And if people vote with their wallets that they are willing to pay for a years worth of energy on training LLMs on cat pictures, we should respect their choice that apparently this is what they consider a valuable use of the limited resources they have.
Sure, there are still people out there who believe the invisible hand of the market will regulate everything to give us a good outcome despite every real world evidence to the opposite. But in a market more demand for bullshit reasons drives the prices up for everybody, also for things that are essential for the survival of the poorest, the long term sustainability of environment, health services, etc.
The question I laid out was whether it is really a good idea to treat some random bullshit the same as essential services and externalities? Especially considering we are walking into a climate catastrophe that is the result of too much energy use.
Granted, we live in a society that is kinda built on ignoring these connections — otherwise we would go mad or cynical, but lying to ourselves has a hidden cost that will come due at some point.
More energy use overall — momentary or over time (=work), doesn't make a difference here — especially with LLMs which aren't exactly producing bursty loads and could be in theory scheduled to any time of the day. And energy corps will just have to produce more energy, which has it's own negative externalities on the world.
That means my stupid project still has an impact on the rest of the world. As of now everybody luckily still has the luxury to figure this out themselves. But we have to realize that depending on how bad things get this won't be feasible forever. And how fast things get bad depends on our collective energy use. If you're in a desert with limited water you won't let your kid pour it on the water because it makes a fun sound wouldn't you?
You would only let your kid do that if you had no mental model of water being a limited resouece and no imagination of the consequences a lack of water would mean for you and your kid.
Energy is a limited resource and producing more of it has it's own secondary costs (e.g. for climate change).
Operating with limited resources doesn't mean we are not allowed to have fun. It just means you don't pour your limited resource on the ground for it.
