlock my phone after plugging the headphones into the USB-C port of my iPhone -- the audio didn't come out of the speaker, nor out of the bluetooth of the car I was driving. No sound worked until after the phone was unlocked.)
At least with open source software I can fix the bugs I care about, but the fun goes away once you have to deal with other people to get things merged.
Is there a community of software Luddites I can go live with where we build simple technology that works and works well?
The third party transport links feeding my company's network have suffered 2 lengthy outages due to backhoes hitting buried conduit with fibre installed. Underground outages tend to be the longest outages since repairs can be quite involved. One of the outages was due to a large municipal construction project (LRT) where the buried conduit's location had been properly marked and yet was still hit anyways. They managed to pull on the fibre hard enough that repairs extended to a total of 4 manholes since the splices in the adjactent manholes were completely destroyed.
The other more recent underground hit occurred due to a process failure since the locates were issued before the carrier had installed their conduit and fibre, with the end result being that the other party doing construction had an all-clear from a locate completed before the fibre was in the ground. Ooops!
Dump truck hits are far more common around Ottawa. I'm aware of at least 8 in the past 5 years around where our network exists, which is only covering about 30 km. Thankfully when they have hit the poles we have fibre on, our fibre / strand was not damaged. The incumbent's fibre on the lowest strand on the pole was not so lucky. By my estimates there must be at least 1 near miss by a dump truck per day in the city. It's not surprising given the abuse dump trucks take.
If we had more fibre installed I'd love to have a proper ring to make these physical outages non-service impacting.
You're talking about being a tradesman on a forum dedicated to software and maybe making a company out of said software? If people liked the idea of being outside in the weather, doing manual labor as you've described, there is a very large chance they would not be on this forum.
It's very often that people here lament the fact that they're not outside being outside, in the weather, doing manual labor. How may of us don't dream, at least once a week, of walking out into the woods, or taking up woodworking instead, or wondering how long it would take to retrain as a plumber?
I channel that into my gardening during the appropriate seasons, but now that it's November, all that woodworking equipment in the garage is lookin' mighty appealing.
Yeah people have thoughts like this but then you hear a story about lying on your back in a muddy 3’ crawl space cutting into a blocked sewer line to install a cleanout and hoping you can roll away when the liquid starts pouring out.
Then your desk job writing code starts to sound a little better.
Most of my career has been in software development. Running an ISP / carrier is more fun as there's more of a variety from day to day (as is the case for anything entrepreneurial) while still involving technical skills. There is a need for with some programming from time to time, but it is usually tied to solving a particular business need.
I'm sure there are other people out there frustrated with the software grind. My point is that change is always an option. There are interesting problems to solve in the world that exist outside of large software projects that most folks here have the required skill sets to tackle.
It is telling that none of the online ad platforms engage with the advertising standard council type organizations that defined the standards that old school media use to self regulate. Most people don't realize that this was once a solved problem.
Implementing rate limiting in a scalable manner is harder than just making logging faster, and it makes the cloud provider money whereas rate limiting causes them to make less money. The incentive makes it pretty clear what side of the tradeoff cloud providers are going to come down on.
Instead the cost of pollution is externalised and placed on the backs of humanity's children. That includes the pollution created by those datacentres running off fossil fuel generators because it was cheaper to use gas in the short term than to invest in solar capacity and storage that pays back over the long term. The pollution from building semiconductors in servers and GPUs that will likely have less than a 10 year lifespan in an AI data center as newer generations have lower operating cost. The cost of water being used for evaporative cooling being pulled from aquifers at a rate that is unsustainable because it's cheaper than deploying more expensive heat pumps in a desert climate.... and the pollution of the information on the internet from AI slop.
The short term gains from AI have a real world cost that most of us in the tech industry are isolated from. It is far from clear how to make this sustainable. The sums of money being thrown at AI will change the world forever.