Cross-posted from my Substack.
Epistemic status: I’ve puzzled over this for a long time but I’m not sure I came to the right answers. I'm sharing this partly because it might help others work on resource allocation, but mostly because some smarter reader might tell me how to do it better.
TL;DR:
* I he...
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
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.