Rather, the way that AI companies engage with communities-forcing NDAs, dangling billion-dollar promises, pushing environmental externalities far away from AI's wealthy user base-resembles a classic story about dark money in politics.
there is nothing fundamentally inherent to the concept of a building full of computers that causes choking air pollution, water impacts and climate change.
It was already clear a while ago that Anthropic mostly do not care about climate, environment or air pollution in any material way, even if they care a little bit more about bad PR than Elon Musk does.
The fundamental drivers of this change are panic and impatience, and that is what is behind the worst impacts of data centre growth, including a material risk to decarbonisation and climate action.
This, in turn, creates serious estimation problems for the diversion rate, which is why environmental benefit-cost analyses underrate the effect of urban rail construction.
If you’re interested in the environmental impacts of our current food system and want to dig into the opportunities for meat-like products without the animals (and their impacts), I really recommend it.
Consider using a noise machine to offset environmental sounds or earplugs if necessary. Temperature controlled mattresses such as Eight Sleep are great.
Playground by Richard Powers is a strange and wonderful novel set (mostly) on a remote atoll in French Polynesia that follows the tangled lives of an environmental advocate, a sculptor, a tech entrepreneur, and a brilliant bookworm trying to escape the grinding poverty of Chicago's South Side. The richly drawn characters drive the story, but what I love most about the book is that it's a love letter to the ocean with prose that comes closer than anything else I've read to capturing what it feels like to, for example, dive a thriving coral reef.
In terms of things that are causing us to lose to China, tariffs are neither here nor there because, as we've discussed, we're not sensitive to cost on power. But the environmental regulations that are actively preventing us from deploying renewable energy in the United States, like this is the reason Texas is winning. Texas is out deploying California 10 to1.
so the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.
There’s still plenty to worry about with respect to the environmental impact of the great AI datacenter buildout, but a lot of the concerns over the energy cost of individual prompts are no longer credible.
Fab construction time in the US has increased from just over 650 days on average in the 1990s to over 900 days on average in the 2010s, compared to around 600-700 days in Asian countries, in part because of increasingly stringent environmental review processes.
We cannot sustain the most stringent environmental and social norms, invest less than our competitors, have a more naive trade policy than them and think that we will continue to generate jobs. This no longer holds together.
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