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?"

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

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.