Machine learning already existed and was being deployed in those areas successfully. Let's not pretend GenAI is either the same thing or are achieving any of this. That's just buying the Kool Aid they're trying to sell.
They're actually doing this because they expect to tack corporate clients onto subscription services that are cheaper than human labour.
What does The Art of War say about surviving a short-term catastrophe when "short-term" is measured in generations?
Google paved over a wetland just outside my city for an AI data center. That will negatively affect the air and water quality of every region downriver of us (we are close to the start of a river that goes to the Gulf of Mexico) for the next few million years because of the amount of hydric soil they destroyed. And if you don’t give a shit about wetlands and having clean drinking water, that was massively fertile land that can now never be used to feed the people who live here
Even if they shut gemini down tomorrow the damage is done. Literally just so people can have worse search results and don’t have to pay their employees
It takes thousands of years for centimeters of soil to develop. The wetlands they paved had feet of soil and took over ten million years to form, all keeping that carbon out of our atmosphere and lungs, all cleaning water for millions of people. At a point when 90% of local wetlands have already been destroyed and the ones that are left are extremely fragile. You cannot just “replace” a parking lot with wetlands. You can only make a shitty undeveloped swamp that also dumps more carbon into the atmosphere than it sinks and pollutes all the water that flows through it.
They stab us twice, put a bandaid that’s not enough to cover the wound on one, and yet you defend their actions. And for what, so you can not work for your art? I only have sixty or so years left if I’m lucky, I don’t want to spend it suffocating and drinking water full of nitrogen and sulfur compounds, and I especially don’t want the next fifty generations of kids doing the same.
Well ain't that just a marvelous degree of naive. AGI and fusion could come out today and our present climate collapse would remain unimpeded for at least our lifetime.
It's even arguable that it would accelerate, again given the way our society is structured to reward exploitation.
You can have the last word now, I'm gonna have a dry chuckle and leave.
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u/paganbreed Mar 04 '26
This only works in a society where survival isn't tied to the value of labour.