Honestly, as a vegan, I find the idea that we’re “enslaving minds” with AI to be highly suspect. A lot of the idea that AI is sentient is also buying into the idea that AGI/ASI is real. Many people, myself included, either don’t believe it’s real or don’t believe it will be achieved with our current set of technologies, namely LLMs. Once I understood how LLMs work, the mystical idea of these chatbots being sentient fell apart for me.
Even if it were a possibility, we KNOW animals are sentient and being abused right now. We don’t have to guess at that.
Everyone has their own amount of activism they can put into the world and stay sane and healthy themselves, and for most vegans, they are going to dedicate that energy towards animals. That’s not to say we can’t advocate for multiple things at the same time, but for myself, there’s other solid reasons to dislike AI in its current form (environmental damage, exploitation of labor/authors/artists, generated child sexual content, etc) without getting into philosophical debates about the nature of software being sentient.
I think it’s entirely possible to have AI/LLMs ethically. If we didn’t live under capitalism and workers and artists didn’t have to worry about feeding and housing themselves, if we weren’t dedicating our entire economy towards it at the expense of everything else, if we weren’t using an inordinate amount of limited resources like gas and water, if the models and the data they were trained on was completely open, if everyone had equal access like a public library, for starters.
That does seem high. I am in a 2 person apartment and this month on average we have used 24 kWh/day (heaters on most days). I have a couple servers and networking equipment, and I game a lot on a beefy PC. I also cook almost every meal I eat on our electric stove. We are all electric here except for water heater. Granted we are an apartment, but less natural gas usage/more electric.
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever hit 80 kWh in one day here. Our highest usage day this year was 50 kWh in March.
When we rented a house, I’m not sure what the exact wattage usage was, but we were paying a lot just to heat the place because it was so big, even with our thermostat uncomfortably low.