Comment on China's rare earth export restrictions threaten global chipmaking supply chains
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 day agoI am not going to lie, i just don’t have the energy to put together all the research that has been done on the energy consumption of AI neural networks for you.
I did all that before i answered you because I wanted to make sure my thinking was accurate.
Total electricity (not energy, because energy is oil, gas, coal, etc, tool, just talking electricity here) used by all data centers in the USA for all computing is about 5% of the total USA electricity consumption. source.
They are consuming more energy than entire States in the USA use.
True, but I’m not sure what relevance that has. Lots and LOTS of industries use way WAY more electricity:
“The industrial sector accounts for 33% of all the electricity used in the world (the largest sector for energy consumption is residential housing, followed by commercial businesses). According to the U.S Energy Information Administration, in the United States, 77% of all industrial electricity goes to manufacturing, 12% to mining, 7% to construction, and 5% to agriculture. From the list of high energy consumption industries in manufacturing, chemicals account for 37%, followed by petroleum and coal products at 22%, paper and paper products at 11%, primary metals 8% and the remainder is made up of food, non-metallic metals and all other categories.”
Then theres cryptocurrency.
I’ll agree its a waste, but of the 4.4% used by ALL datacenters 1.5% of that is crypto.
AI, by itself, last year was about 1% of the 4.4%.
If you’re rationally focused on CO2 reduction, all of compute is a drop in the bucket compared to a number of heavy industries. Again, my numbers here was only about electricity, which does have CO2 concerns, but lots of those other industries use way more electricity in addition to other CO2 producing energy sources (like natural gas/coal/oil, etc).
So if your true goal and concern is CO2 reduction, your priorities should be going after the much bigger fish.
9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Thats the thing. Compute ENABLES all of that industry. Compute ENABLES all that residential energy usage. Compute ENABLES commercial businesses to operate.
Those sources are referring to direct energy usage, but isn’t accounting for indirect production enabled by that technology.
Im not saying there aren’t other fights to battle. All im saying is halt this nonsense until we can figure out how to clean planet Earth of all the crap we have already produced. Piling on isn’t helping at all. Leave those rare earth metals in the ground and figure out how to recycle them ones we have already mined. Figure out how to pull from landfills all that forgotten ewaste.
Its going to take time and effort. Its not going to be profitable. Its not going to fast.
Personally, I believe every company who produces a product must also provide a way to reuse, recycle, or return each and every product they sell. Phone manufacturers, solar panel fabricators, and wind turbine manufacturers should be the ones leading the charge on this. It shouldn’t be up to any third party service, government, or country to have that burden.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I agree with this, but this is why I asked you the second question in my original post to you. That question was “And all the services you consume that use these?”
So if you’re saying “yes” to that too, then you’re essentially wanting to roll the clock back to life back in 1940 or so. The consequences on human life will be devastating if we do that. It may be cutting the human population on Earth in half. A good chunk of what compute enables is human life.
9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Its not rolling back the clock imo. We have already pulled out those resources. They are in our possession. We don’t need to mine fresh rare earth metals.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
So if your policy goes into place, all extraction of rare earth materials stops at, lets say, midnight. We’ve got some spares on the shelf, but without replenishment, and knowing that replen will never come from virgin materials again, those components are horded.
With the global knowledge of this, industry and consumers rush to buy up remaining stock. In three months most electronics stores will be bare electronics. This includes mobile phone stores too. In about 2 months we’ll see new automobile supplies dry up because specific critical control modules simply can’t be built new anymore. Most cars on the road today will break, and simply be parked or scrapped because replacement parts are simply non-existent.
Existing deployed systems all over the world will start to break and not be fixed anymore. Simple things like digital signage at stores will break and remain dead or be ripped out altogether. Lines (queues) will be much longer as many kiosk driven activities now have to be done by humans. Think airport or train check in. Delays in post or package shipping will increase as transport infrastructure starts to break down.
Most of the western world will still have food for many months, but variety will decline dramatically. Anything delivered by aircraft will suddenly cost much MUCH more money because carriers will be trying to keep low hours on now (mostly) un-repairable aircraft.
New computers will start getting bigger again and slower again. Much of the benefits of these materials making computers smaller, faster, and require less electricity.
It will take probably a decade for your recycling program to come online at any scale that can replace what we have for supply chain right now. Even then, recycling can’t easily replace some of the materials as they are bonded chemically during time of manufacture so many lower cost semiconductors simply stop being made.
None of this speaks to the massive economic impact to the world where tens of millions of jobs start to disappear because the world they did relied on affordable devices which are now a premium priced item. Economic upheaval felt by this will make the tariff war we’re going through right now seem like an ideal fantasy.
It will be very eerie to watch our societies and technologies slowly crumble before our eyes and things that were considered near throwaways be now treasured relicts of the past of an age of abundance.