A pause (for now) on AI and the environment posts, and a bounty for mistakes

Over the last half year or so I’ve been running through a lot of deep dives on AI and the environment. I was motivated by a few key points:

• I was going completely crazy with the number of everyday people I was meeting who suddenly all had wildly inaccurate confident beliefs about AI, energy, and water. All of these beliefs were easily disprovable with simple easy-to-find statistics and comparisons, but I wasn’t finding anyone online doing it. Every piece of news coverage I was reading had ridiculous comparisons (the first one I read literally said that ChatGPT is now using more than twice as much energy as a whole person) and no one doing the simple David MacKay move of actually putting the numbers in context.

• I had a decent background in the general facts involved after following climate change for 15 years and teaching physics for 7 (if you’ve enjoyed my explanations here you can find my full explanation of all high school physics on my YouTube channel) and it was satisfying to use my stored-up knowledge. It was nice to get out some really fundamental ways I think about climate to a big audience.

• I was getting a lot of great feedback. My original two posts (here and here) have been collectively read 230,000 times, and posting the first was the reason my blog took off:

  

  It’s put me in touch with a lot of really cool people in tech and journalism and environmentalism, and has been extremely fun. I’ve developed a reputation as the AI water guy.

  

• This was one of the first topics I was able to do very rapid, complex research using chatbots as aids. A lot of people who don’t use them much don’t know how easy it’s become to just have them make huge catalogs of relevant sources and to double check all the sources they give. Here’s one of many examples:

  

  I feel like I’m writing with a whole team of researchers by my side now. I owe a lot of this blog’s success to AI chatbots. At some point I’ll write an update to how I use them.

Now I’ve developed a pretty huge catalog of takes on AI and environmentalism more broadly. I always wanted a topic where I could imitate Piero Scaruffi and leave a big collection of takes important to me