This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
New Video from AI in Context: The Fall and Rise of Sam Altman
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AI in Context is excited to be back with our fourth video! For those just hearing from us, we make videos for 80,000 Hours, telling stories about transformative AI...
Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone - MIT Technology review.
Should the EA forum still recommend to use an AI generated picture for a post's preview image?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/
Charging your phone is a very small amount of energy. The CO2-Emissions from that are less than what humans breathe out during an hour.
(some math with example values found through quick google searches, actual values depend on lot of factors and differ from source to source: 20 Wh to charge a phone, 1kg/kWh CO2 for energy, 0.66kg/day CO2 per human breathing. So a phone charge is 20g of CO2, which is equivalent to 20 * 24 / 660 = 0.73 hours of human breathing)
Seems like the externalities of that action are either covered by the electricity cost or should be offset as a bundle.
In either case it doesn't seem worth removing the functionality.