Fair enough - I just hope the advancements in AI do not outpace our capabilities in producing a better hardware for the job, and that what’s left after finds a good use in other tasks.
Because otherwise it will grow more and more into a huge ecological problem.
I feel like we went onto two very different planes here.
Sure, data centers are more efficient than a decentralized system, but the question is, to what point the limitless hogging of power and resources makes sense?
Sure, a lot of computing power goes into, say, console gaming, but that’s not what I originally talked about. I talked about data centers training AI models and requiring ever more power and hardware as compared to what we expend on gaming, first of all.
And while in gaming the requirements are more or less shaped by the improvements to the hardware, for AI training this isn’t enough, so the growth is horizontal, with more and more computing power and electricity spent.
And besides, we should ideally curb the consumption of both industries anyway.
Environment doesn’t stop at electricity costs, it’s also about manufacturing.
A simple terminal is more efficient to produce and has way longer lifespan, removing the need to update it for many, many years.
And then you can tie it either to your existing PC (which you need anyway) or cloud (which is used by other players when you’re not playing, again reducing the need for components).
That’s what I meant there. Generally, from an energy standpoint, gaming can absolutely be made more energy-efficient if hardware would put it as a priority. You can make a gaming machine that needs 15W or 1500W, depending on how you set it up.
If I get you right, you talk of carbon offsets. And investigation after investigation finds that the field is permeated with shady practices that end up with much less emissions actually offset.
So we absolutely should pay special attention to industries that are hogging a lot of energy. Xboxes and especially vibrators spend way less energy than data centers - though again, moving gaming on PCs and developing better dumb gaming terminals to use this computing power while playing with controllers in a living room is an absolute win for the environment.
Russia has a market full of consumer and professional-grade GPUs from Nvidia and AMD, as well as all other components, available at regular computer stores that never went anywhere. It’s not cut out from technology for sure, not even close. On that front, it’s literally less affected than even China.
But it now has more power to grow independent manufacturing of chips useful for many industries, that now have lower risks of supply chain interruption.
I think that behind those “oh, it’s 30 years old” people miss one thing:
350nm chips are perfectly alright for many things. Simple controllers, chips inside various appliances, even some of the simpler military tech can absolutely rely on those chips.
If the following car doesn’t speed, the guy will roam past, making braking a non-issue for the lawful driver behind as the distance between them will continuously increase.
The only place where it is an issue is when he tries to get in front of someone right before the stoplight.
But in any case, this is reckless and dangerous driving and I’d much prefer each country would have rules against that.
Normally I would super support you, but in Star Citizen the owner of the yacht actually loses nothing and can call another one later.
Wars, piracy, and all that behavior is part of the game, and it is encouraged by the developers. They even released a second system with pretty much 0 policing specifically to make some anarchy.
In this case, it’s not ruining other people’s fun, it’s the gist of the game.