1mo ago

The real cost of AI is being paid in deserts far from Silicon Valley | Rest of World

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The real cost of AI is being paid in deserts far from Silicon Valley

Environment @beehaw.org

solo @slrpnk.net

1mo ago

The real cost of AI is being paid in deserts far from Silicon Valley

restofworld.org /2025/ai-resource-extraction-chile-indigenous-communities

7 comments

Regarding AI, some simple examples of likely computing expense:
performing 1 + 1 in assembly language: 1 CPU cycle
performing 1 + 1 in a high level interpreted language: maybe 10 CPU cycles
performing 1 + 1 using an LLM: millions of CPU cycles
asking "why was the rabbit an animal after 1 + 1": probably priceless, maybe a billion cycles
- Nowadays with JIT #1 and #2 are very close. There was less than a x2 performance gap when I compared a direct simple task in C and javascript.
  About #3 no one does that.
  #3 and #4 will be on the same scale, every token generated is roughly the same amount of CPU.
- To be honest we lost that war when JavaScript dominated everything.
  
  PHP would like a word.
- And that translates directly to energy consumption - a single ChatGPT-style conversation can use as much electricity as charging a smartphone, which is why companies are scrambling to build more efficient AI chips and why they need so many power stations (you can compare some on gearscouts.com to see the best $/Wh values for emergency backup).
As someone who was extremely vocal of "the cloud" when it arrived and enthusiastic about AI (especially the non generative uses) I am sad and a bit angry that people only NOW realize that servers do not exist on an etheral plane but do have physical requirements.
The article is about lithium and copper. AI does not use lithium. It is a very small user of copper.
“Our ancestors were miners,” says Ramos. They were the ones who discovered the copper in the first place. The problem, she says, is the scale.
And I'll add a complementary take: the problem is not the tech, it is the capitalist economy that decides to centralize megamining projects in the places where they are worst (read: cheapest) to implement due to poor environmental and social regulations. Most mineral resources are pretty well distributed in the world, we choose to mine them only in the poorest countries for a reason, which is unregulated trade.
The question is not "is the damage done worth the final benefit?" but rather "is the environmental and social damage worth a 20% decrease in consumer prices?"
And people won’t do shit because they are distracted by shiny image generators while the parasite class carves out another chunk of earth to destroy.

7 comments