Over the span of a month, I recently wrote a series of universally correct essays about the implications of LLM on value-based design. The short answer is “minimal”, but describing why took a minute.
Since then, LLM has only become more controversial. Some people are very mad about it, and some people are very enthusiastic about it. Candidly, I got a lot less excited about LLM since I wrote those essays. This happened for a lot of reasons, and one of them is because I discovered that they are the primary reason for electric bills spiking in America. In fact, my own electric bills have doubled, despite my overall electrical usage declining year-over-year. That has never happened to me before. In fact, it probably shouldn’t happen at all, right?
I think for a while, a lot of us took one look at the projected climate impact of LLM and shrugged. I think that is considerably less defensible of a position these days. Building a squillion data centers and hoovering up the collected output of the human experiment is something we are allowing to happen by supporting LLM companies. It’s not a good look.
Practically speaking, I don’t feel great about using LLM unless it’s with models that I can run on my own computers – and only for relatively simple tasks. I definitely don’t feel great about LLM replacing search, or LLM being used to do all sorts of crazy sinister things like deepfakes, artistic infringement, or replacing your therapist or girlfriend.
But there is a solution, which is that you can simply pay for the rest of our electric bills. Yes, you already pay for the LLM’s product, but that is clearly not enough, and I selfishly want my electric bill to be the regular amount next month. It’s only fair that if you use an LLM online, you cover the overage. For everyone. Otherwise you’re completely screwing over millions of already-screwed disadvantaged people who are already dealing with rather enough on top of a doubled electric bill, you know? And you would not want to do that! It would be cruel and horrible.
I’d like to believe that under my hardened design veteran shell remains a kind person who just wants to do good in the world. I look hard at the impact of the things I do, and while I’m certainly not perfect at everything, everybody’s got their line. This just crossed mine.
I believe you’re kind, too, even though we’ve never met. That’s why you’ll be paying the appropriate amount for the thing that you’re doing, or you’ll quit doing it. I have long since given up on the idea that you stop, of course. People do all sorts of horrible things to the climate all the time, from driving gas cars to flying business class (guilty) to buying from Shein or Temu. So if you’re going to use LLM, simple logic proves that you can fix all of the attendant problems by simply comping the electrical bills of everyone else, everywhere that a data center is being built.
If you think that the likely billions of dollars that it would cost you to right this wrong feels unreasonable or impractical, you can simply stop using LLM and go about your life free of such debt, karmic or otherwise. You’ll probably still have a job. In fact, you might even enjoy it.