Everyone knows what to do about it.
Describe the situation to a 5yo and they'll tell you what to do about it.
Hell, ask a LLM what to do about it and it'll tell you "stop using the power-hungry AI."
Just because corporations don't like the obvious solution to a problem doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Framing a problem as deeply complex or insurmountable when the problem is "tech companies are spending billions on fancy autocomplete that is really bad for the environment and will likely never become profitable for them" is a bad journalistic choice.
Journalists need to get comfortable calling things stupid when they are clearly stupid. GenAI is stupid. It's bad for everyone except scammers and chip makers.
It's not editorializing to point out that GenAI is a mostly useless product and its few uses are minor compared to its profound drawbacks.
Ok, so tech companies are clearly not going to do the right thing on GenAI, because they're evil. It falls to government.
What if governments create a 5¢ "stupid use of energy" tax for every GenAI query, paid for by tech companies? Make it more expensive for these folks to knowingly burn the planet.
If GenAI is as groundbreaking and crucial for the future of humanity as the tech companies all say it is, a 5¢ tax is a small price to pay for its use.
But if it's useless, like everyone who isn't a shill for big tech says, everyone will cut way back because taxes make the cost of something real.
This is how they frame all of these "dilemmas" caused by unchecked capitalism and greed. "How do we solve homelessness?" "How to we handle climate change?" "How do we protect privacy in a digital age?"
We know how, but we're unwilling to tell money No.
'Nobody knows what to do about it'
If it was a device that cured sickness, or fed the hungry, it'd have been switched off 'until the unsustainable power consumption problem was resolved' (never).
They just confessed to Goldman Sachs that there's no profit nor route to profit in it.
The novelty has already worn off.
It's seen as brand poison to use it.
WTF are they even doing?
It's fascinating, just like RTO where everybody but the execs utterly despise it, but economic and political power is now so wildly unbalanced that it's treated as inevitable instead of ludicrous
