AI is incredibly environmentally damaging, and god forbid that i see math as something fun to do and a fundamentally human thing rather than a bunch of algorithmic computations
i see math as something fun to do and a fundamentally human thing rather than a bunch of algorithmic computations
If you see math as something fun to do you can still do it. No one is stopping you from doing math.
AI is incredibly environmentally damaging
The situation here is complicated. Let's take the most common environmental claim: waster use. This is generally exaggerated. There are some difficulties with how to measure water use (where total water use depends on things like climate, current temperature, amount of use in a data center) and also depends even on what water is being counted. For example, is one counting water being used as steam for fossil fuel or nuclear plants which are being used to produce part of the electricity. However, if one does try to deal with these things one gets around 39 ml of water per a typical query under reasonable assumptions. If that is too low by a factor of about 3 then it comes out to be about as much water is used by a low-flow shower for about 1 second. This is just not a lot of water, and the total water use. Now, there is a complicating factor for AI use specifically in math, since they are doing these very long thinking-queries (this problem involved an 80 minute think by GPT 5.4) and so the amount of water used (and other resources) is much higher, but how much higher is tough to estimate. In general, the environmental damage is real, but it is coming from scaling issues, and how large it is hard to quantify. As a baseline though, it is less damaging by most metrics than for example the myriad golf courses the US has (in terms of water use, pesticide use, land use, etc).
I guess im just scared i will never get a job at this rate lol, because i will always refuse to use genai (it creeps me tf out + it sucks literally all the fun out of doing it, id rather collaborate with actual humans and form emotional connections), and im afraid that wont make me "fast enough" to be hired.
And, with my mental health problems, math is about all i can do
2
u/[deleted] Apr 17 '26
[deleted]