Tag: environment
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I Sold a Tweet About My Future Cat on the Blockchain and Helped Kill the Earth in the Process
Written by Tom McKay on Gizmodo.
“What the buyer is really getting is less tangible: bragging rights, clout, a collector’s item, or simply a nifty new form of money laundering. And because of the meteoric rise of cryptocurrencies, just attaching words like “token” or “blockchain” or “proof of work” to random crap can make its value skyrocket.”
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”According to CryptoArt.wtf, the Larry transaction used the equivalent of about 11 kilowatt-hours. That’s equivalent to the average electrical consumption of a European Union resident for an entire day—or approximately 21 miles (34 kilometers) of driving with a gas-powered vehicle, one month of laptop use, or a week and a half of desktop computer usage.”
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“Those figures don’t count, as CryptoArt.wtf noted, the energy cost of “production or storage of the works, or even web hosting.” Nor do they include the energy cost of reselling the NFT, and they don’t include the infinitesimal amount I just contributed to making the blockchain suck up even more juice in the future, which I’m assuming is incalculable.”
Tagged with: NFT, cryptocurrency, environment.
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To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution
Written by Ben Tarnoff on The Guardian.
“We are often sold a similar bill of goods: big tech companies talk incessantly about how ‘AI’ and digitization will bring a better future. In the present tense, however, putting computers everywhere is bad for most people. It enables advertisers, employers and cops to exercise more control over us – in addition to helping heat the planet.”
“Training models isn’t the only way [machine learning] contributes to the cooking of our planet. It has also stimulated a hunger for data that is probably the single biggest driver of the digitization of everything. Corporations and governments now have an incentive to acquire as much data as possible, because that data, with the help of [machine learning], might yield valuable patterns. It might tell them who to fire, who to arrest, when to perform maintenance on a machine or how to promote a new product.”
Tagged with: environment, machine learning, data.